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The Witcher 3 GOTY Edition

Carrion

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You can write a functional story without pushing (fake) urgency on the player, open world or not. One of the first things Caius Cosades tells you is to join a guild and do some side quests. There's no real urgency in TW1 either, and for example the main goal of Act IV can be summarized as "kill some time until you can return to Vizima". Hell, even most of the Witcher saga consists of Geralt screwing around and going for these little adventures while he's supposedly searching for Ciri.

I think it would've helped if the main story was structured more like an actual investigation quest (kind of like parts of TW1 or even Fallout), with a larger number of vague leads here and there so that it'd encourage you to explore and talk to different people to find out more clues. As it is, you always know where you should be going next, which means that there's no good in-game reason for taking on witcher contracts or random side quests. There are also very few side quests that tie into the main quest in any meaningful way.
 

Sentinel

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The problem is the main quest, something similar to the first witcher with a criminal organization like salamandra would have been great in Novigrad, with more emphasis on the fight between factions.
They draw inspiration from sapkowski novels which were :decline: from his earlier short stories, all the white frost, prophecy shit was uninstersting compared the plots of W1 and W2.

And the open world was too much ubisoft-like, but yeah with a different plot it could have been better.
Honestly, I would have preferred if they had kept Eredin and Emhyr var Emreis's original motivations, instead of turning them into "big bad evil guys" and the White Frost into the end of the world, and in turn, Ciri into a Mary Sue. The original character motivations from the books were maybe a little bit goofier (and would not go well over in the american market that's for sure), but they were arguably better than what we got.
 

Danikas

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I dunno. It would take too long to list all the ones I worked on, by the end of W3 I probably worked on two or three dozen quests. When I was brought on to W3 in the last couple years of development, I was originally working on a big quest chain with a seperate team of writers and designers. That quest chain was eventually cut for reasons. The only remainders of that quest chain still around are Eye for an Eye, Blood Ties, and Contract: Patrol Gone Missing. Eye for an Eye was also hugely trimmed down, it used to be a lot bigger.

Other than those three, the quests in W3 I was most involved with (though didn't originally design) are: Funeral Pyres, Ghosts of the Past/Fall of the House of Reardon, Fencing Lessons, The Aparian Phantom, Muire D'Yaeblen, Tower Outta Nowhere, and Fool's Gold.

I was assigned to BaW and not HoS, but I still designed and implemented The Taxman Cometh, and Rose on a Red Field, the latter of which I'm not particularly happy with how it turned out, but it was designed and implemented in just a couple of days, so that's something I guess.

BaW, I designed/implemented: Equine Phantoms, Feet Cold as Ice, also worked a bunch on Till Death Do You Part and A Knight's Tales. My big quest here got cut for production, it took place in Fox Hollow and involved genocide, ya'll would have liked it. Also I had a troll quest that was great but the director didn't think it was funny so it got shot into space.
Yeah, he [Iorveth] was in the base game but got cut for reasons. He just never made sense for the expansions or DLC for other reasons. His previous role in the game was in a quest chain that eventually became the basis for Hearts of Stone, but between the initial implementation (for W3) and the full expansion (HoS) it was totally rewritten, to the point that you wouldn't recognize the quest at all. It was a story about the Catriona plague, Mr. Mirror, and some Nilfgaardian researchers. Maybe after we're all done with the game I can drop some more details, the cut stuff with Iorveth was mostly my stuff, so it makes me sad we never got to use him.
I think one of my big disappointments with some of the cut content in W3 is that we lost a lot of the darker shadings on the Nilfgaardians. The cut stuff wasn't the same quality as the rest of the game and there's no way we'd have had the time to finish it, but the Nilfgaardians do some pretty heinous shit in the name of law & order. Yeah, they create order and prosperity, but what is that worth to the people they crush to get there? Wealth and rule of law are pretty pointless when a significant portion of your population have no (or at least very limited) access to either.
Originally Iorveth showed up on Velen searching for a cure to a plague ravaging the south, including Mahakam. Geralt has to team up with Iorveth, and Roche, Ves, and Thaler for very complicated reasons to try and get this cure. The whole plague plotline mostly got cut, though there's some elements of it drifting around in places, like the guy with the corpse wagon who claims he's immune. The quest where you have to get Ves out of the fight with the Nilfgaardians was also part of this plotline, though in a substantially different form (I think the cuts and rewrites really hurt her character, sadly. )

In the version of her quest that I liked best, she's pissed off because the village of Poppystone helped the Partisans escape Velen, but the Nilfs found out about it and are going to execute some people. Ves asks Geralt to help her liberate them behind Roche's back. Ves and Geralt go, save some folks and kill some Nilfgaardians, they have a really nice scene together where they talk about constellations and elven mythology, then go back to the camp and Roche throws a hissyfit because he's secretly got a deal with the Nilfgaardians.
Most of the quests that characterized the Nilfgaardians as maybe not the most enlightened people in the world, got cut. The remainders of that questline are Eye for an Eye (significantly reduced from design), Patrol Gone Missing, and Blood Ties. Coincidentally, all mine, though I don't think they were my best work; and divorced from the main quest most people never even see them.

In Eye for an Eye, the Nilfgaardians were in that village to kill the people who helped the Temerian partisans escape Velen. Which is fair in war, I suppose, though the original design was for them to be in the village capturing slaves. (I must admit, the slavery thing was not my design, and I'm glad it got removed.)

In Patrol Gone Missing there is a hidden event that probably 99% of people never see that reveals that the Nilfgaardians were executing prisoners of war.

In Blood Ties, the dwarf "coachman" for the noblewoman is actually a slave, though it's never explicitly mentioned.
The quest was pretty nilfgaard-centric and involved a renegade general (and demonologist) who was doing crazy wizard poo poo in Velen. Thaler was there, and so was Vincent Meis (but he got cut early). Iorveth was in there, trying to steal something from the demon-summoning general guy so that he could cure a plague that was killing his doods. Some parts of the old story stuck around, Eye for an Eye, Patrol Gone Missing, and... uh whatever the one is with the lady who wants you to find her redheaded kid? There was also a tiny quest in the Nilfgaard camp about some soldiers who stole a pig and tried to make it look like a monster took it. It got cut because it was bad (It was my quest, I'm allowed to say that.)

The whole nilfgaardian war stuff got cut for mostly just not fitting in well with the rest of the game and simply not having enough time to finish it properly.
Yeah, but it's super abstract. By the time we realized that Iorveth's quest wasn't working (he was actually a secondary character in a much bigger story about the war) it was way too late to add something new. About the only thing we'd have had time to do would have been to put his dead body somewhere with a note, which was suggested. I think that would have been a pretty poor conclusion to his story, so it was better to just leave him unresolved.

For an idea of what we need to do to even add a small quest. First I need to draft the quest in paper, get approval from quest lead and the director. This can actually take a couple of weeks, longer if the quest is important. Level design, environment art, character art, audio, cinematics, animation all need to get asset requests. For a small quest I'd try to avoid making more than one new character request, more than 2-3 locations. Some of the assets will go to outsource, most will be done in house.

While that's taking place (months and months of work) the quest and story teams draft the quest. This can take a while, since a lot of stuff that works on paper doesn't work in game, for many many possible reasons.

Once story is done, the text goes to localization (our writers all write in PL). From there lines are translated into a dozen languages, then sent to the studio to get actors to perform them. Those lines flow back to audio and cinematics, who put them into the game and make sure they sound right.

Meanwhile QA and quest bug-fix and iterate on the quest, basically until we ship. This includes bugs of course, but also general feedback. During this phase entire locations might be moved or redone, characters change, etc, and each team needs to respond to each change. So if QA realizes that we made a mistake and actually this character shouldn't say this or this... also he should have a red sash instead of a blue one... also his house is in a swamp and it needs to be in the forest... etc. Each of those changes means that different teams need to jump in. Textual changes are particularly nasty because it means literally hundreds of people, producers, translators, managers, actors, directors, audio technicians, cinematic artists, etc, all have to deal with it.

So I mean, in the super abstract, yes, you are right. Giving Iorveth his own side quest wouldn't have been hard. Actually, we gave him a huge quest and multiple side quests and it was even playable*. But it got cut and it wouldn't have been simple to replace it at that stage of the project.


Taken from official forum
 

Falksi

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Interesting shout regards the investigation being more "vague". Either way I think it should have been a lot shorter trip to find Ciri, and more meat to the bone added to the resulting conflict after.
What may have worked better too could have been the open world used as a place for Geralt to try and outrun the Wild Hunt. Moving from place to place, both trying to stay ahead of the Wild Hunt, whilst searching for clues and ways to stop them too.
Either way, the contradiction of supposed urgency from the Wild Hunt pursuing Ciri, against lazing around exploring the massive errand/day job like open world is jarring.
 

hivemind

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anti-nilfgaard propagandist deserved to have his writing cut desu

GLORY TO THE GREAT SUN
 

Gerrard

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>when you have to play on medium settings :negative:

And someone said that tw2 looks better :shredder:
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Tw3 legit blows tw2 out of the water in graphic fidelity. It's not even funny how lifelike the characters and their animations are.
TW2 grass is shadowed. Checkmate.

Also some light sources in TW3 cast no shadows at all. Fucking next gen right there.
 

DemonKing

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Do the expansion packs follow the same sort of pattern as the main game (open world with a less than urgent main quest) or are they more like a traditional CRPG with tighter central storylines and occasional sidequests?
 

Danikas

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Do the expansion packs follow the same sort of pattern as the main game (open world with a less than urgent main quest) or are they more like a traditional CRPG with tighter central storylines and occasional sidequests?
Well Hearts of Stone is certainly the most focused storyline in game there is little fluff most of the content is the main storyline, Blood and wine has similar structure to the main game.
 

Falksi

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Well Hearts of Stone is certainly the most focused storyline in game there is little fluff most of the content is the main storyline, Blood and wine has similar structure to the main game.

And people wonder why Heart of Stone is often hailed as the best TW3 content.
Old school gaming principles>modern day gaming principles. Really hope this open world fad dies out soon. Having a manageable open world there to compliment a great story? Fine, top stuff. Butchering every game to become a dull mmo style slog, just to meet the "open world" tag and sell more? Fucking retarded
 

Jick Magger

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Bubbles In Memoria
Do the expansion packs follow the same sort of pattern as the main game (open world with a less than urgent main quest) or are they more like a traditional CRPG with tighter central storylines and occasional sidequests?
The main plot of HoS is fairly busy-work heavy (It's basically a more condensed version of the 'find Ciri' structure; one main objective that splinters out in to a series of side objectives), and does lack a lot of urgency, but there is a good in-story justification for it (Olgierd assigns you tasks he doesn't really expect you to be capable of actually completing, as a way for him to avoid having to fulfill his end of the contract with Gaunter) and the quests themselves are all fairly straightforward and are very well-written and presented. Blood and Wine is essentially just a mini-version of the main game, and despite the fact that the new content is all very top-notch, the lack of gameplay urgency combined with the inherently urgent nature of the story (re: solving a murder mystery) does lead to a lot of dissonance between the gameplay and story, even moreso than in the main game.
 

Falksi

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Another bizarre thing which is irking me, is the amount of Nilfgaard & Radanian soldier everywhere, but the total lack of conflict.
I've now completed 128 quests, and not one has involved any live Radanian Vs Nilfgaard battle. To say war is supposedly ravaging the lands, it seems awfully odd how little conflict there's been to get involved with.
 

veskoandroid

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Wow, thats a big shame, in novels geralt & co were constantly involved/on the run between both armies, their quests were sometimes deeply related to war skirmishes (scoia tael etc...)

Sent from my Xperia ZR using Tapatalk
 

GloomFrost

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Well Hearts of Stone is certainly the most focused storyline in game there is little fluff most of the content is the main storyline, Blood and wine has similar structure to the main game.

And people wonder why Heart of Stone is often hailed as the best TW3 content.
Old school gaming principles>modern day gaming principles. Really hope this open world fad dies out soon. Having a manageable open world there to compliment a great story? Fine, top stuff. Butchering every game to become a dull mmo style slog, just to meet the "open world" tag and sell more? Fucking retarded
True. You dont need hundreds of monster killing quests to enjoy a good story. I think the best story was in W2 and it didnt have an open world and every contract was unique and interesting. Unfortunately for us skyrim is like by far the biggest selling game in the genre so open world tendencies are not going anywhere any time soon.
 

vonAchdorf

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The situation in Velen is really a Drôle de guerre / Phoney War. Both sides are a few steps apart but do nothing.
 

Paul_cz

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Another bizarre thing which is irking me, is the amount of Nilfgaard & Radanian soldier everywhere, but the total lack of conflict.
I've now completed 128 quests, and not one has involved any live Radanian Vs Nilfgaard battle. To say war is supposedly ravaging the lands, it seems awfully odd how little conflict there's been to get involved with.
ffs this is explained in the game. Multiple times. They are at a stalemate. Wars take long time. Battle happens and then you get months of waiting. Geralt arrived just after a recent battle happened and ended in pretty much a tie with big losses on both sides. This is another thing that was actually handled perfectly and you see problem where none exists.
 

Falksi

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ffs this is explained in the game. Multiple times. They are at a stalemate. Wars take long time. Battle happens and then you get months of waiting. Geralt arrived just after a recent battle happened and ended in pretty much a tie with big losses on both sides. This is another thing that was actually handled perfectly and you see problem where none exists.

Don't buy it. Whilst that does happen, there's just so many soldiers on both side roaming around, and so many opportunities for some Nilfgaard vs Radanian action that again it feels out of place and contradictory.
"We're in the midst of a big war. Villages ravaged. Death, pestilence, disease, woe. So how many soldiers have you seen fight each other after around 10 full beard growths?" - Not a single one.
The whole game builds up an initial sense of urgency (with the Wild Hunt) and edginess (with the war) and neither deliver anything on any significant scale to back that up on either front. The lack of any battles throughout so much game time just makes the war seem fairly insignificant & pretty pointless. Having constant exposition of "there's a war on" doesn't convey any urgency or edginess which makes you feel like there is.
 
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Sentinel

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ffs this is explained in the game. Multiple times. They are at a stalemate. Wars take long time. Battle happens and then you get months of waiting. Geralt arrived just after a recent battle happened and ended in pretty much a tie with big losses on both sides. This is another thing that was actually handled perfectly and you see problem where none exists.

Don't buy it. Whilst that does happen, there's just so many soldiers on both side roaming around, and so many opportunities for some Nilfgaard vs Radanian action that again it feels out of place and contradictory.
"We're in the midst of a big war. Villages ravaged. Death, pestilence, disease, woe. So how many soldiers have you seen fight each other after around 10 full beard growths?" - Not a single one.
The whole game builds up an initial sense of urgency (with the Wild Hunt) and edginess (with the war) and neither deliver anything on any significant scale to back that up on either front. The lack of any battles throughout so much game time just makes the war seem fairly insignificant & pretty pointless. Having constant exposition of "there's a war on" doesn't convey any urgency or edginess which makes you feel like there is.
This does happen at least in the Ves side quest.
 

Perkel

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The lack of any battles throughout so much game time just makes the war seem fairly insignificant & pretty pointless.

You have weird understanding of war in middle ages.

- wars were fought for years but there were usually handful of battles and most of the time only when one side had huge advantage.
- between those battles you had long months sometimes years of absolutely nothing with outright troops of both sides chilling together from time to time (especially nobility)

And yeah wars in middle ages were usually insignificant and pointless.
 

thesoup

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I think I may have rushed through the white orchard a little too fast as I'm in Veles now where everyone and their grandmother is higher level than me (at 3). Gonna take my time here, though.

Playing on the second hardest difficulty. Blood and broken bones was the name I think. No vitality regen so I naturally took the gourmet ability which maks food health regen last 20 min instead of 10 sec. This shit is way better than swallow.
 

Carrion

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I think I may have rushed through the white orchard a little too fast as I'm in Veles now where everyone and their grandmother is higher level than me (at 3). Gonna take my time here, though.
The game is built so that you can't really ever be underleveled for the main quest. Velen is actually the only location where you'll probably have to take on some quests while being slightly below their recommended level. Enjoy it while it lasts.
 

Falksi

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You have weird understanding of war in middle ages.

- wars were fought for years but there were usually handful of battles and most of the time only when one side had huge advantage.
- between those battles you had long months sometimes years of absolutely nothing with outright troops of both sides chilling together from time to time (especially nobility)

And yeah wars in middle ages were usually insignificant and pointless.

That's a fair point. But then surely that's just a boring, inactive, cumbersome backdrop for a peice of entertainment media which is supposed to excite? Between that and the Witcher contracts what's next, job simulator 7?
I had a superbly enjoyable session on the game last night, and all that was in Skellige & Kaer Morhen. Those two areas have really highlighted for me how the rest of the game should have been handled.
 

odrzut

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Wars happened mostly from spring to summer, when there was stuff to feed horses on the fields. Then there was a break. Sapkowski even mentions it in books (they are afraid of Nilfgaard invasion, but harvest is in few weeks, so if invasion doesn't happen by that time, there will be no invasion this year).

Also yeah, wars were mostly months-long sieges, or soldiers marching from one place to another, with a few big battles, maybe.
 

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