Fighting large monsters might be hard, fighting groups of bandits might be hard, but so far the hardest part has been what decision to take while talking to the people. I tried to play the good guy Witcher but sometimes that causes the townsfolk to hate me and some other decisions I tried to be forceful and that’s caused the townspeople to hail me the hero, an example is

and this is why i love this game the character interaction can not go the way you think, has anyone else had any great character conversations

And this is why conscience has been bread out of the political class.

Bioware RPGs trained me to be the goody little two shoes because I often think it's the right thing to do and those choices usually give you the best outcome. In the Witcher 3, this whole notion goes out of the window and I just go with my gut. My Geralt is a good guy at heart but he can be a snarky asshole and will wreck your shit if you cross him. I don't feel bad about it either. That's some good game design right there.

That Ladies of the Wood decision. Christ.

Yeah, there are a lot of really tough decisions in this game, some of them not very apparent.

Most heart-breaking thing I had to do so far was not kissing Triss and then saying farewell to her. Love's a bitch.

Yeah. There's a lot of figuring out which choice is "the lesser of two evils". There's not enough of that and meaningful consequences in open-world games. This game set a new standard on so many levels.

The hardest part is doing those garbage-ass sunken treasure missions. Swimming in this game just sucks.

The hardest part for me is living with my decisions after I make them. There have been choices where I've sat for minutes thinking "okay, which one of these will not result in everyone dying 2 hours from now."

The entire Bloody Baron questline absolutely wrecked me. I don't think I've ever played a game where things went so poorly for people because of a choice I made that was only tangentially related. I spent the next couple hours wandering the wilderness because I was just so taken aback by it.

Yeah so far the decisions have been awesome and unexpected. Even something as simple as rescuing a guy tied up and ready to be eaten by monsters reveals later he's a bandit and murderer who has thrives in his business after you freed him (yeah, I killed his ass when I found out).

This is why the Witcher series is so great. In 2, you can try to help out the non-human races all you want in the first area and in the end they end up getting slaughtered. Things are rough out there and you can only do so much. You can never be sure quite how things will play out.

But so far, 3 seems the best yet. I'm really excited to see how things keep going. So far I try to do some good but I'm also looking out for myself and I've stayed out of a few personal quarrels that in most RPGs you'd be the negotiator/arbiter for because fuck I got my own business and I can't be sure how anything is going to turn out. I'm almost always making sure I get paid too. Little charity work going on. Witcher's gotta eat!

This is actually very well reinforced by the game's economy. At least it's working perfectly for me. Because I am straight up broke as hell, I really do make my decisions based on getting paid most of the time.

Not how most RPGs are played:

I HAVE UNLIMITED MONEY / CANNOT DIE / WILL SAVE EVERYONE

Yep, just earlier today I came across one that was in the wreckage of a boat and it was sort of maze like and Drowners were all over it and I'm not too skilled with the crossbow so I don't even bother and I could've made it out but fucking Geralt just kept choosing to level out for no reason while I was clearly holding the surface button and I got slapped to death.

The horse is also janky. It's been, what, five years since Red Dead Redemption and we still can't get a horse as good as theirs? Roach keeps pulling up and even coming to a complete stop for no obvious reasons. If it's less than 200 yards to my objective I'll generally just hoof it rather than whistle in the horse. Just less annoyance.

@nodima: Hot tip for crossbow, just tap it when the enemy is close (when you see their healthbar, but you don't have to be locked on). It will auto target and hit them.

The decisions so far has been quite heavy. The entire Bloody Baron quest, man. I saved the children, but the barons family got fucked.

It would be kinda cool if at the end of the game they had a decision review and showed your choices. And the results of everyone playing on that platform, along with your friends. You know, like Telltale does with its games. That would be pretty cool. I know its not going to be there. But I can wish.

@sterling honestly I think any game with choice should adopt that going forward. It would have been nice to see that stuff in Mass Effect, for example, but that series was started before these consoles were as openly connected as they are now.

Yea, I do that on foot, something about water I just want to not do combat. Probably goes back to some PTSD from Turok 2 water combat.

Right now the hardest part for me is having to wait until tomorrow before playing it. I was actually intending to hold off on buying it altogether for a while, save my cash for a bit and get a new GPU first. So today I ordered one, and only after buying it I realised that one of the two free games they promoted the deal with was Wildhunt (the other being Arkham Knight). Now I feel like a little kid on the night before Christmas.

LUL WUT!

She actually tried to kill you? What did you say dude? I straight up told her "No don't go to Radovid unless you want to get tortured to death. In fact go hang out with my Witcher buddies in Kaer Morhen. Before you do gimme those damn notes though!" And she basically took it in stride. I have since dismantled the notes into parchment.

The hardest part of this game is when you have to fistfight two people at once.

Couldn't agree more. Bugged me seeing people say they hope it gets patched in the other thread. I love the system how it currently is. Really makes crafting worthwhile, haggling and getting every dime worth your while, and not just doing charity something that makes sense.

@geraltitude: @artisanbreads: Eh honestly money is only a problem at the start, once you get to Novigrad it quickly stops mattering, it's just that your expenditures really slow down as you get most diagrams and gear setup and merchants there pay more for stuff, bank can exchange all your other currencies, lots of loot to sell from dead humans, and so forth. I went from dancing around 0 to over 30k gold.

Hardest part for me is finding long enough stretches to play. I only get an hour a night maybe 2 so I had to go to the easy setting because spending hours fighting one beast wasn't cutting it :( I'm old

My main approach with money for quests is if I think they can pay for it (Nilfgaard troops or other well to do, noble ish type people) then I'll make them pay me as much as they can.

If they're peasants they pay the agreed upon price.

If they're really hard up or they seem like decent people (e.g the guy who took in the orphan kid after the Shrieker Cockatrice wrecked his parents) I might do some pro bono work for them

I'm playing on PC and the hardest thing in the game so far is getting my PS4 controller to do exactly what I want it to. I've been killed by the griffin upwards of eight times, largely because Geralt will often not roll when I press X.

I'm mad salty about it.

I've spent minutes deliberating dialogue options. I haven't seen all the ending permutations (and I don't think I want to), but it seems like the end state of the world is vastly affected by choices in game.

I love how ambiguous some choices have been - especially when you're given a timer to choose. The lack of an actual morality meter is one of the best design decisions ever in a game.

The choices in the game are great and have definitely left me pondering for a minute or so. I'm not far enough to see how the world is being affected by any of this yet, but it's going to be real interesting down the line.

I also just finished the Keira questline and got the same outcome. I said the wrong thing apparently, and it resulted in a fight that ended with her death. I was bummed because I liked her character, even though what she did was kinda shitty.

The hardest part for me, though, is not simply turning the game off every time I die because I don't want to sit through the 60-80 second loads. The load times on the PS4 version are horrendous.

Every time I find out that a choice I made hours ago (that didn't seem that important) affects the game later, I can't help but smile and then ask my friends playing the game what they did.

The economy in the game is great. I never feel like i'm rolling in dough, but I will go out of my way to sell something at a vendor that I know will pay more. I've let money influence some of my decisions in a way that I'm not proud of.

The subtle humor is also nice. Nothing is over the top or trying to hard, but the game definitely has its moments.

This game is something special. I'm loving every second. I haven't had any of the control issues other people complain about. Once you spend an hour or so running around, it all feels fine to me. The horse does what I want, swimming works, combat and running around on foot is decent. Just takes a little bit to get used to the momentum that the movement has. I stopped having to think about the controls by the time I fought the gryphon.

Yeah I just played a lot today and I now have a little over 2k, unheard of in the early game. Wish it stayed that desperate but must be super hard to achieve that balance across such a game. We will see. Might find some stuff to blow all my money on soon.

The hardest part of the game is getting it to run without crashing every couple of hours.

But ya, the choices are tough too.

yeah I am playing on the PS4 version also, and fighting a large monster like the Cockatrice and being on the Blood and Broken Bones difficulty can become more time waiting for it to load then actually fighting the monster, but then I start thinking about the battles when to dodge, when to hit it with a sign the game is changing my play style where I would normally just hack and slash.

I also killed that guy! I don't know of anyone other than comic book superheroes that would let monsters like that live.

Yeah right now I am wrestling weather or not to accept a certain proposition to kill a man.

(I would actually kill Radovid in a blink of an eye that little shit, the only thing that's stopping me is that he is kind of the leader of the unified armies holding back Nilfgard and killing him at this juncture would seem unwise from a purely practical perspective)

@tennmuerti: Agreed, I've been pondering with that decision for a while now, since that seems like it would really have far reaching consequences. Kinda leaning towards killing him by now and just let Nilfgard take the lands since that would probably still lead to a better future for the mages at least..

@sessh: So I went and did the quest, you should do it. Actually the way Dijkstra phrases it when he initially proposes it to you is key and is 100% accurate. He just asks you to help out with a part.It's just that I (and others i think) read further into it.

I was pleased I did the quest.

@tennmuerti: Okay, I just did the quest now too and so far so good, but I kinda doubt that's going to be it. I'm pretty sure that was just an opener to a questline.

i made a few mistakes dont know if it would have gone any other way thought.
accedently released the evil spirit in the tree and resulted in the barons wife to die and the baron hanging himself. and without me getting my reward