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The Witcher 3 Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Bruticis

Guest
UPDATE: Game released, new thread here - http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-witcher-3-release-thread.99234/

Massive info dump from Game Informer are leaking onto the sewage of NeoGAF.
The feature list (i.e. every crazy idea we could think of that may or may not be in the game)

1360040450623.png

Witcher 3 confirmed, is next-gen, featured in Game Informer

February 4th, 2013 Posted in News
Posted By: Valay
Update 2: We’re adding in our own details from the magazine as well. Keep checking back for more.
- The team felt it missed the huge freedom of open-world games like Skyrim
- Proper mounted combat still being tested
- Currently not a definite part of the game
- Horses will be in, though, since they’re important for navigation
- Ships float on the water in true physics interactions
- Team has doubled in size
- No chapters, acts, or any artificial break-points
- Geralt can seamlessly cross from one end of the world to the other thanks to REDengine 3
- No loading screens while traveling in the open world
- Can explore on foot, by horseback, and via boat
- Pursue yor long-lost love, play the game of empires on behalf of the northern kingdoms that still claim independence, and thwart the nefarious Wild Hunt
- Fast travel: instantly revisit any discovered location
- Director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: “A huge goal is to keep the high quality o four quests, with all the cinematics and impressive events and moments.”
- Point of interest will always be in sight
- Players will be beckoned to explore dank caves, embattled villages, decaying ruins, etc.
- Over 100 hours of hand-scripted quests
- Quests: help villagers, engineer the succession of the Skellige kings, etc.
- Use monster hunting for adventure, incoming, and unique rewards
- There are mini-games based on the area of the world
- Ex: Skellige has knife-throwing
- Gain exclusive rewards from mini-games
- Don’t have to complete mini-games to proceed in the story
- Monsters, bandits, traders, animals, and more will attack anyone they deem hostile
- Enemies don’t scale to the player’s level
- Slaying monsters, fighting hostile humans in the different forms they come in, collecting items, leveling up are in the game
- World 40 times larger than the last game
- Three different aspects to narration
- Lowest level: free-form activities like monster hunting, crafting, individual standalone quests
- Second step: political situation and Nilfgaardian invasion is resolved through the core plotline of the major areas (Skellige, Novigrad, No Man’s Land)
- Each land has its own storyline
- Can abandon the storyline, but will have repercussions later
- Not doing a plotline is a choice the player has
- Main narrative: search for Geralt’s loved ones and conflict with the Wild Hunt
- Multiple branches of narratives that feed into each other
- Don’t have to do anything outside the main storyline to beat the game
- Could have help in a main-line encounter from an ally you gained in the Skellige archipelago if you’ve completed certain quests in certain ways
- Major events in the main storyline are “gates” for the state of the world
- Ex: village threatened by bandits might be abandoned after certain events if the player doesn’t help
- Weather effects are dynamically generated and fully modeled as real volumetric clouds rather than being simply painted on the skybox
- In contrast to the last game, Geralt encounters communities and individuals with monster-related problems that need solving
- There aren’t contract-like assignments this time
- Press the left trigger to turn on Geralt’s witcher senses
- Can glean information from a crime scene upon discovering it
- Within range of a scene of interest, the mechanic conveys clues to the player through the witcher muttering to himself and/or visual depictions of past events that represent Geralt’s reasoning
- Time of day and other conditions determine where monsters appear and their abilities
- Can strike critical areas in combat based on how much you learn about monster anatomy and tactics
- The team is deciding between using a handful of in-combat special moves for particular attacks and a slow-motion quick-time event style
- Monsters you defeat leave otherwise unobtainable alchemical and crafting ingrediants needed for making of unique items, potions, mutagens
- These allow Geralt to gain special powers and upgrades in the new mutation development tree
- These kills serve as the witcher’s primary method of income
- Moving more toward romance and away from shallow sexual encounters
- “We want to treat it maturely like we did in The Witcher 2. We are not bringing sex cards back.”
- Witcher 3 doesn’t have completely different environments based on singular choices due to the open world, but there are similarly impactful decisions
- You’ll be involved with mutually exclusive storylines and situations based on certain momentous choices
- Won’t be on the same level as Witcher 2, however
- Game mechanics based on previous games, but the team is revisiting many details
- Backward difficulty curve being addressed
- Rewroking the flow of combat
- 96 animations for Geralt’s combat moves (last game had 20)
- Game has a “weighting” system for the camera to help keep the biggest threats in frame at all times
- Combat system: three big changes to solve the problem of being locked into long animations
- Every button prss mapped to a single strike
- Each move takes a roughly equivalent time to perforom
- Can always interrupt your current action to immediately dodge or block
- Can block/dodge when out of stamina, but you’ll be staggered
- Team wants to make the combat “more intimate”
- “You don’t run – in the Witcher 2 you were running constantly. You walk, but your attacks are very fast. Your opponents also walk but they have charges and things like that.”
- Geralt’s dodge roll replaced by a pivot move
- It retains its defensive utility without game-breaking mobility
- Attacks faster than in The Witcher 2
- Enemy AI completely rebuilt
- No scripted boss encounters
- One boss: ice giant
- Roughly a dozen types of interactive objects
- Ex: Can irritate a wasp with the telekinetic Aard sign to make a damaging distraction for his foes and disperse the swarm with the fiery Igni sign once the wasp swarm becomes a problem
- Magical signs are retooled
- Each of the five signs has a basic form such as Igni’s new flamethrower effect
- If the player advances down the magic tree as Geralt levels up, can unlock a second form of the sign
- For Igni, would unlock a 360-degree blast that immolates anything close
- Yrdren’s small trap can be changed into a bigger field that slows enemies
- Player retains the use of the basic form
- Other two trees are based on swordsmanship and alchemy
- Swordfighting: can unlock new strikes and boosts such as improved stanima and parrying
- Alchemy: mutation mechanic moved off to a separate development path, independent of the level-up process
- Alchemy specialization is based more on potions
- Improvements available for the horse and boat
- These aspects are still in development
- One idea: players could access their long-term storage stash from their horse as well as from inns
- Team knows about frustrating inventory management in Witcher 2
- Crafting still important for enhancing Geralt’s capabilities
- Can customize crafted items
- Some components are can be substituted for similar things
- Ex: monster scales instead of leather in a piece of armor
- This affects the properties of the final item
- Can find unique components as part of monster hunts or questlines
- Combine these with special recipes to make artifacts of immense power
- Each armor piece has a unique appearance
- Armor has improved presentation and new cloth simulation
- Can visit a barber to change Geralt’s hairstyle
Update: Details are already coming in. We’ve added them in below.
World supposedly 20% bigger than Skyrim’s
30-40 minutes to cross world on Horseback
New streaming technology (CDRED Engine 3)
Geralt’s Memory is restored
No chapters/acts
Dude is DONE fighting for everyone else
Everything from solving MYSTERIES to slaying monsters
Coming out on “all top-of-the-line” consoles​
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Self-Ejected

Excidium

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- Moving more toward romance and away from shallow sexual encounters
- “We want to treat it maturely like we did in The Witcher 2. We are not bringing sex cards back.”
:decline: of Poland.
 

Bruticis

Guest
Video of some funny looking guys talking with some funny sounding accents.
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium

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I have no interest on this shit anymore, it's basically "we want the Biothesda audience". They even mention Skyrim and Dragon Age in the video.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
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Sounds good overall. I liked the segmented aspect of the second game, but open world is also good as long as they keep the world building standards high.

Wonder how big of PC upgrade I will need to run this well (and Fallout 4, and Dragon Age 3, and whatever else).
 

deuxhero

Arcane
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Flowery Land
A lot of the bits (like a personal goal with a time limit) remind me of the Atelier series.

I doubt the alchemy system will be anywhere near as good though

s9UYj0d.jpg
 

ohWOW

Sucking on dicks and being proud of it
Dumbfuck Queued
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Messages
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- Moving more toward romance and away from shallow sexual encounters
- “We want to treat it maturely like we did in The Witcher 2. We are not bringing sex cards back.”
:decline: of Poland.
Sex cards were the only thing that came out good from the first game.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Didn't Skyrim costed 100 million dollars to make? They are making not only one openworld game but two openworld games, how they did found so much potatoes to finance two huge projects?
 

tuluse

Arcane
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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I only got through the first ten items, but none of it sounded like it would make the game better. The act cutoffs in the first two games were one of the good ideas they had. You made choices and the story moved along.
 

Dexter

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Messages
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Screw all of you potato-hating pricks, the potato farmers from Poland are about to deliver their best potato harvest yet.

And I am baffled at "The Witcher" games being in the PopaMole category when shit like Diablo 3 is as PopaMole decline as it goes and is still listed as CRPG.

I'm happy that it also won't have to suffer from retarded 7-year-old console hardware, since they obviously wanted to port Witcher 2 from the get-go and it likely influenced the design a lot.

Didn't Skyrim costed 100 million dollars to make? They are making not only one openworld game but two openworld games, how they did found so much potatoes to finance two huge projects?

The Witcher doesn't cost as much to make, I'll just copy this from back in February last year:

== TW2 production costs:
PC: 7,43 Million USD
XBox360 and PC EE: 2,44 Million USD
--------------------------------------------------------------
Total: 9,88 Million USD [i.e. 33,1 Million PLN (Polish zloty)]

== Sales of the whole franchise (TW1, TW1 Enhanced Edition, TW2, TW2 EE): over 4 Million.

== Hired employees at the moment: 113

They could've financed The Witcher 2 on a bigger Crowdfunding Campaign like Star Citizen without the need of outside investors.
 

sea

inXile Entertainment
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Messages
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I have no interest on this shit anymore, it's basically "we want the Biothesda audience". They even mention Skyrim and Dragon Age in the video.
Rule 101 of marketing: find a big, recognizable name, and say "we're like that, but better." Although, in this case I don't have much hope for CD Projekt making a proper RPG anymore.

I think it's telling how many of the bullet points up there relate entirely to graphics.
 

logrus

Augur
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Messages
163
Project: Eternity
A lot of things small and big, good and bad, game obviously targeted at the Bethesda games fans (especially Skyrim), but even if a lot of the things in the list fails, still:
Open world + no level scalling = :incline:
 

sea

inXile Entertainment
Developer
Joined
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Messages
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A lot of things small and big, good and bad, game obviously targeted at the Bethesda games fans (especially Skyrim), but even if a lot of the things in the list fails, still:
Open world + no level scalling = :incline:
If you're gonna take it up the ass, you might as well use lube, I guess?
 

Fat Dragon

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local brothel
Ugh, more of this "bigger is better" talk. The best open-world games are the ones with smaller, but more memorable and content-rich settings. Like Morrowind, for example. It's a much smaller landmass than something like Skyrim or this, but it's so packed with interesting and cool things to do and discover, so many unique environments to explore, and so much background lore to dive into that it manages to feel like a much bigger game than it is.
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
World supposedly 20% bigger than Skyrim’s
Quests: help villagers
village threatened by bandits might be abandoned after certain events if the player doesn’t help

Tons of filler confirmed. I dunno why they're going for size for size's sake. "20% bigger than Skyrim" is a terrible approach - even if it's first and foremost marketing speak, it still means they'll have to make the world as large as they can, which is impossible without diluting the actual meaningful content in the process.

Still, I'd say going open world is an incline for the Witcher franchise. Witcher 2 had terribly designed locations. If they improve the combat... and create enough unique content and interesting locations to explore... and non-linear dungeons... I'd enjoy a good hiking RPG -- haven't seen one since Morrowind, after all.
 

Twinkle

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'Open world' requires the ability to jump.

True, but most importantly it requires good designers that can fill landmass with interesting content. Raw size of gameworld doesn't mean much if in the end the world consists of barely disguised corridor segments or some patch of grass repeated ad infinitum. Even worse is giving a character an ability to climb or jump only to box you in by invisible walls, whether it's a result of crappy area design skills or just bad programming.
 

Fat Dragon

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Still, it'll be good to see Bethsoft finally get some proper competition in this area. At the least, it might force them to be less lazy with their games now that Witcher is after their territory. Might. It is Bethsoft afterall.
 

Dexter

Arcane
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Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
Anyway, from the stuff mentioned these are the most concerning:

- The team is deciding between using a handful of in-combat special moves for particular attacks and a slow-motion quick-time event style
- Moving more toward romance and away from shallow sexual encounters
- World supposedly 20% bigger than Skyrim’s
- DO NOT WANT Quick-time events in any way
- That was one of the best things about the Witcher, god shall hopefully smite them down if they move into BioWhore direction
- Bigger is never better, Skyrim was shit because most places, quests and NPCs didn't have anything interesting to offer and if you have been to one or two caves you had been to them all. I hope they'll keep in mind that one of the best thing about their two previous games was that most of the content was uniquely hand-designed without much filler and shitty grind

Still, it'll be good to see Bethsoft finally get some proper competition in this area. At the least, it might force them to be less lazy with their games now that Witcher is after their territory. Might. It is Bethsoft afterall.
Gothic 1+2 and even Risen beat any game made by Bethesda. It depends how much I'll like it if they decide to go the carefully hand-crafted and thought-through Open World style with interesting characters and quests like Piranha Bytes or the "let's fill everything with dragons and caves and shit, even if it's all boring" of Bethesda.
 

Fat Dragon

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Anyway, from the stuff mentioned these are the most concerning:

- The team is deciding between using a handful of in-combat special moves for particular attacks and a slow-motion quick-time event style
- Moving more toward romance and away from shallow sexual encounters
- World supposedly 20% bigger than Skyrim’s
- DO NOT WANT Quick-time events in any way
- That was one of the best things about the Witcher, god shall hopefully smite them down if they move into BioWhore direction
- Bigger is never better, Skyrim was shit because most places, quests and NPCs didn't have anything interesting to offer and if you have been to one or two caves you had been to them all. I hope they'll keep in mind that one of the best thing about their two previous games was that most of the content was uniquely hand-designed without much filler and shitty grind

Still, it'll be good to see Bethsoft finally get some proper competition in this area. At the least, it might force them to be less lazy with their games now that Witcher is after their territory. Might. It is Bethsoft afterall.
Gothic 1+2 and even Risen beat any game made by Bethesda.
Not what I meant. PB's games have always been rather niche. Witcher however, is a pretty popular mainstream series and sells a lot, now that it's going open-world Bethsoft might have to step up their game to compete.
 

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