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The Witcher 3: What Geralt Wants

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Enjoyed this article about the game's crazy dynamic economy: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/how-the-witcher-3s-economy-was-saved-by-polynomial-least-squares/

I suppose that system mostly worked out. I always felt like I never quite had enough money to do everything, but after just a few hours of play I was never so broke I couldn't do anything. (Though, the crafting/shopping interface is another story.)

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Still making my way through Novigrad... about to hit lvl 16 and still haven't been to skellige. Loving things so far.  What builds are people using?  I've put some points into Melee but have been hoarding them until I decide exactly what kind of hybrid build I want to use.

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There's a bunch of really useful stuff in some of the other ability tiers, but the things that I've found most useful are in the melee tree. My tree is:

 

-Muscle Memory (fast attack upgrade)

-Strenght training (strong attack upgrade)

-Lightning Reflexes (slows down time when aiming crossbow, SUPER useful when you're under water surrounded by sirens)

-Battle Trance (basically a last stand/second wind feature, refilling an empty health bar by draining the stamina bar)

-Sun and Stars (replenishes health outside of combat so you don't need as much food anymore)

 

Other than that a few alternative sign powers, and Delusion upgraded to the max, comes in really handy in dialogue choices. Most of the rest are some really specific usecases so I don't find those too useful, although I'm curious if anyone has a radically different build.

 

I started to get a little burnt out, but then I turned off the minimap and decided to ride everywhere, no fast-travelling, and just wander around for a while, stopping into towns and doing a few quests every day, and it's great how well that captures the drifter mercenary lifestyle. I feel like knowing where you are all the time and having that backlog of quests opressively loom over you detracted from my enjoyment a bit. Some of these sidequests are really great! Especially in Skellige.

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New game plus dlc came out...a little annoyed that 2 of my items are suddenly above my level...my chestpiece is a good 20 levels above which is ridiculous.

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I don't really understand what I'm leveling for after 30, since I've filled out the talent spots. I guess I could just stack high-end talents in instead? I feel like I like most of my talents, though.

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I'm back to where I was before, story wise although this time I completed more quests, and have a complete set of Griffin gear rather than my level 4 tat :P! I'm a little bit ahead now, having tracked some treasure through a sewer to a boat.

I made a brief trip to Skellige to try my hand at some of the lower level quests I had picked up... It is so gorgeously rugged and bleak! I mostly ride around rather than fast travel, and love the various cloppy noises on the different surfaces.

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Anybody here got a dusty old PC like me and running this on a Radeon 6950?

 

I barely got it to run on a 7700 at the minimum 4:3 resolution with everything set to lowest. It still looked nice but I had to restart every so often from memory leaks, might have been just my PC.

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I'm now nearing the end (I think, my main quest is called something like Final Preparations). 

 

Real Spoiler:

I liked how long Ciri was kept lifeless... even though the Snow White parallels were obvious, it was just about long enough that I thought they might have actually killed her off, bearing in mind what the Crones said previously

.

 

I honestly think that the question marks are a mistake, since they are so distracting and plentiful  that I was super over-leveled for part of the main quest (and am currently still 4 or 5 levels above recommended level). I would prefer to find the events / locations more naturally through exploration rather than divert. 

 

I have been playing a very magic-heavy Witcher, with Quen,  Axii, and Yrden almost maxed out (the alternative mode for Yrden is a great turret / anti missile defense, while the main version now saps significant health from all enemies in its grasp). I am thinking of doing new game + with a more combatty witcher instead. I'll only take Contracts from boards.

 

Some quests are great, most are interesting, but one or two  were really horrible, all the worse because one of them led on naturally from one of the fluffy ones; even in a war ravaged world with monsters and possible apocalypse (?) they seemed unnecessarily cruel. 

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We've just published an interview with two environment artists who worked on The Witcher 3 and its upcoming content. It's a development interview so might be of interest to those into that side of things.  :ph34r:

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So I had a pop at fighting the main dude, got killed and am trying to muster up the enthusiasm to try again. I definitely agree with people who expressed earlier sentiments that the game should have ended at a particular early point. 

 

There were some fantastic missions early on, but I get the feeling that all of the really good stuff was front loaded. For example no other contract has been as satisfying for me as the Devil By the Well, where researching weaknesses meant the difference between success and failure. Similarly, none of the other characters seem as layered as the Bloody Baron, with the possible exception of Dijkstra (sp). Perhaps it's for the best, since more people are likely to see it that way.

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I finished off that guy pretty easily next time round, then finished the game; it took me about 70 hours. I'm very tempted by the idea of new game plus at some point, but maybe will check the expansion first. I know there's a bunch of stuff I missed, and a fair number of ways to play with the world state. I might also radically alter my build. Should be fun when I come back to it

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Apparently there's some dlc coming out soon. I think I'm going to get it depending on how expensive it is. There's also a 15gig patch. 15gig sounds like a typo to me...

I just started NG+ but MGSV is still holding me in. It's a lot harder, but I'd like to go back to the first act because that was by far the best part. I went from adoring the game to finding it kinda boring once I found Ciri. It just doesn't need to be an open world at that point, but going around being a fantasy detective looking for Ciri and monsters fits that open world perfectly.

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Apparently there's some dlc coming out soon. I think I'm going to get it depending on how expensive it is. There's also a 15gig patch. 15gig sounds like a typo to me...

I just started NG+ but MGSV is still holding me in. It's a lot harder, but I'd like to go back to the first act because that was by far the best part. I went from adoring the game to finding it kinda boring once I found Ciri. It just doesn't need to be an open world at that point, but going around being a fantasy detective looking for Ciri and monsters fits that open world perfectly.

 

It's interesting to see your description written like that, because that was about the last 4-5 hours of 90 hours for me. I mean maybe it was more than that, it's a long game. But less than 10% of my game time was spent doing that, so it's weird to wrap my brain around going "back" to the interesting part when the interesting part was 80+ hours.

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For me that seemed to go on forever because I found it so incredibly boring. I kept taking breaks and playing other games, then going back to TW3 because I wanted to finish it. In play time, the 3rd act was about the same as you, probably 10% of the game at most, but it felt like a chore to me.

 

Looking for Ciri was just great though. Everything I love about that game can be found there, I just wish it had ended at Kaer Morhen. I'd have been super excited about it and played it again immediately. 

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There were some pretty great scenes in the last part, after Kaer Morhen, like 

the world/dimension travelling? that one promo screenshot with 2-3 moons was from this scene/level that was only used once

 

There's other great stuff but I remembered that one the most.

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There were some pretty great scenes in the last part, after Kaer Morhen, like 

the world/dimension travelling? that one promo screenshot with 2-3 moons was from this scene/level that was only used once

 

There's other great stuff but I remembered that one the most.

 

Yeah, I didn't like that. It felt really weird. 

 

Time and space travel in my fantasy RPG?

Just didn't belong in my opinion. 

 

I just loved going from town to town, looking for Ciri and helping people out for money. Being a monster detective is just so awesome.

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Yeah, I didn't like that. It felt really weird. 

 

Time and space travel in my fantasy RPG?

Just didn't belong in my opinion. 

 

I just loved going from town to town, looking for Ciri and helping people out for money. Being a monster detective is just so awesome.

 

The journal has Dandelion call Ciri 

the Lady of Time and Space

:P

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I really loved the vibe of the first act in Velen, where you're in what feels like a fantasy version of the rural south filled with intractable problems both fantastical and mundane, and you can't just walk in and fix everything like a video game protagonist does. The fact that you're able to just go back and kill the

Ladies of the Wood

like a stupid boss monster almost ruins the tone of that whole section retroactively.

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I loved that...but for different reasons.

 

I thought the idea of essentially pitchfork and torch wielding blokes going to the swamps to deal with the menace was awesome.

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I also liked the first part the most. I think Skellige was in some ways the weakest part. All that slow boating if you force yourself to not fast-travel much, like I did... Velen was perfect for actually travelling around and doing detective stuff.

 

 

I kind of agree that being able to fight the ladies later was kind of robbing something from the Velen chapter, but I liked how that whole mountain ascent destroyed the idea that the ladies were really something godlike of their own, establishing them as underlings of the space-elves was kind of a neat twist IMHO.

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I got it, playing it on my cruddy PC. It runs at 30fps with most things turned down, at 1600x900 resolution, and by heavens it still looks damned good.

 

GF is moody with me now because I've been playing it just now for five straight hours. Only coming off it because I fear she may leave me and shack up with someone less hopelessly addicted

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