steam is having a sale for the witcher 3 for 15 bucks and I'm thinking about pulling the trigger. I want a open worldish adventure game but the style isnt my favorite. it seems to lean more toward the elder scrolls side than it does the fable side. I kind of think that since I havent touched it in the 4 years its been out I shouldnt but hearing such praise about it always made me think twice. I could just go with horizon but I rather not have to dig out my launch ps4 and play something on pc.

Yes, everyone should play The Witcher 3.

watching the quick look again. is this lowkey a detective game?

I do remember one quest where if you miss certain clues you can end up making the wrong conclusion and not get the 'best ending' for the quest. But other than that a lot of the detective-y sequences will just have you go inside an area and find a thing, or follow a trail until you find a thing.

Do it. It's excellent.

Breath of The Wild, The Witness, and The Witcher 3 are my top 3 from this generation. The DLC is even better then the main game. They both have a tremendous sense of adventure, wit, and humor.

My only real complaint is that the skill tree sucks.

@jetmet: Lowkey, but most mysteries are solved in-fiction and don't put much demand on your own deduction skills. Some do actually demand some analysis, recall, and deduction.

I actually just finished up Witcher 3 yesterday after installing it a few weeks ago. It's now one of my favorite games of all time. Personally it took me a bit of time for all the systems to "click" but the UI and controls are miles more intuitive than Witcher 1 and 2. The graphics are amazing, both technically and artistically.

15 is a steal. Witcher 3 is amazing. It's the gold standard for open worlds as far as I'm concerned.

I’ve put hundreds lf hours into Witcher 3. It’s almost certainly my game of the generation (either Witcher 3 or Overwatch).

I'll put it this way. My girlfriend doesn't normally play games. Witcher 3 became a bit of an obsession. We lost a save 140 hours in or so, and she started over, that's how good the game is.

I'll be the voice of dissent here:

• It controls horribly.
  • Movement feels sluggish
  • Interactions such as trying to mount/dismount your horse/boat simply fail half the time
  • Climbing/jumping is a jank-fueled nightmare
  • It's 50/50 whether the game will allow you to aim/throw a bomb when you hold the button down
• The combat is boring. I played the game at max-difficulty from the start and within a few hours combat had devolved into spamming quick-attacks ad nauseam. The game never required anything more than this over the next hundred-odd hours. I tried respec-ing to spellcasting builds on more than one occasion but they felt clunky and drew out the fights even longer. Your bombs' damage doesn't scale and they become useless very quickly.
• The UI is atrocious. Having to dig through menus before and during every fight to apply oils is some mind-numbing design. Same, if lesser, issue with consuming potions.
  • There's an entire skill tree designed to grant you benefits when you've taken enough potions and decoctions. Well, joke's on anyone who thinks this sounds cool: the game also wraps a big, swirling green liquid effect around your screen whenever this is active. It's obnoxious and made me ignore the tree entirely until I found a mod to disable the effect.
• The art design is dull. The landscapes are beautiful but after enough hours they aren't enough to carry the game.
• Come at me: I think the story and characters, outside of the Bloody Baron, are all bad.

One of my favorite things about this game is how much it's about just going around and helping random people for money and smaller individual stories that aren't just we need to save the world from some ancient evil. The main story does have that eventually which is my least favorite part of the game, but for 90% of it you're just wandering around helping someone who's house his haunted or fighting random monsters people have issue with.

So I got it and went through the first our and i have initial thoughts

The movement is terrible on 60fps. It's the first game that I actually feel a huge difference going from 120 to 60. It was like night and day. Couldn't imagine playing on 30. I don't mind slow, I liked the rdr2 movement. Getting on a horse in this game feels wrong after rdr2.

Its a good looking game but looks 4 years old. Again RDR2 did some stuff imo.

I'm excited for some mass effectish type of fighting potential

I'm excited for this tho as far as open world botw is 1 and RDR2 is 1A imo. I'd be really surprised if it made that level but I'm gonna be super glad if it does.

The Witcher 3 is the greatest RPG ever made.

It was a good time to play the game when it launched four years ago.

It was a great time to play the game after all of the DLC released for it.

Nowadays it's an okay time to play The Witcher 3, provided that you have the spare time.

It's the greatest RPG ever made. You should play it.

The Witcher 3 builds a wonderful world for you to get lost in, and if you lose yourself in it it's utterly enthralling for all 100+ hours. However, I can see how easily one could see through the cracks, presented below:

• The combat, on its surface, is incredibly complex, but it's most approachable if you over level and treat it more like a JRPG and simply attack, attack, attack

• The writing, while layered and amongst the upper crust of video game lore and background color, will begin to expose itself as somewhat formulaic if you wind up pursuing most of the side quests

• In that same vein, the more you immerse yourself in the world and the side details, the more you'll start a quest and immediately realize both the format and conclusion of the mission

That said, these are ultimately flaws with a lot of media and particularly video games, and it only slightly bothered me from time to time, mostly when I was having a generally cynical day anyway. I paid $100 sight unseen for this game due to the hype from Danny O'Dwyer, Vinny and the general gaming industry, gave it about 20 hours before deciding to put it off while CDPR continued to pump out game changing patches, picked it back up from the beginning after the last DLC dropped and had a 130+ hour blast with it.

People can nitpick this game to death, and I'm sure it's easier to do now than it was two years ago when I played it, but like I said if the lore and world grabs you don't let it let you go. Kind of like Mass Effect, it's a game where the moments you can put the controller down and listen to two people speak to each other is the best part.

Definitely in my top five from this generation, maybe my second favorite. That said, I put 400 hours into it on the PS4 on easy, and then, did almost all that same content in about half that time on the Xbox One X on Death March. I can't disagree with those that say the game can be a bit repetitive and check boxy. It was more noticeable, and less negligible the last time I played it, but I still loved the game. Exploring the environments and seeing the character interactions in the story is great. I love the music. It was one of those games that I could play just to walk around the environment listening to the sounds. I thought it was relaxing. Combat, for a game like this, outmatches most if not all, but it's not terrific.

Ahhh, hello Jeff's alt account. :)

I installed this on this laptop and keep meaning to try getting into it! I wish the MKB controls were a bit smoother.

1. Make sure to try the alternative control mode. Found under Gameplay in settings. It will make Geralt not wait for animations that much, hence making the controls more direct.
2. I got used to the general feel of the game after a while. In my opinion it's never perfect, especially not indoor and looting but the fighting feels really good after a while. Think and plan ahead, don't spam the buttons.

I hear there's never been a better time to play the Witcher 3. Still among my all time favourites, love everything except the horse races.

There's never been a better time to play The Witcher 3

@nnickers: BOO THIS MAN!

BOOOOOO!!!

;)

@nnickers:

I will come at you because the old and tired line about the story being no good after, or even apart from, The Bloody Baron quest is the biggest pile of pure bullshit ever uttered about a video game. I have no idea how it even started, it's an early quest and maybe there is a bit of a slow patch in the plot after that, I suppose most people fell off then and used it as an excuse. In reality the game is stuffed with great story beats, and the endgame against The Wild Hunt is outstanding.

Dan Ryckert said that thing about the Witcher 3 story as well, and he is a well known games journalist, but he also ate egg shells because he thought those were the egg whites. So there is that.

Some might say it's the best time to be playing videogames :D.