The Witcher -- violence, sex, and alchemy as part of your daily balanced breakfast

Am nearing the end of the campaign, but mopping up all the landmarks and expansion content first. I enjoy how this game has deliberate comedy missions.

which difficulty level did you all go for? i changed it to the easiest one, i guess cos i am bad at games and this might help me to finish it. enjoying it so far. the game looks amazing. one gripe i have is that the tutorial instructions are in tiny text - it's like i need to get a chair in front of the couch to be able to read them.

Playing at normal, I think.

I found the medium one too easy and played at the second-hardest--which requires you to eat and drink to regain energy. There's always enough resources but it is a bit of a drag to do so. Otherwise I thought the difficulty was about right. Certainly there was never, ever a time I got stuck on a level/baddy who wasn't way above my class rating.

finally having the time to play this properly - it's pretty cool. i find the level of information is p crazy, like how am i supposed to remember the 100s of plants, potions, weapon materials, weapon upgrade grids etc etc, feels like more info than when you start a new job.

that said it does seem to give good tutorials/tips as you go along. the whole thing looks and feels amazing, all the weather changes and the nights.

anyone notice your horse sometimes doesn't come when you whistle?

yep Roach is always a bit lazy, keeps on with the grass chewing.

you don't need to remember all of those plants/potions etc by heart, just check the bestiary for what you need for specific monsters .... the game really does handhold you nicely into knowing how
to use all the systems. bit overwhelming at first, but i became comfortable with it pretty quick.

still only a third of the way through though! its huge! HUGE!

this is really good - very into it now. i guess it's common to find yourself lagging behind on the experience levels, i had to put the important stuff on hold and i'm now wandering back towards white orchard to do sidequests and get tooled up.

love this game so much. it's so big and has so much depth to it, but it's quite easy to just pick up and play for an hour or two.

i'm still quite early in the game but i still don't quite get the crafting stuff and alchemy. like i can see how it works, i think, but it seems to take forever to have all the ingredients to make a thing. then there are those scrolls that tell you how to build something - are they just basically a way to unlock buying that thing off a craftsman? feel like i've met one craftsman in the entire game so far.

Finally started this. I feel like it's taking forever to gain XP to level up.

yeah - same - i was touring around doing every tiny mission and i'm still not level 5 which the next main mission says i should be. now some of the side missions are a lot harder - a few are nearly impossible for my level.

i guess i just keep hitting those question marks and killing bandits. the other day there was one huge bandit camp near the dock type place that you need a special ticket to travel across - it took me a few goes but once i realised the key was to draw them out one by one, it was really good fun. you haven't lived till you've burned a horse to death then slit the throat of the rider as he falls off it. very efficient.

I think this and Fallout are my Gotys for the year

wow, this went from "jesus christ, this is complicated and pointless and these fucking fish men are killing me over and over what the fuck am i doing wrong how do i even equip a sword i don't even know what i'm doing" to "oh fuck it's three in the morning" REALLY FAST
just took my audience with the emperor and there's all kinds of storyline stuff that I'm completely missing but this totally scratches the ol' D&D itch

the depth of gameplay, complexity of fights, deep crafting system, a gazillion things to do and find, looting looting looting, xray specs, better than usual voice acting and writing, real sense of humor... it's pretty great and may stop me from going back to metal gear if i ever find my disc again
moving sucks

The sword stuff is still a bit confusing to me. Like - there are two types of sword and you can only have one of each equipped at a given time, right? And each one has uses in different situations? I'm not sure they ever explain this. Also, I never know which one is which in actual gameplay. And lastly, sometimes pressing square or triangle automatically swings a sword, like 19 times out of 20, but occasionally he'll just swing a punch and not draw a sword, while monsters beat me to a pulp.

The punching without drawing thing happens to me on occasion. There are some wonky control issues in the fighting but I'm finally getting over them.

The silver sword is for monsters, steel for humans.

I am enjoying the little stories though. I liked piecing together the gay nobleman's tragic tale and I wish there was more of it, which is saying something for this type of game.

yeah i like the way people often lie to you to get a thing done - then you can go back and murder them as punishment. i think i am playing this kind of lawful evil - i will help people who need help, i have sympathy for that, but any transgression or lie must be punished with death.

not my irl world view

anyone done the dlc yet, trying to decide if i should bother

i purchased and have not played it - helpful customer review

i ended up giving up on this with something like 30 hours invested because i felt slightly nagged by all the little incomplete items spotting my past so i ended up circling back trying to do everything which is a pretty bad strategy and also made the game sort of tedious. reading the last dozen or so posts i am very tempted to dive back in

based on those sorts of comments, i am clearing as i go. it's a tetch tedious but i imagine much better than coming back twenty levels later.

yeah, that's making me think i ought to doubleback to velen and clean things up before moving too much further along with the main storyline

I'm checking the Quests tab to see the suggested level and just hitting the ones I'm capable of, building up as I go along.

for me I ended up way way behind all quests by about the time of velen/bloody baron - I'm just about catching up now after doing almost every available mission in white orchard and other areas. And I mean just about, like still a level down.

from what i've read only white orchard really ~requires~ the completist approach to avoid being behind in the overall scheme of things, but idk, i'm only like lvl 12 i think?

right now i'm mostly concerned with how to allocate points in the skills tree in a way that isn't totally slapdash

like i got to velen and all the main missions needed level 5 or 6 and i was like level 2. had to go back and complete mission after mission, then even still i'm just about level 4 and a half.

my skillstree philosophy was to hammer it into two as long as i can equip two. my friend told me there's a potion you can get that allows you to rectify any mistakes, later on.

been away for a week for xmas and i'm surprised by how much i crave a 3/4 hour binge of this game.

starting to think this is one of the best games i've ever played. it starts to get very addictive once you start shooting up the levels more quickly - the range of ways to use your experience points is interesting - so far i mostly focused on improving my attacks with the sword and my igni (igni is my go-to sign).

also all the equipment and swag and stuff in dungeons is cool.

just did the mission with the curse on fyke island, thought the narrative was p cool.

got a bit of a fever, and spent the entire last night of attempted sleep with the gwent music looping in my head. wasn't too bad actually.

i can't get into gwent at all - that's the only part of this game i am not on board with. i assume i can progress without playing gwent. i played magic: the gathering back in the day and all, just a game like gwent within the game seems too deep inside for me, i spent about five mins playing it in that first inn and then quit and haven't touched it since.

i tried to go back and finish the gwent stuff at the end but i think you're meant to do it along the way from the beginning. i also suck at the suck at the horse racing shit.
the dlc is pretty good so far. seems to add quite a bit of side stuff along with the bigger story

lol typo

yeah I'm at level 14 and haven't done anything gwenty and wonder if it's worth doing at this point

just did the first horse racing mission in the ciri memory sequence and i won it straight away but it bothered me just for how redolent of other games it was, like just a stupid derivative and boring mission next to the fairly unpredictable quests i've done so far, hope there's not too much of that.

All the Ciri stuff that early in the game is just tutorial, right? The Bloody Baron episode is in retrospect the introductory chunk of what the game really is, narratively, passed just the movement/combat mechanics tutorials that is the White Forest.

I dug the DLC, since you encounter an interesting way to deliver narrative and demonstrate the doomed relationship thru memory and Impressionism.

Kinda highlighted the limited vocabulary of interaction we still have w.r.t. video games, since the control interface is still just button presses.

ah yeah, i guess that's true in theory but i ended up way behind on levels before the bloody baron, so i had to go back to white orchard, but then by the time i got to the bloody baron i actually was way ahead, i got kinda addicted to sidequests and i did all the fyke island stuff with keira metz which gives you loads of experience and a sex scene. though i ended up killing her soon afterwards.

so now i'm like level 9 or something, slaughtering everyone on the bloody baron quests - i guess it makes sense that it's teaching me hand to hand combat and stuff. i quite like the bloody baron storyline even if it's a bit too long. the botchling is pretty dark.

wait you killed keira metz??

yeah i honestly didn't mean to - it kinda escalated quickly i swear officer.

basically i followed her quests through and did the fyke island mission etc, then after the sex scene with her she cast a spell on me and ran back to fyke island. she robbed some notes from that creepy mage's lab and said she was bringing them to... the king whose name i've forgotten, a conversation followed in which geralt was telling her this meant certain death, it seemed very much based on the previous storylines, and he also told her not to do this as the notes could be extremely dangerous if the king sees them.

it went from the seeming possibility of a fight to the fight music initiating and she was dead within about three fast attacks and an igni. kinda weird.

like to me it seemed like my only choice was kill her or let her give the nuke to king radovid.

Same thing happened to me and I felt bad because I thought we had a real nice time on our sexy date? So I reloaded an old save and tried some other lines on her and she eventually went off to hang out in my dreary old home fortress.

Got real conflicted dealing with the crones and the whispering hillock.

currently deciding whether to help Dykstra kill a king.... i sort of love how his character arc works, they really put work into making him more 3 dimensional and his interplay with Geralt is top notch semi-homoerotic goodness

some of the decisions are tricky. how did you all navigate the fyke island stuff with the wraith? i fought her and then went and told her bf about it all - then he came back and kissed her, while she was a wraith, and died. p great that whole quest.

xpost

hmm thats a while ago! i'm not sure - i think i killed her, and that boyfriend ran off ashamed at what he'd done - has to live with the guilt etc.... just about to reach skellige and act 2 - but there's such a vast swathe of Velen still to cover, the completist in me might stick around for a while

ah really - i got an amazing cutscene where i brought him to her and she turned into this gross wraith and asked him to kiss her to remove the curse. and he kissed her and died, it was v touching.

I did the same. I think the crone one is basically that village and the Baron and his wife vs a bunch of orphans. I chose the former.

"crawl back under your rock"

it always makes me a little sad when geralt says out loud "looks like a storm" as he has nobody there to talk to :-( :-( :-(

Just a lonely guy, thinking about how it looks like a storm because of all the heavy rain and lightning there's been for the past four minutes

woah there roach