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So, which one is your favourite Witcher game?

Which Witcher does Witchering the Best?

  • Witcher 1 (the NWN mod)

    Votes: 149 45.8%
  • Witcher 2 (the cutscene simulator)

    Votes: 20 6.2%
  • Witcher 3 (the downgraded port)

    Votes: 126 38.8%
  • KC (Skyrim)

    Votes: 30 9.2%

  • Total voters
    325

Jools

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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Insert Title Here Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
Discuss!!!
 

Doktor Best

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As much as i love the first game, i must say witcher 3 improves on almost all aspects and therefor takes the throne for me.
 

Carrion

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I think I've got to go with the first one. Best character development, best alchemy and most solid overall mechanics, best pacing, most satisfying conclusion. The writing and the story are better in the later games, but they've got some notable issues elsewhere — TW2 with its pacing and reliance on cinematics, TW3 with some nonsensical mechanics and a few of the open-world aspects (even though it is a very well crafted open world in itself).

TW3 is better than TW2 already, though, and no doubt it's going to get better later on.
 

Commissar Draco

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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
TW1>TW2>TW3

Twicher One was best made NWN mod ever! :M

Seriusly it was better game than 2 and 3rd part even if I did loved Broche and political intrigue from second part which was replaced by banal shit boring LARP-ing of Sapek books; who cared about Yenefier or this spoiled brat Ciri after playing the first and second part? Third part also had been Biowhorized into sappy Romance and went full comercial with its accent on consoles; it was like watching Elder Scrolls or Fallouts being raped again. :decline::argh::negative:
 

Nryn

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Reflecting back on some of the elements of the three games:

W1: Witcher 1 will always be special to me since it was a breath of fresh air at that time. Bioware was busy championing colour coded choices, and the less said about Bethesda the better. The morally ambiguous choices and the delayed consequences drew me in beyond my wildest expectations. The characterization was not the strongest in the series and the writing had odd turns of phrases on account of the translation, but the C&C style of the game carried it.

The individual quest design itself was not anything spectacular, resorting to constant A->B->A fetch quests and kill "x" number for contract quests, but the main quest structure was a revelation. I liked how quests received in the Prologue would not resolve until 40+ hours into the game. I loved the "thread" structure for the main quests where the quest designers split the main quest in each act into multiple threads that could weave in and out with one other, only to have all the threads converge at the culmination of the act.

The main quest itself never really came into the fore until the end of the game, instead content to play second-fiddle to the individual stories within each act, such as the Beast and the Village, Vizima confidential and Act 4. But the twist towards the end was what elevated the main quest for me -- instead of blatantly announcing the identity of the Grandmaster, the game instead elected to trust in the intelligence of the player and did so in a relatively understated manner (though it boggles my mind that some players couldn't piece together the identity).

The economy is also the best in the first game, since I was perenially running short of orens to purchase books, which lent credibility to the monster hunting contracts. I also prefer the style of music in the first game the most: most of the harmonies are quite simple, yet they evoked such strong feelings of melancholy.

The combat was simplistic to a fault and character progression was non-existent, with the ability to max out most of the useful skills by the game's end.

W2: The main draw for me was the politically charged story with personal stakes, in addition to the vastly improved writing. Characterization was also quite great, thanks especially to Broche and Letho. Dethmold was a character I loved to hate and Henselt's arrogance was well done. Even the quest journal being written in-character was a small change in the grand scheme of things, but added a lot to the characterization.

Complaints of the first game's repetitive quest design were heard, and effort was taken to make most of the side quests unique, in addition to retaining the "thread" structure for the main quests from the first game. Likewise, the character development system at least allowed for distinct builds this time around.

Music was a big disappointment, as barring a handful of tracks, the style of the music in the first game was shelved in lieu of more generic "epic-sounding" music. Combat became too twitch-heavy with ridiculous amounts of rolling around, random attack animations, and the alchemy system was gutted. I preferred the brain-dead combat of the first game to the frustrating combat in the sequel.

But my biggest issue with the second game is that it lacks a lot of the witchering that the first game had. It seemed CDPR ran out of time or money, and so only had time to include the critical paths of the main quest. The binary C&C choice that closed off half the content, though pretty brave for a mainstream ARPG, didn't help with feelings of a lack of content. The game desperately needed more quiet witchering moments like Act 4 in the first game to just let the world breathe a bit. Instead, the game sprints towards the finish line right from the interrogation sequence at the start.

W3: The game contains lots and lots of the witchering from W1 and combines that with the strong focus on characters and their stories that I liked in W2. Ciri's chosen one story was not my cup of tea at all, but that was balanced out by all the fun I had in dealing with Keira, Dijkstra, the Kaer Morhen Witchers, Triss and Yennefer's personal quests, and so on.

The biggest strength of the game is the framing of the quests; even the formulaic contract quests are framed with some sort of narrative that aids in reinforcing the setting. The meaty side quests are better than the main quests in a few recent releases, and the Bloody Baron and Ladies of the Wood quests is my favourite in recent memory. The "thread" structure of the main quests are alive and well here, and in addition, the game channels multiple Berengar-like quests from W1 at once, since quests involving Dijkstra, Radovid, the Crones, Philippa, etc., appear to meet a dead end, only to continue dozens of hours later depending on one's choices. Additionally, while the contract quests are framed compellingly, the auto-pilot investigation was a giant waste of potential. If those investigation sequences contained some actual player deduction with the the possibility of deducing the wrong conclusion, even the formulaic contract quests would have been a highlight.

The open world both succeeds and fails. It succeeds in telling compelling witchering stories through quests littered throughout the map. On the other hand, I cannot recommend the game solely to satisfy exploration lust. Too many questionable design decisions such as MMO-style quest level gating, MMO-style damage reduction buffs to high level enemies, loot downscaled to one's level, recipes generated inside chests randomly depending on one's level, and mostly useless non-witcher gear detract heavily from the exploration aspect. The UBI-style Points of Interest are also absolute garbage since they amount to nothing but tedious and monotonous content that do not play to the game's strengths of questing in the world. The game plays far better on turning those icons off, but they should not have been included in the first place, especially those "area liberation" activities that give more XP than several meaty side quests in the game.

The character system sees further improvements from the second game with the addition of alternative sign modes being the most interesting change. The limitation of 12 active skills was to my liking since I had to make conscious choices about the specifics of the build I wanted to play with. The combat is far more serviceable compared to the second, with sidestepping being far better than rolling around in the second game. There were encounters where I was completely in the zone and enjoyed the combat for what it was -- reading the monster attack animations and sidestepping them never got old, but this was counterbalanced by those encounters where half a dozen monsters attack at once, leading to the familiar incessant dodge/roll shenanigans or risk getting stunlocked to death. I played on the hardest difficulty and got used to the combat by around level 12, but I want the combat and encounter design to get reworked from the ground up for the next game. Boring predictable attack animations and encounters involving fewer but far more dangerous monsters is a combat overhaul I would like to see. It's got the strongest moment-to-moment gameplay in the series but there is ample scope for improvement.

I was skeptical about the alchemy system but it works well in practice, and it is my favorite in the series. Decoctions remind me of the lengthy potions of the first game, but allow for some interesting game-breaking combinations that are fun to fuck around with. The replenishing potions are probably my favorite change since I could focus less on picking flowers and more on witchering.

The music marks a great turnaround after the second game, and features my favorite battle tracks in the series, though I still prefer the slower pieces in the first game to those in W3. The composers must be commended for including remixes from W1 and W2 when one encounters characters from those games -- not enough games do this when it is such an easy way to evoke positive feelings from fans of earlier games in a series.

Overall, each of the games features flaws, some significant enough to be a dealbreaker to some, but I found the sum of the whole to be compelling enough to put up with the flaws of the constituent parts.

I'd rate the games as W3 > W1 > W2.
 

Eyestabber

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No love for TW2? I really liked the idea of getting two radically different main quest paths depending on your choice of faction. Both paths are even "balanced" in a way: Roche is the better bro, but Iorveth's path features a more interesting places. If you can put up with a despicable PoS like Iorveth.

TW2 got REALLY fucked up by TW 3, it's not fair. We had all those BIG political events that ended up not mattering because TW3 decided to go "trolololo, it doesn't matter because Black Ones". TW3 is to blame for scrapping SEVERAL interesting TW2 plots. It's still a good game, but it shouldn't get a pass for giving us TW2 players the middle finger. TW3 was CLEARLY focused towards new players, it feels like save game importing was an afterthought in development.

BTW: I reinstalled TW2 to try and make a FULL Iorveth playtrough. I only finished that game with Roche, because my hatred for Iorveth prevented me from playing the game
after getting to Aedirn and realizing that Iorveth is fucking friendzoned by Saskia, a fucking human peasant girl, no less. So much for his "elven pride!" bullshit


But, yeah, I'll admit that TW2 had fucking QTE. Those always suck.
 

Perkel

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No love for TW2? I really liked the idea of getting two radically different main quest paths depending on your choice of faction. Both paths are even "balanced" in a way: Roche is the better bro, but Iorveth's path features a more interesting places. If you can put up with a despicable PoS like Iorveth.

I like TW2 but both TW1 and TW3 are just better games.
After TW3 TW2 feels like prologue to TW3.

And yes split two whole two different games after act 1 was amazing and probably we won't see anything like that in future.
 

Eyestabber

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You know what? I'm going to provide THE DEFINITIVE ANSWER to this thread. Reinstalling TW1. I'm going for a trilogy playtrough while I wait for more TW3 patches. All hail potatoland! :D
 

DeepOcean

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TW1 was the more RPGish so it was the best of the three.
TW2 gone all the way to action/cinematic bullshit but there were some nice C&C on there, two playthroughs could be really different, mostly because the choice between Broche and Yorveth,
TW2 the action/cinematic bullshit got even more annoying than TW 2, you have the impression of playing a Telltale game sometimes. It is just TW 2 ten times bigger and even more cinematic.

Now that TW 3 sold 4 million copies on two weeks, I totally expect all their games to be TellTale games with a pointless open world from now on. Shit, on some parts of Witcher 3, (especially on Novigrad) the cinematic bullshit got so intense that even Ass Creed games had more gameplay, shitty gameplay but still better than no gameplay.
 

Tigranes

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They're all pretty good games. TW2 is probably the weakest (as TW3 does what TW2 tries, and better), but I really enjoyed the focus on political intrigue. TW1 probably has the best vibe; TW3 does nearly everything else better, but I think the open world bit really is a drag.
 

undecaf

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
Hard to pick from a series that's always been "just nice" overall in it's own way and never has offered much replay value as far as gameplay goes. I guess Witcher 3 at the moment.
 
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Carrion

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TW1 was the more RPGish so it was the best of the three.
TW2 gone all the way to action/cinematic bullshit but there were some nice C&C on there, two playthroughs could be really different, mostly because the choice between Broche and Yorveth,
TW2 the action/cinematic bullshit got even more annoying than TW 2, you have the impression of playing a Telltale game sometimes. It is just TW 2 ten times bigger and even more cinematic.
Oblivion was arguably more "RPGish" than TW1, but that doesn't make it the better game.

TW2 was also clearly more cinematic in its approach than TW3, with notably more frequent cutscenes that often got in the way of actual gameplay (or replaced it with QTEs) and numerous lengthy linear sequences with very tightly dictated pacing and little player freedom. TW3's cinematics are generally more impressive and better directed, but they're also less obtrusive and generally don't hamper gameplay in a distracting way (e.g. you don't have to watch Geralt get his ass kicked in a cutscene after having beaten the shit out of your opponent in a fight, or win boss fights by doing stuff that doesn't even exist in the actual game mechanics like riding dragons or giant tentacles). In many ways it's a step towards TW1 rather than a continuation of TW2's more cinematic approach, although it does retain many elements from the latter.
 

DeepOcean

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TW1 was the more RPGish so it was the best of the three.
TW2 gone all the way to action/cinematic bullshit but there were some nice C&C on there, two playthroughs could be really different, mostly because the choice between Broche and Yorveth,
TW2 the action/cinematic bullshit got even more annoying than TW 2, you have the impression of playing a Telltale game sometimes. It is just TW 2 ten times bigger and even more cinematic.
Oblivion was arguably more "RPGish" than TW1, but that doesn't make it the better game.

TW2 was also clearly more cinematic in its approach than TW3, with notably more frequent cutscenes that often got in the way of actual gameplay (or replaced it with QTEs) and numerous lengthy linear sequences with very tightly dictated pacing and little player freedom. TW3's cinematics are generally more impressive and better directed, but they're also less obtrusive and generally don't hamper gameplay in a distracting way (e.g. you don't have to watch Geralt get his ass kicked in a cutscene after having beaten the shit out of your opponent in a fight, or win boss fights by doing stuff that doesn't even exist in the actual game mechanics like riding dragons or giant tentacles). In many ways it's a step towards TW1 rather than a continuation of TW2's more cinematic approach, although it does retain many elements from the latter.
I agree with you on the QTE bossfights, and the Letho fight was ridiculous, they were awful and Witcher 3 is better at that but the "Go there talk with that guy and watch a cutscene. Finished? Go there and talk with another guy and watch more cutscenes. Finished? Go there and talk with yet another guy and watch more cutscenes." got really excessive. I don't have a problem with sometimes a cutscene showing up but on those missions you do on Novigrad where you go after Dandellion it was a cutscene ride with little gameplay between them. It doesn't help that dialogs, except when its time for choices, don't make me feel I'm interacting with anything, they feel more like cutscenes where sometimes I choose the order of how the cutscene plays like. If in Witcher 3 you couldn't choose a single dialog line until the time to make the choices I wouldn't feel the difference.

People mock Bioware for their Renegade and Paragon points system but I didn't feel any relevant mechanic associated with the dialog system. It is nice that you can use Axii to fuck with other NPCs mind but I felt the need of some kind of morality system or any mechanic related to dialog. I know that talking about morality systems on Witcha world is kinda strange but I got bored with so much dialog and non interacttive bits the game has.
 

Deleted member 7219

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Each game has its own strength.

Witcher 1 was the first to do a semi-open world (big areas), a bit like NWN or NWN2, but with fancier graphics and some really good multi-solution quests. Some of the locations had a great atmosphere, especially the lake in one of the later chapters, and the village with the noonwraith problem.

Witcher 2 had the best story of the three games, although I have to admit the draug / battle stuff in the second act is very tiresome on repeated playthroughs. Act 3 just gets better every time I play it, especially with the EE. Witcher 2 also had the best combat. Some here call it rollamole but I was still having to use potions and different tactics with fights all the way up until the end.

Witcher 3, well, it is just an amazing achievement. Huge open world with hundreds of locations, each feeling like it was designed by a real person and not by a computer (Ubisoft/Bethesda take note). Many side quests too, with proper dialogue, cutscenes and multi-solutions (compare to the absolutely awful shit BioWare gave us in Dragon Age: Inquisition).

However, the combat is just as easy at Witcher 1 once you get about 15 hours in. I would have also liked to have seen a bit more done with the Geralt homies in the final act (Yen, Triss, Zoltan, Dandelion etc). But there's so much good stuff everywhere else. For me, it is the best in the series, and I count Witcher 1 and 2 as among my favourite games.
 

Carrion

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Am I the only one who liked Iorveth a whole lot more than Roche?
Yes. You should've changed your mind at the latest when Roche saves your ass yet again in Act II, even when he's got absolutely no obligation to do so.

Roche just can't help it, he simply is a fucking awesome bro no matter what.
 

Monkeyfinger

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Voted TW2. The other games have too much running back and forth, which pisses me off a lot and outweighs any advantages they might have
 

Eyestabber

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Am I the only one who liked Iorveth a whole lot more than Roche?

Dafuq?! At the end of act 1, Loredo sets fire to a building full of elven women. Iorveth's reaction? "Leave them. Our women are ready to die for our cause". THAT is the kind of guy Iorveth is. A despicable fantasy che Guevara, with all the retarded sociopathic tendencies that comes with being a meek leftist faggot.

And how does Roche reacts to similar shit? By going after the asshole that hurt his girl, chopping his balls and slitting his throat. Like a MAN.
 

Deleted member 7219

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Yeah, to be honest the only things I can fault Roche on is some racist shit he says about elves here and there in Witcher 2. It matches the racist shit Iorveth says about humans, but Iorveth goes a step further in terms of pure psychopathy and I don't think he has anything to offer Geralt, or any realistic goals that he hopes to achieve.
 

Prime Junta

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I'll go with Twitcher 1.

It had some massively annoying characteristics, but was also fresh, didn't take itself too seriously, and had systems that gave a sense of progression. It also featured two massively memorable sequences, Vizima Confidential and the lovely Slavic folklore sequence.

I dig what Twitcher 2 attempted, but it kind of failed at the attempt. Both of the two entirely different chapter 2's felt incomplete, and the Loc Muinne ending truncated. The mechanics were dumbed down and it had those really stupid QTE bossfights. And it just felt... well, smaller than Twitcher 1, but not in a good way.

As to Twitcher 3... I'm on level 20 or so now, don't know how much of the main quest is left, so this is necessarily a 'first impression' but... overall I'm not as impressed as I thought I would be. It's a technical tour de force no doubt; the world is huge, immensely detailed, 'living,' and as good as bug-free, and everything works really well; there's much less filler content than I expected, and the various interweaving storylines are written with care and executed extremely well. The pop-culture references and situational jokes are also pretty damn funny at times.

But... combat is dull, there's little sense of progression as you go from fighting level 3 ghouls to level 9 ghouls to level 16 ghouls to level 20 ghouls, there's way too much junk in the game which makes itemization dull ("thanks for the sword Hattori it's nice but I already have three better ones which I also get to upgrade"), and man these potatoes must hate their women, thinking of all these ever-more-imaginative ways to rape and torture them to death. Also who is this mopey redhead and what did they do with the real Triss?

So yeah, Twitcher 1 is where it's at. We'll see what my final ranking is going to be, but ATM I think it's TW1 > TW3 > TW2.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Witcher 1 , no contest. It was the best RGP.

Witcher 2 was a mess, tunnel vision game with shitty controls , with storyline that fell apart half-way through.

Witcher 3 could have been the best thing to ever happen to the genre, the writing and worldbuilding are certainly up there with the best, but the pointless fully open-world with shoddy mechanics ruins everything.
 

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