I like it so far, but I hate the fall damage. I'm supposed to be a badass warrior yet I die when I fall 5 feet.

Does anyone know if there is a built-in screenshot button for PC? In the install folder for Witcher 3, there is a screenshots folder.

My biggest take away from the game so far is that almost all of the major changes from the second game to the third seems to have been done for atmospheric effect. I plan on writing a detailed blog post going over all of the changes between the two, but it might be a few days.

Combat feels refined and that seems to be largely due to the way they've changed the default keybindings. This is in reference to PC controls. Parrying is set to a right click and you get this out of the gate. Signs change visually as you upgrade them. Blood splatters on your clothing and then you've got the really cool dynamic hacking of limbs. It was there in the second one but better here. I'm playing on the second highest difficult and being aggressive seems to pay more in this game while playing defensively seemed to be more encouraged in the second game. This leads to combat feeling faster.

Controls feel less refined, but movement wasn't necessarily that good in the second game. I still find myself positioned over looting something where I'm not prompted to actually loot it. Toggling between running and walking is useful because it's difficult to control Geralt in small spaces while he's running. And, again, it just seems natural to walk through town.

I prefer the medallion to the witcher sense specifically because I don't like the camera effect it has while I'm zoomed in.

Despite the legitimate downgrade criticisms, I found the game to be beautiful. I overclocked my R9 290 to 1050MHz, normally clocked at 947, and maintained a constant 60-61 fps while playing a mixture of ultra/high, having full AA, and taking the hairworks off. I've got a crossfire setup but it's not supported yet. The second card isn't utilized at all, but I was experiencing frequent artifacting and black screens while I had it enabled. Even still, with an i5-4690k OC'd to 4.3Ghz and my R9 290 setup, I didn't experience any crashing that NVIDIA users seemed to be experiencing on the GAF forums.

So far I'm only a couple of hours in and I'm holding off until my new 34" ultrawide curved display comes in to really dig deep. After that I'll post a more detailed comparison.

I'd trade the looks for a bit of stability so far. 3 hours in and 5 crashes...

Yeah just to confirm cutscenes are capped at 30 fps, it happens on pc too. Also OP, I have only died once but Blood and Bones is freaking hard. The health regen is so slow for a few hours I thought it didn't actually regen anymore, kid you not.

@karkarov: wait, does your health just regenerate on its own out of combat? I grabbed the one perk that heals you during the day but only noticed that taking effect.

Rolled back my drivers and things seem stable for now with no noticeable performance issues.

I'm running into that problem of wanting to explore but not being able to because everything I run into is 4 or 5 levels above me. It's a bit weird when a bandit with a pot on his head can kill me in 2 swings despite only being a little bit down the road from where the main story is happening. I'm hoping that changes.

That said, I just did the main story mission involving the Baron and the fetus and now I think I'm hooked no matter what.

@sackmanjones: On the harder difficulties it doesn't auto-regen like in previous games. You've gotta eat, drink potions, or find an inn keeper.

@lunnington: must be donnel from fire emblem :3

The game really steps it up a notch at that point. The second main quest option you have at that point is really great as well. So far this game is pretty much everything I hoped it would be. Combat is still the weak link but it's enjoyable enough and you have a lot of options which I like. The quality of the quest, writing and voice acting are the things that stand out especially. It's kind of sad when you compare this game with Inquisition because it shits all over that.

You are playing as Geralt after all.

So far, mostly just focusing on the comparisons to Red Dead Redemption because without them I wouldn't have bitten on release day. Let's just say some of my fears are being realized. I don't own a PC, don't play PC games, but this has all the look and feel of a Random PC Game for me. It may be great, but I'll be curious to see if it ever seems great to me. I like the vibe of the game, and have already gotten some novelty out of this just for feeling so foreign to most console-focused games of this type. But it definitely has that rough, sloppy feel obscured by meticulous minutiae I've often noticed in PC-exclusive games covered on this site.

Worst of which is this bug that just caught the game in a forever-loading state when I walked up to a merchant in Nilgaarden. I saved just a couple minutes before that, but now I'll have to be wary of saving before doing just about anything considering I've seen one or two similar comments in this thread and they weren't specifically related to the PS4. That's not cool, especially coming from a world where THAT level of bug usually doesn't happen.

I feel like I betrayed myself a bit buying into the hype last minute knowing full well this game might not be to my liking, but I'm hoping to make the most of it. I like the soundtrack and sound design.

I'm enjoying the game so far. I am on PC with a i5-4690K OC'ed to 4.2 ghz, and a GTX 980. I have everything set on ultra and I'm averaging around 55 FPS. I would like to get a consistent 60, but it runs smooth enough for my liking.

I played through to the Griffin hunt, which took me about three hours to get to. There is a lot of stuff to do in the game that I kept getting side tracked. As others have said, the Red Dead comparison is spot on, and just like Red Dead, I have a feeling I'll be playing this game for a long time.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the game looks incredible on ultra. One of the best looking games I've ever seen.

This is the problem I always had with this series.

Combat feels terrible coming from Bloodborne. Clunky and unresponsive. I love everything else though.

Been playing on a gtx 960 with an i5 4460 processor. 4gb of ram which is below minimum.

Was getting between 40 and 60 fps with everything on ultra (hairworks off, seems to be quite a performance heavy feature), pretty inconsistent, much more consistent 60 with everything on high, all effects on, but still a little bit of hitching and some dips to 50-55 sometimes. I don't like framerate inconsistency, so I capped to 30, turned everything up (except hairworks) and I get a rock-solid 30 fps on all situations, looks frigging beautiful. Gave me headroom to enable HBAO+, although I saw no big difference. There is some minor pop-in and hitching sometimes when transitioning from gameplay to cutscene, but I hope this gets resolved when I upgrade to 8 gb of ram. Overall feels incredibly smooth. Had just one crash at a random time when I asked Roach to run.

It's a new build, and I'm pretty happy with it, because i paid a bit more than a ps4 would cost, so I was expecting a little extra stability. Seems like I can go ps4 settings at around 60 fps, or better-than-ps4 settings (not that much better though, Ultra didn't blow me away as I thought it would) at locked ps4 framerate.

Oh, when I capped at 30 suddenly motion blur became more distracting, so I disabled it and normal Blur, prefer the cleaner look, just as I did in Witcher 2.

Please excuse my english.

Already had my first crash in under an hour of gameplay. Oddly enough it wasnt the open world, it was trying to Skip a turn in the card game tutorial that did it.

Other than that though, I am enjoying the game so far.

So far so good on my PS4. Although I'm terrible at combat and had to bump it down to normal difficulty. Damn wolves kept demolishing me.

Put in three hours on PS4 version last night.

So far I'm loving what I'm seeing and experiencing. Feels like a living world where the bits and pieces fit together in a sensible and interesting way.

Visuals are gorgeous. After the darkness of Bloodborne it's nice to have some bright and beautiful areas. I will say I've run into some performance issues when transitioning between cutscenes/conversations and normal gameplay. Think this is the slight stuttering that people have mentioned in reviews. It's enough to be noticeable but with the game being so interesting it doesn't bother me too much.

Few hours in after doing everything in the starting area and just arrived to the first "big" area.

Story and tone wise i'm satisfied so far, i loved that a quest as random as "go free that well from a monster" turned out to be the final part of a local tragedy encompassing multiple characters from other various quests; it felt very rewarding to uncover the motives of what happened even after the task was done.

I really dislike tho the movement and the camera (especially when you need to keep using the witcher senses to highlight loot). I might go back to keyboard and mouse so at least i can toggle walk/run, it might make some things less frustrating since with the controller Geralt start sprinting around at a moment notice

Got no crashes which positively surprised me, just a few second lock when starting a gwent game.

For anyone having crashing problems with Nvidia cards, try this: In Nvidia Control Panel/Manage 3D Settings/Program Settings/The Witcher 3, set Power management Mode to Prefer Maximum Performance.

Haven't had a crash since I tried this - saw it in a Steam thread. Of course, it might just be luck but worth a try.

I've played for a couple of hours. I really like the writing and the combat is coming to me slowly. However I'm having a lot of technical issues on the Xbox One. The framerate is all over the place and now I'm getting an extra layer of judders on top of it. The worst part is that the game's not letting me save anymore and my last autosave is from an hour ago.

Hopefully the technical aspects will be sorted out and hopefully I've not just lost an hour of playtime.

I was really afraid my AMD Phenom 965 CPU would hold me back from playing this game even though it met the minimum requirements. Not only does it play it, but with my Geforce 960 I can run this game on medium-high settings without much issue. The frames drop when I pan over the landscape, but not to an unplayable state - I'm amazed at how well this plays on my computer honestly, I think I could probably afford to raise the graphics even more if I want, which I might experiment with later tonight.

Gameplay-wise, I REALLY appreciate the tutorial, it's MUCH easier than The Witcher 2, and tells you all the basics very quickly while also not being drop dead boring like so many other tutorials. That being said, the game is still difficult, and a group of enemies can fuck you up instantly if you make a mistake. For instance, I fought a pack of wolves and got slaughter on my first encounter, but then when I reloaded my save and fought the same pack, I decimated them within seconds.

I haven't gotten very far along in the story to comment on it, but from what I've seen so far, it's going to be good.

So far the game's living up to the immense hype I built around it, so that's pretty rad.

This game is incredible. I played for a couple hours last night and restarted today on a higher difficulty. The combat is certainly not the greatest, but it's fun when you start getting good at it. Even fetch quests don't feel like simple fetch quests, there's always some intrigue or involved gameplay sequences to go along.

Probably the most impressive thing about it might be the freaking weather. Like, it just got windy. Not because I entered a new area or triggered a scene. It just got super windy. I've never seen anything like that in a game. It makes the world feel so organic and that the world is still turning without you. Very cool.

Me too. Thanks for finally helping me realize why I haven't been able to get into these games. It's so far up my alley, but the gameplay is just off enough to make me feel a constant sense of vague discomfort. It's really too bad.

I've been really impressed with the weather. I was wondering if a tornado was about to pop up halfway through last night's session because the wind kept getting louder and heavier.

Ran into a couple issues with the game. Like others have said the inventory layout is a bit of a mess. My other issue is the ingredients collecting for potions. I need this one ingredient (arenaria) to make wraith oil so is there a specific place to get that or am I expected to randomly stumble across when picking up random flowers or whatever. I wish the ingredient stuff was a little less all over the place

Game has no real flow to it which is a shame because I dig the atmosphere of the story. I'm just lost jumping between the two areas trying to level up (everything I'm getting is two or more levels too high for me) and getting forced to watch the same cartoon narrative scenes over and over again. Progression and gold seem to come very sporadically in this game, at first it seemed like it was moving pretty quick but this last hour has been a slog through level 3.

However, I do enjoy how stronger weapons are unveiling some much more brutal ways to take enemies out, and I am appreciating combat more as I get used to blocking vs. rolling, using my magic in appropriate ways, etc. I also enjoy the conversations, it's still not perfect but there are many more shades of grey than, say, the Mass Effect series.

Overall the tone and idea of the game is sinking in well so far, but the mechanics and game parts of it aren't always doing the same. I've gotten more used to the horse but movement in general still feels awkward and I'm not really feeling any kind of feedback from the game that the main story is urgent. The GTA games allow for plenty of meandering but they always have incentive to follow the story and get your character prepared for bigger and better things. Here I'm just wandering into level 11 enemies two hours into the game and being told I'm several levels too weak for every mission I pick up, let alone the two below the main quest.

Considering sometimes level 2 mobs tear me apart and other times I brutally dismember them in seconds, I just don't have a good gauge on what I can reasonably tackle above level yet. Is it like Destiny where I basically shouldn't bother, or SNES-era JRPGs where it just takes some tenacity and a good amount of health supplies?

I've played maybe a couple hours (mostly tweaking settings) and it's running fine so far, 40-45fps after turning foilage and shadows down and bumping mostly everything else to ultra. Running a radeon hd 7950. Crazy thing to me is, the foilage is so demanding but in motion it doesn't really look that great, like cardboard cutouts of leaves. It's probably just a nitpick because everything looks so good in comparison. (although it looks great in screen shots).

As far as the game it's definitely a lot like the witcher 2, i started on the second hardest but turned it back to normal as it was getting annoying dying to drowners in one combo. FOV is fine to me but i think they should include an option for people since it's a big deal to others.

Story is the same fucked up shit mixed with beautiful fantasy that doesn't seem forced and comes out pretty real and natural.

GOTY is all I have to say the game is so huge, the first area alone is hours and hours of content and it seems to be a pretty small zone compared to others.

It took some tweaking on PC but I have it set to ultra except for vegetation viewing distance dropped it to High instead of ultra, honestly can't see a difference.

Its so beautiful the forest and shadows are so insane, graphical "downgrade" My ass. my only real complaint at this time is the repeating dialogue for NPC's walking by the same kid 4-5 times to hear the same little poem and the same old man getting mad at him for it kinda breaks the world a little I wish they had just played those clips once and then killed the dialogue from ever playing again.

Play on Blood and Broken Bones the first few fights are tough but it quickly evens out and feels right, I couldn't imagine the difficulty being lower, low level guys already can go down in a single hit but using the dodge and roll with Quen along with other spells proves pretty vital to survival.

My crashing seems to have stopped. Fresh install of the new drivers and not touching GeForce Experience, which I suspect is a problem:

I hardly ever use the thing but checked out the Witcher 3 settings out of curiosity. They were totally out of whack - reporting settings as disabled when my game had them enabled etc and when I pressed optimise the GeForce settings didn't match the new in-game settings at all.

Did a fresh install of the drivers and GF Experience and left that bloody program well alone.

I had constant crashing that wouldn't allow me to progress more than a couple of minutes into the prologue. Tried the Nvidia control panel "maximum performance" option and reverting back to the old driver, I was able to play for about 20-30 minutes but ended up crashing again. Haven't tried since.

Just hoping for some sort of acknowledgement soon, followed by a fix. Besides the crashing, I'm able to run everything at Ultra or High settings and I'm just using a 2gb 770.

GeForce Experience was bugging me about updating when I turned on my computer. Glad I told it no!

I don't think it's a bad game but I wish Geralt's default movement speed when inside and/or approaching doors slowed to a walk. As it stands, the movement feels sluggish. It feels like they were trying to add weight to it but instead every action takes *just that* much longer that I feel like it needs to.

Combat still feels pretty solid, though! I died to the griffin once and felt like it was solely my fault so that's a good thing.

I find locking on to enemies to be kind of finicky and annoying? Like I don't think the range is long enough for it maybe

Oh my god this game is so good. I just made a harrowing choice (not even related to the main questline) and I have that feeling when you want to tell everyone ever. Fuck this game. THIS FUCKING GAME.

It does, not sure if challenge level effects it but on Blood and Bones the regen is slow as hell.

Since my Dell order got delayed til next Thursday (curses, $25 coupon), reading all these posts suuuuuuuuucks.

Got 2 hours in last night. Everything on Ultra thanks to a recent 980 upgrade. I don't play a lot of RPG but I love open world games. Loving it so far!!

I'm loving it to far. Runs buttery smooth on my 970 on high with a couple options set to Ultra.

Shit won't stop crashing though. I'll be playing any it randomly boots me to the desktop while the game continues to play in the background (I can hear conversations continue, enemies attack, etc). I can't switch back to the game or do anything else until I ctrl-alt-del and close the process. Tried all the suggested fixes people have come up with. No luck. Seems totally random. It's happened while in menus, cutscenes, combat, etc. Sometimes i can go an hour without that happening, sometimes only 10 minutes.

Straight up the best game I've played this year so far, but I'm going to have to stop playing until they patch it. That makes me sad. I think the combat is a lot of fun (playing on the 2nd highest difficulty). My first death was to simple wolves. Not monsters, ghouls, or that ghost lady at the well. They will attack you like I imagine wolves would. They aren't coming at you one by one for easy pickings. If you become staggered, they'll all attack at once and rock your shit.

I've watched a few people playing it and noticed some of my small choices early on that seemed like simple dialoge options has an effect even early on. Like it seems that you can lose a vendor forever by simply saying the wrong thing. But it's not like "____ will remember that!" or "Oh no you di'int!". You would never know the difference or make the connection.

Game runs like burning garbage on Crossfire setups, which shouldn't be much of a surprise as just about every major release in the past year has done that on launch.

Mama, don't let your babies grow up to buy two (AMD) graphics cards.

I miss Witcher 2's tighter narrative experience. Skyrim influenced all these games to add garbage MMO style side content. Like you activate quick travel, really is this FF14. Im getting nothing out of this open world busywork they added. And yeah Witcher games always had that kind of side stuff but they're mandated more of that into the main quest line. If Im playing nothing but the main questline, there shouldnt be all these "go kill some wolves then I'll give you info" shit happening.

harping on graphics again, but i'm so torn between dialing down things a few notches for sweet sweet 60fps or keeping most things maxed out and hovering around 30. almost about to go for a 2nd r9 290 or maybe even just getting a 980 (Which would be dumb but i feel so much shame for my amd)

Crossfire, fool me once...

They'll never stay cool and they'll make you a fool because you didn't by Nvidia?

In all seriousness that sucks though, i switched back to Nvidia because of this, its a shame that AMD cant get its act together with drivers and that Nvidia is basically pushing them around now. Rather see them more competitive because AMD offers a better value usually and drives Nvidia's prices down.

Anyways, loving the game so far, i'v spent like 8 hours just in the starting area screwing around, The combat is taking me awhile to get used to though, can be hard to judge when to attack with bigger packs of monsters and i think i mainly prefer fast attacks, strong hits harder but can really leave you open to getting murdered. Also, playing on the second to highest difficulty and not sure why they decided to make meditation not heal you when you just need alcohol to heal anyways, seems tedious more then anything as i have to meditate to get my potions back to full then heal, then meditate again to refill it again. And food hardly heals anything so thats pointless. Other then that though its been great, looks great and i love the choices they give you even on the small side quests.

Just to chime in with the crashes, at least in my game I see it.... but it is always in the inventory. Not only that... it is always when reading a book. Kid you not. Never happens otherwise.

The stampedes of deer through the forest is one of the neatest little touches.

I also tried tackling the bear and it almost tore me a new one. Should've known, IT WAS A FUCKING BEAR.

There is none of that in the sidequests though. The complaint is totally valid in games like Inquisition and it's something I was really worried about but Witcher 3 actually doesn't do that. All of the sidequests have a narrative context, often with at least one choice, or neat background info to explore. It also does a great job transitioning from main story to sidequest stuff too. There is one character in the second area that is part of the main quest. Once you're done with that you get a completely optional follow up questline with that character that concludes the narrative arc of that person (at least for the moment). It is really involved and of a quality that most other RPGs don't have in their main quest. It really is the best RPG I have played in a long time and if it can keep up the quality of the writing, characters and quest design this will end up being one of my favorite games of all time.

Oh and a little tip for PS4 players: Swipe up on the touchpad to get to the map instantly, hold it to get to your inventory and click it to get out of menus without having to hit circle twice.

If you're on PC and you're performance is unstable, turn off nvidia hair effects. I am now getting a solid 60 FPS, with everything else on the highest setting. It sucks because the nvidia hair stuff looks awesome. Hopefully that gets fixed soon.