The Witcher 3 (2015)

[li0li]

So depressing realising this game was shit. It got hyped out its asshole and I've been looking for a good open world RPG ever since finishing the good Bethesda ones. I really thought this would be it cause it has an open world and side quests with dialogue choices. But no, it's horseshit. When did gameplay get replaced by story and everyone lapped it up as a good thing? When did tight, responsive controls get replaced with tedious animations and people praised it? Endless cutscenes that you can only skip line by line, meaningless dialogue choices which don't effect the story in the slightest, these are all things that textbooks and game design courses say not to do, and here they are, in a AAA game that every is claiming is the greatest game in history? What the crap is happening? I was really looking forward to Cyberpunk, but if this is the best CDPR can produce I may not bother, although that game still looks really good. And right now everyone is badmouthing Bethesda for throwing in some Minecraft-a-like features, ignoring the amazing rest of Fallout 4. My only hope now is the new Obsidion game. If there's a million Souls clones, why can't we have a million Elder Scrolls clones, why hasn't that game created a new genre? Instead we have to wait 10 years for a Skyrim sequel.

The Witcher 3 has bullshit difficulty spikes, tedious boring travel between quests, running back and forth between towns. The open world is pointless since the sidequests are pointless, they could've just had a menu to select the next mission instead of a boring horseride. It rarely ever felt like I was in control. Either I was sitting through a cutscene or on a horse travelling to the next mission, or else I was following a boring linear mission with no choice. Just make a fucking movie instead of making people think we're actually getting a game. Even the combat was basically just mindless clicking, except it was luck whether or not you actually hit the enemy with them constantly dodging attacks like fucking mindreaders and then oneshotting you if you didn't manage to jump away in time. And even the dodging sent you about three miles away from them so you had to run for twenty minutes to get back to them. Who fucking designed this and how can people think it's good? And everything has some stupid fucking animation to it so you can't just turn around, you have some dumb animation of Geralt spinning around so his fucking hair can waft in the wind. Fuck off, this is what we get with faster computers and better technology, worse controls and dumb fucking animations of wafting hair. Just so dickheads who want to fuck their computer can say 'oh fuck me 60fps, 4K, look at the grass textures', meanwhile we have to wait twenty minutes for the horse to decide he wants to actually do what you said, and we have to sit through a bullshit fucking visual novel and watch actual games get relegated to indie titles or stay classics from 20 years ago while stupid dickheads play fucking Journey or Ys. God I'm so pissed off. I'm going to go play Shovel Knight now, I hope to fuck I won't discover it's actually a fucking walking simulator.

[Anomaly]

My reaction wasn't so vitriolic, but I found that after about 20 hours or so of playing my interest just sort of petered out entirely, and I haven't touched The Witcher 3 since then. I too find Bethesda's open world RPGs to be pretty compelling, often in spite of themselves - despite the poor writing and plots, the feeling of openness they provide is something I haven't felt in any other game. It feels both like the world is there FOR you to explore, and also that the world will continue to exist WITHOUT you, and you're just some small part of a whole. Kinda like the real world in a way. The ability to screw around and just ignore the main quest is part of this, I think, and that's something that I want to see more of in games.

People have talked up the Bloody Baron's quest chain to high heaven, but I was just bored by it the entire time. Yes, he's treated complexly, but that alone isn't enough to draw my interest. I was never once given any reason to care about him, and this is what, the first ten-odd hours of the game? Doing fetch quests for this guy? I finally made it past that to the city in the north, which should have been where the game really opens up for me, but that was actually the place where my interest died off completely. I've been meaning to give it another shot one of these days, but I've been busy and I'm never in the mood to give it a try. I don't know if I ever will.

Also, this reminds me I have completely forgotten about Criticker Games after it was launched. I should get around to that someday.

[ShogunRua]

Semi-related, but I'm curious how many Witcher fans have read the stories that Sapkowski blatantly plagiarized from, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone?

[TheDenizen]

Oh man.

I mean, I thought the Witcher 3 was a pretty good game (I liked the story so I didn't mind watching it between the fighting bits, even if it was pretty linear), but whatever, to each their own. This review is fucking hilarious though. I laughed pretty damn hard reading it.

Then I looked at the poster's profile and saw that they are from Ireland, so I re-read the whole thing imagining it in an Irish accent and I almost had an aneurysm.

Well done li0li!