I dunno about you guys, but I am right.there. with the rest of bombcast guys. I know I should resume playing Witcher 3 before GOTY and beat it... but I never feel like playing Witcher 3.

I paid full price for it back when it came out because it came out in a drought and I needed something new. Never played a Witcher game before. Coming from Bloodborne, the combat and movement was a real hard swing to adjust to and I never felt comfortable with it. Jason was right: that Griffon boss fight was really hard, annoying, and tiresome after several tries.

I got up to the next region and as soon as I saw all the ' ? ' markers on the map and how much bigger it was then the beginning region, I was like "Nope!" and turned it off. That was months ago. Since then, MGS5 came out and

whooped

that

game's

ass.

So hearing Dan Ryckert say he's not gonna finish the game after getting wayyy farther than I ever did was pretty reassuring. Oh, I'm sure the game will still be in the top 10 GOTY somewhere just because, but to be honest it's my 2015 Most Disappointing game this year. Just like Destiny was for me last year.

2015 Best Surprise? Undertale.

I just wanna say that I don't know if I've ever read a post on the internet I agreed with more than this one, all the way down to the Undertale recommendation

The problem with Witcher 3 is that it's so easy to overlevel and make everything trivial, and then the few bits of combat gameplay you do get are preceded by running back and forth a map between two NPCs that eventually put a way-point on your map to a monster.

I eventually ended up cranking up the difficulty to the highest setting and I was still getting bored with how easy the combat was.

That being said, the writing in the game is fantastic and far above most any fantasy RPG I've seen. It inspired me to pick up The Last Wish which was a great book. For the first 25 hours, I was having a great time with Witcher 3. It was when I went to Skellige that the wind went out of my sails.

My opinion of both MGS5 and Witcher 3 are the polar opposite compared to GB's opinion. MGS5 is just all sorts of awful in comparison to Witcher3's entire world. I just got bored of the same exact, repeated missions in MGS5, and the lack of story hurt my enjoyment even further, expecting some pivotal and emotional moments to occur throughout its plot which never happened. It's just a boring, empty game with good gameplay.

Witcher 3 is just... amazing. Once you turn off the minimap and the POI markers and just EXPLORE the world by yourself, its unlike anything out there right now.

Would it be worth it to watch a Youtube run that summarizes the best quests? I mean... I bought the game for PS4 so it's not like I'm watching a game I don't own...

@fitzgerald: I dont think so. Mgs is like an actionmovie and sure you can watch that without playing. The Witcher is like a series and it would make no sense to watch just the highlights. If you dont experience the long haul yourself i dont think it would give anything.

... what?

No. Don't. Stop. You don't like the Witcher, why would you want to sit through hours upon hours of cutscenes for a story you're not invested in, featuring characters you don't like, in a world you didn't want to explore?

It's cool that you don't like the game, but why would you waste your time watching cutscenes of a game you don't care for when you could be playing something you do enjoy? You're not missing out by not participating in the zeitgeist of any given title. Stay with the stuff you enjoy and participate in those discussions instead, and you'll be a lot happier for it in the long run.

@tru3_blu3: I did that too. First thing I did was turn off the dotted lines leading to your marked quest. I'm a Witcher lover from the original though, so I'd enjoy the game any way. (TW1 is still my favorite though)

Meh, MGS5 isn't even in the same ballpark as Witcher 3 for me, in any regard. Even after the dozens and dozens of hours I spent clearing the main game I never got tired of it, and I'm enjoying the new DLC too. Few open world games do that for me.

I think the mistake too many people make is that they see all those icons and think they have to go and see all of them. I still had dozens of uncompleted quests and objectives when I finished the main quest and I was perfectly fine with that. Having all those objectives doesn't mean you are obligated to see them all in a single playthrough, it just means you have a lot of options when you do feel like doing side stuff. If/when I play the game again there will still be new stuff I have yet to see.

(Ironically, if you want to talk about most disappointing games it would probably be Bloodborne and MGS5, if not for the fact that my expectations were pretty tepid going in.)

I find that to be quite a shame. Witcher 3 just has a ridiculous amount of incredibly well-detailed, well-written content. If it's not your thing, I totally get it, there are games I've played that most people have loved and I'm just like "eh" (How do you people not find Red Dead Redemption boring as hell after ten hours?). But man, you just can't undersell how much quality stuff there is to see and do in The Witcher 3. This doesn't mean that the game is without issues (large portions of the second act, especially everything having to do with Dandelion, are just terribly paced), but there's so much going for the game. Stopping at or right after the griffin is selling the game a little short. Don't think that you have to do everything in the game - basically, you really only have to do the main quest, and you should probably also do any sidequests that spin off of the main quest if you're to finish it. But that's kinda missing the point of what makes it so special.

As far as the controls go, I played it at launch. I thought they felt funny at first but I got used to them rather quickly and didn't have much trouble with the griffin at the beginning of the game. The combat controls were always perfect as far as I was concerned, it was general movement outside of combat that was problematic. They tried to give Geralt a feeling of weight, instead of the overly digital-feeling movement he had in Witcher 2. It didn't feel too far off from controlling a modern Rockstar game, what with their reluctance to let you turn on a dime and all. Anyway, there's an alternative controls option in there now that makes it feel more... responsive, I guess? It feels closer to Witcher 2's more "digital" movement, although it's still something of a middle ground. You also always walk when indoors now with the option to run, which is something that I wanted as soon as the game came out.

The Giantbomb crew have never really been fans of fantasy RPG's, though. Vinny likes them, Rorie likes them, but generally the guys seem like they would rather be off playing something strange and arcade-y than something that's going to inspire power metal albums fifteen years from now.

All of this said, I haven't played MGS V and I don't really want to. I played a little bit of Ground Zeroes, just enough to remind me that I generally want as little to do with stealth games as possible. I still might get it - even if I think I won't like it, something in me wants to know what's up and I'm always willing to give a highly-praised game the good ol' college try. But if that happens, it won't be until sometime next year.

This is sorta turning into an interesting debate. There seems to be a camp that loves MGSV and has TW3 as "most-disappointing" and another group that has that pairing reversed.

Personally, I'm in the latter group. I blew through over 100 hours of the Witcher 3 and didn't get bored at all. And initially I was enjoying MGSV as well, but there was definitely an inflection point. At about 20 hours in I was really, really enjoying the game, and then at 21 hours I was suddenly really, really not. I don't see myself going back. I just found it to be mind-numblingly repetitious and the plot was just dumb, as opposed to the Metal Gear Dumb that I'd come to expect.

When I played the Witcher, I couldn't even fathom how anyone would not see that it as one of the most amazing experiences in gaming, so to hear that there is actually a not-so-small (?) group of people that didn't get into it was certainly interesting to hear. Especially when juxtaposed with the overbearing praise for the at best mediocre MGS5. It in some way has to depend on what you look for in the respective game and whether you found it, but I can't imagine what that had to be for you to not end up loving the Witcher 3 anyways.

It'll be an interesting discussion come end of year times, especially if they get someone with a different opinion into the mix (did Vinny ever have the time to finish the game?).

@huelarl: Last I heard he only got a few hours into The Witcher 3 (probably not much farther than that Quick Look), and sadly I doubt he'll have time to play more any time soon. Maybe someday when his kids are grown up we'll get a retrospective from him on the Beastcast.

I tried playing Witcher 2 a couple months before Witcher 3 came out. I consider myself to be fairly competent at games for the most part, but I could not make heads or tails of the combat tutorial. I played a couple story beats beyond that and put it down, never to return. I respect the process that goes into making a game like that and they obviously have cultivated a good following, but it is not a game for me. From what I understand the combat is dumbed down fairly significantly in Witcher 3, but I'll have to wait until it drops in price to see if the changes make it a game I could get into. Getting Rorie's take on it certainly didn't bode well though.

I had the almost the exact same experience as dan. I did as much of the side quests in the Novigrad area as I could, did the Baron's quest, got most of the witcher armor sets, then got most of the way through the Dandelion quest line and just stopped. That was almost 5 months ago.

The Dandelion quest killed all my interest in the game because it would not fucking end. It all felt like filler but there was so much of it that I eventually had to take a break and never came back to it except for putting it in for about 30 minutes and stopping again.

It is a good game but that one quest line was such a buzzkill for me.

@lawgamer said:

I like both, though. Witcher 3 more than MGSV because Witcher 3 is actually finished, and therefore stuck the landing, but... both are really good games. It's disappointing to see the GOTY stuff beginning so early with people trying to tear down a different game in order to make their favourite look better.

I guess I'm on of the few in neither? For me Witcher 3 would have been GOTY almost any other year, but MGS5 edges it out ever so slightly. As someone who doesn't particularly care for open world games I both explored every single question mark in Witcher and did every side op in MGS5 loving every second of both. I just chalk it up to how every game that comes out these days gathers a small yet extremely vocal group of naysayers who try to rip that game to shreds. I get that everybody has different tastes but man it gets real tiring seeing how every other game is apparently deceiving people and/or buying off reviewers.

The combat in Witcher 2 was total BS. It's much better in Witcher 3, even though a lot of the fundamentals are still the same. They made a lot of little tweaks that made the combat just flow together quite a bit better than it did in Witcher 2, where you were constantly rolling around like an idiot. It certainly feels a lot more fluid. My only really huge complaint is the inability to reapply oils to your blade without going into the menu. They're kinda necessary on the highest difficulty level, but the low level versions only last something like 15 hits before they wear off. That's a lot of trips back to the menu.

Saying you love people disliking something is weird.

@lawgamer: If there's some to complain about with that game it's the menus. Which they've improved with patches, but it's still kinda clunky. (Why can I still not read books and notes directly on pick-up?) It boggles my mind that when people do complain about the game that's at best a footnote next to combat and movement, which are fine.

I just don't get people I guess.

I had the complete opposite reaction where Witcher hit a high peak and kept it high for the duration, and MGS just got less interesting as it went along.

In my opinion, if people don't want to complete the Witcher 3, they should at least complete everything to do with the Bloody Baron and the major side quests in velen. There's some good stuff in Novigrad and Skellige, but there's a lot of filler, poor pacing and just plain uninteresting content in there as well.

Even though I was very disappointed with the game, it's still a good game, and I am happy I finished it. But if you want most of the best moments without the full time investment, then Velen will be a pretty good highlight reel.

The big problem throughout, though, is that the combat is just so easy, even on the highest difficulty, but at the same time never feels good. If that's too grating, I don't blame you for quitting early. Hell, I considered it once or twice.

I think I got to Skellige before I put it down. So incredibly impressive when you first land there, the music and atmosphere, and everything just looks gorgeous (playing on PC). But by that point I just couldn't take any more of the combat. I just don't think this series has ever had combat that felt impactful. Sword swings that should feel brutal and nasty just kind of glide through enemies, and Geralt just kind of slowly glides across the ground, forcing you to basically spam the 'B' button to have a sequence of spaz attacks just so he can move around a bit quicker. It's really the underlying problem with the series and almost the entire reason I just can't bring myself to finish one, which is a real shame because the world is stunning and the characters they've created are really well written.

I hope CD Projekt hires on some new combat designers for Cyberpunk 2077, because I definitely have zero faith in the people currently making decisions on this stuff

@rongalaxy: Right there with ya.

@fitzgerald: I feel the same way. Just don't really care all that much to keep going even though I feel I should. I'm afraid that once fallout 4 hits I won't touch witcher 3 again.

@brackstone: I don't think very many people are going to find the game too easy on the highest difficulty, considering how much complaining I've seen about how hard the game is even on the average difficulty since launch. There's probably numerous factors invovled there, the major one likely not utilizing all of the mechanics available (I bet 3/4 of the people who play this barely touch decoctions), but whatever experience you had that made it so easy clearly is not the norm.

The exact same thing happened to me with MGS V. Something drastic clearly happened in the development of that game, the first half or so of the game is really great and incredibly polished, but the quality drops around the mid 20s mission count, and more preciptously than anything I've ever played. It starts introducing aggresively annoying elements like HR Manager 2015, FOBs and the whole quarantine bullshit - which also stops you developing your weapons and equipment for the worst part of the game so far - and the mission design goes to shit at almost exactly the same time. The boss fight with 'Eli' , the infamously fucked Mission 31. Ugh. It feels like one of those films where the director was fired halfway through filming and someone else was parachuted in by the studio to finish it. Like a different team finished the game, but I imagine what really happened was Konami insisted they finish development within the next 8 months and they had to just cobble together what they had from all the things they had wanted to cut.

Witcher 3 is still on my 'to play' list.

I'm in the camp of the crew's opinions of Witcher 3 and MGSV are swapped for me. I played Metal Gear for a little bit, it seemed ok, but then took a break. Now after hearing so much about the gameplay being fantastic, but some story stuff obviously cut, as well as the insane sounding penalties they implemented if you don't want to build a FoB, I have zero interest in going back to it, where I loved the Witcher when I started, and want to keep playing it and see it through. They are both fine games, I just don't think I am ever going to return to Metal Gear.

That all being said, I may not even return to Witcher with this insane holiday season upon us. Halo 5 to Fallout 4 to Just Cause 3 is insane, and I'm sure there will be other treasures between those 3, so my gaming time will be hard fought for.

That and going out to play Magic always wins in a decision.

@takayamasama: There are no penalties unless you consider being connected online a penalty. You can go on and play just as before ignoring the FoB, dont let the internet rage fool you.

Metal Gear Solid V without a doubt is my game of the year, I put 100 hours into it and loved every second. I think I put more time into The Witcher 3 and came away with very mixed feeling.

Most of the time I was playing I absolutely loved it but I took a break for a few weeks and when I came back to it I had lost interest. I had completely lost the story thread and felt like I didn't know what was going on anymore. I did force myself to finish it, but for the life of me I can't even remember the ending.

I bought the season pass when the game came out so I'm going to see if the dlc can get me back in.

@zeik said:

The game starts a bit hard, but one you get used to the combat, as janky as it is, it's really not a difficult game. I think what made it especially easy for me was that going deep into the sword path just makes you cut through everything so easily, and I'd wager most players do invest primarily in swords. Add to that how ridiculously powerful all the signs are, even unupgraged, and the game quickly became a breeze. Once I unlocked the spin and the overhead sword attacks, it felt like the game almost played itself. The spin is ridiculous. If dynasty warriors gets flack for being a game about mashing x, The Witcher takes it to whole new levels, letting you beat bosses by literally holding x and dodging once in a while.

I tried to engage with the game more, use all the options at my disposal, but in the end, I pretty much never used bombs, non-healing potions, decoctions or the blacksmith equipment for weapon and armor buffs, because I didn't need them, and it would just be a waste of time making them all. I think the only time I used decoctions was to remove my encumbrance for a short while. I used oils here and there, but I never felt like I actually needed them. I used bombs mostly because blowing people apart was kind of rad. Hell, I don't think I even used the crossbow on land except for that first griffin fight, and I fought pretty much all the flying creatures.I suppose the Witcher has always had the issue of the sword skill tree being straight up better than the other ones, and the alchemy one being kind of terrible, but it really stood out in this one. This was definitely exacerbated by mid combat healing though.

Your opinions are your opinions ... thats fine, more power to you. But that Griffin fight is in no way hard. It's a tutorial fight where they all but nail the griffin to the ground for you. If you think that fight is hard you did something wrong.

Also ... I'm not sure if anyone that played until that fight and stopped is qualified to comment on the quality of the game. You can always say "I didnt like it", but getting to that fight takes like 2 hours at most. Thats hardly a representative view of the game as a whole.

I feel a big part of this is that some people like shooting guns and others like swordfights and monsters. To me, MGS is the one that's repetitive. You go to a base, headshot some guys, fulton some others... just get on with the story already! I'm not saying MGS is bad, but so-long-it-might-as-well-be-endless fantasy adventure is much more appealing to me than so-long-it-might-as-well-be-endless military ops. And most of the GB guys seem like they're more into shooters then action RPGs.

@brackstone: I went back and forth between the sword and sign trees, and even though whirl was good, I never thought it was OP unless I combined it with the echidna decoction, which made it straight up broken. I invested a lot signs though, because signs were just more fun than straight melee.

I don't know, I didn't use everything at my disposal, but I used a lot of it and I didn't start to feel excessively overpowered until about 3/4 of the way through the game. The game gave at least a modest challenge otherwise, and I enjoyed the combat well enough regardless. Even when the combat wasn't much of a challenge I found ways to make it fun, like puppet controlling enemies to let them finish eachother off, or using Aard to knock someone off a high ledge to their death. In the expansion I can set people on fire until they explode which then sets other people on fire. Stuff like that never gets old.

@rethla said:

OTOH there is a penalty if you do play online and it happens that your free time for playing games happens to line up with their "maintenance" windows (which seem to last entirely too long...), which causes GMP balance to suddenly go red because the game makes up its own numbers for how much is "online" and how much is "offline". That whole (opaque) system is entirely the worst thing about MGSV, with very repetitive side-ops coming in 2nd. The FOB invasion stuff is actually pretty fun.

Yeah agreed. I also turned off those markers right away...I hate that kind of thing in any open world game. It kind of got me when Dan was lamenting the same-ness of side quests in Witcher 3, then right after that gushing about how much stuff you can do in MGSV. It's fine that he found MGSV more enjoyable (of *course* he did, he's an MGS superfan *and* this game fits his obviously non-sneaking style better than the previous ones to boot), but trying to come up with objective reasons why Witcher 3 didn't grab him led to some fairly ridiculous statements. As if all the different weapons in MGSV are actually interesting (do you really need X different kinds of pistols), or 90% of all the gameplay isn't a subliminal advertisement for balloons.

There's no question that Witcher 3 isn't for everyone (and IMO it does require some time commitment to get into) since the characters + story are the main draw. And it's not perfect either...there are definitely aspects of the world that kind of go unaddressed (haven't played the DLC). It's basically a given that if you drop it for months you'll find it tough to get back in, but I don't think that really means there's anything especially wrong with the game and it's a mistake to try to point to specific aspects of it to count against it (I just know this will happen during GOTY discussions, and it will be maddening to listen to).

@oldirtybearon: My guess is he might like the story going on in The Witcher but just hates playing it. I didn't particularly like playing The Witcher but I was interested in what was going on, the story was good and I liked the characters. Its just the actual game part kind of blew. When it got to The Witcher 2 I thought the game part blew even more so I stopped playing it altogether.

@jesus_phish said:

... we're talking about Wild Hunt, though.

If the Witcher 3 isn't in the top 10 for GOTY, fair enough, they all seem to have at least given it a shot.

But if it isn't there and Dying Light is, all those responsible will be tried for crimes against humanity.

Has Vinny mentioned if he completed the Witcher?

@pcorb said:

He's played a bit of it, but hasn't had time. As it turns out, having a whole brood of children is detrimental to "me" time.

@oldirtybearon: I know that we're talking about Wild Hunt.

I don't think that's got anything to do with what I've said. I was giving an example of why the OP might want to watch the story of the game but not play the game. Reading his post it sounds like his issue is much more to do with playing the game rather than the story.

I brought up my experiences with The Witcher because it echoes what he's talking about. Actually playing The Witcher isn't that great. Looking at Wild Hunt, it doesn't look like I'd enjoy playing that one either.

It's something that has me worried about Cyberpunk 2077. CDPR are great at making big worlds with interesting characters, but their actual game mechanics leave a little to be desired.

It's a great game, play it or don't... what I would advise the staff to do to at the very least to get a reasonable feel for the experience, is to play the stand alone DLC, Heart of Glass.

Its fine that people don't want to play it, if they feel like it its not from them. I am just personally afraid that it wont be represented that well at goty talks, which is fine if they all generally don't like it or happen to be indifferent about it. It just bugs me because I quite honestly feel like its the best game I have played in 5 years and I was pretty meh about it before playing it. Granted I am not one of those people writing in constantly about it, but if that's the reason you aren't playing it, because people are telling you to, and you so happen to be a professional "games guy", then maybe you aren't as professional as you think.


Witcher 3 goty.

I just wanted to say that everyone who doesn't think that Witcher 3 is the sixth best video game of all time are dead wrong.

For whatever reason - and I'm one of those people who beat The Witcher 2 twice - I stopped in Novigrad and haven't played in months. Nearly everything in The Wild Hunt has been better, yet... I'm going to chalk it up to being a little more time poor these days. Coming off of Bloodborne could not have helped, either.

The Witcher 3 would be a phenomenal game if it wrapped up immediately after the Bloody Baron questline. Nothing else in that game even comes close to being that well crafted and engaging from a narrative standpoint, and it doesn't even have anything to do with the main plotline. Everything up until the last couple of missions felt bland and there was so much filler tossed into the game (there are fantastic side quests when they aren't the scavenger hunts etc, so why did they pad the game out with so much banal garbage?). Less is sometimes more.

MGSV would have been a better Metal Gear game with a better story, but the gameplay is so... beyond everything else right now. It gives you hundreds of tools and an insane amount of ways to achieve the mission goals, allows for improvisation that's actually still fun and engaging when stuff doesn't go according to plan, and there's so rarely fail-states in mission objectives and such that you barely ever see the gears turning. It's honestly a marvel when you don't just try to do everything by the books, with the exact same equipment, unlike how most video games are built these days with huge limiters on the interactivity. It's a shame that a game like this is so costly, but either way I can see people holding MGSV up as a prime example of what this generation of video games should be striving for (worth noting that Witcher 3's writing, characters, world etc are all prime examples of what the industry should also be striving for).

I'd say Witcher 3 had the best writing/story/characters this year, but then Undertale came out. I'd say Witcher 3 had the best atmosphere and world exploration this year, but Bloodborne came out. It seems like Withcer 3 started pretty high up on my list, but there are just games I feel are doing all the things it does well even better. That's not meant to be a slight against W3, because I still enjoyed the narrative when things were actually happening, and you can't say a bunch of those side quests aren't some of the best in the industry. I just can't give it top spot in any of the things I wanted to when I first played it because this year really has been an incredible one for video games. Especially after last year.

Heh I found this funny too and then he proceeded to talk about enjoying Destiny which made it more hilarious.

But that's beside the point this whole "GB crew aren't superfans of TW3" thing is just weird and so is this OP who seems to get some kind've physical satisfaction by hearing them justify his opinion about the game.

People like what they like and honestly you haven't been here very long if you weren't able to tell prior to TW3's release that the GB crew wouldn't be the biggest fans. Brad I expected to like it and I have a feeling he would've finished it if it weren't for PAX and then afterward Batman Arkham Knight breaking his flow.

But seriously people why is there such a fuss around this? Both TW3 and MGSV have been for the most part accepted as fantastic games with flaws in certain areas.

The funny part is TW3 did so right where MGSV does wrong and vice versa which I guess is how the hard divide of fans was created. Sounds like CDPR need to employ KojiPro ex-employees and then everything would be rosy.

I may be over simplifying this but it kind of seems like one camp is gameplay and one camp is story.

I feel this way about The Witcher AND Metal Gear

No need to fight guys. Let's all just agree to select Bloodborne as GOTY and move on. MGSV and TW3 will make the top 10, don't worry.

@fitzgerald:

Its hard to argue with personal preference but I liked the whole of the Witcher 3 I felt it had interesting side stories available when the main story was boring and vice versa. The only real issues I had with the game were too many endings and all the fucking boating in Skellige. The boating being the primary issue.

I also think people who fell off would have a hell of a time getting back on the horse, like a lot of in depth RPG's its not pick up and play. So its not like I blame Dan and the others for giving up but I do think they have sold the game short, just like they did with New Vegas back in the day.

Its also a game that if requires some dedication and is a massive time sink, its meaty in a way I wish a lot of other open world games were.