@Thrillho@Rudy_Manchego@JohnnyShoulder So, having never used the summon mechanic, if you summon for help and then you die in the first minute of the fight but the person you summoned prevails without you, do you get credit for the victory too?
And what is the incentive for giving assistance and answering summons? I guess you gain experience as well?
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Rudy_Manchego I always saw it as a fun way to replay boss fights I particularly enjoyed or as a more enjoyable way of farming blood/souls. It was the same in Nioh too.
@Th3solution In all these games, if the host dies then you get booted out so it can be frustrating to wait around to be summoned only to get booted within a few seconds. Almost as annoying as them getting killed right at the end of the fight! And as I said above, it's a good way of getting the equivalent of XP. Some of the covenants (or the DS equivalents) have specific rewards for helping people too I think.
@Th3solution In Bloodborne you gain Blood Echoes, Insight Points and that awesome feeling of having helped someone. Got some really nice thankful messages too. I've only summoned about a handful of different occasions in the series, but started to leave my summon sign/ring by bell (no smirking at the back please) when I was more confident in the latter stages of DS3, when I went back to play the doc on Bloodborne and DS Remastered.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
If you've ever played a Tropico game before then you'll already know what to expect. This is pretty much more of the same but with some tweaks.
For those who don't know, the series is a construction/management simulation game that sees you running a small island nation in the Caribbean through colonial, world war, cold war, and modern eras in either a campaign or sandbox mode. In either mode, you have to meet your objectives but also keep the local populace appeased/oppressed.
The sixth instalment of the series sees you be able to take control of multiple landmasses rather than just one central island, connecting them via ports or bridges. This makes for some nice aesthetic differences but doesn't alter the game drastically.
Raids are a new thing with each era having a raid building and each of these giving you different options from looting resources/gold through to manipulating the markets and give you better export deals. The game also allows you to use raids to steal famous landmarks from other nations. Fancy helicoptering Stonehenge into your country? No problem!
Other changes include the Broker who will give you tasks that earn money for your Swiss bank account (this can be used to buy off other nations, give you increased standing with a faction etc). New buildings are still unlocked via blueprints but these can now be bought (or looted or gained from completing objectives) rather than researched.
I really enjoy the series as they're light hearted sims that offer a good challenge but without getting too bogged down in the minute detail of some sims/city builders. The campaign is well structured with most of the missions focusing on one gameplay mechanism or quirk of the game from going all in on tourism, one that sees you being able to build multiple pirate raid buildings, one set on a volcano, and one where you can't build any houses. The final mission then puts everything together really well.
However, a few things really grated. First off, the game lets you mostly crack on and have fun but the economy can be a right pain at times. Your economy can suddenly collapse for almost no reason, particularly when changing eras, and it can be really hard to correct/counter this. I had to start a fair few missions again once I got into a death spiral with my economy and the levels can take multiple hours each so it can be pretty galling to have to do this. I dropped a few levels down to easy mode as I couldn't face the thought of having to start all over yet again. This also means that often your best strategy on a mission can be to ignore your objectives and tediously build up a functioning economy first. As each level is completely separate from each other (unlike Tropico 5), it can feel a bit frustrating having to do this each time.
The other big issue are rebels. I get why these guys exist but you can be minding your own business, building up your island and thinking your people are all happy with you but in the background these cretins are plotting against you. It's really hard to keep them from happening and, a bit like the economy, they can suddenly build up in number and it's game over. Keeping the people happy only works so far, and one raid building can help thin their numbers slightly, but if they get rowdy enough then they will start a rebellion where only a really strong military will save you (and in many missions you don't need much of a military, if one at all) so it's another frustrating way to see the game over screen.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with the game but having to restart a campaign mission you've already been working on for four hours for one of the above reasons is a real kicker.
You have hit the nail on the head with lost progression. In the trophy age, lost progress is reason to backlog a game - damn I have to do all that again!? With no guarantee of success?
Tropico 5 (the one free on psplus) was alright I suppose, but I couldn't get a ship to move and it broke my city and I had to restart a dead long section. I backlogged it and never went back.
Seems the same issues are prevelant here which is a shame
Forum Best Game of All Time Awards
PS3 Megathread 2019: The Last of Us
Multiplat 2018: Horizon Zero Dawn
Nintendo 2017: Super Mario Bros 3
Playstation 2016: Uncharted 2
Multiplat 2015: Final Fantasy 7
@themcnoisy T5 was the first I played as it was a freebie. I’d had this one on my wish list waiting for a price drop and it was worth the punt at half price. Not a great deal has changed since the previous game but I still had fun with it.
As for lost progress, I guess I should have just had more manual saves going on. The game auto saves loads but with only a few slots so those can be useless if the death spiral has been a slow one.
The most frustrating game for lost progress I can remember was Surviving Mars. I mean, the whole point is that you have to be much more careful over resources but one mistake in that game can trash a save completely. I’ve only ever got to a sustainable colony on that with a resource rich map and the game set so factories give double normal output. I have no idea how anyone managed it otherwise!
@Thrillho Oh lord, in Europa Universalis IV you can only earn achievements on Ironman mode so no saves for you! Try a world conquer attempt with a tiny nation and everything’s going well until Spain, France and the UK decide to invade you or the Ottomans decide you’re not worth their time. So many hours wasted 😂😂
The last mission in Tropico 6 involves you being invaded multiple times, particularly in the modern era. Unfortunately for me, one big invasion coincided with a rebellion at the same flipping time. It did not end well for me.
@Thrillho I remember 5 being rather unforgiving at times but yeah, that does not sound fun at all. Especially with ‘El Presidente’ ringing in your ears at every opportunity when you’re trying to save the bloody island from itself!
@nessisonett Thankfully, the voiceovers from the supporting cast were nowhere near as grating as T5! The woman who did the radio broadcast shoutouts in that game used to drive me mad.
The music will still get stuck in your head for days though.
Completed: All main story content for the base game and the Hearts of Stone DLC expansion; all side-quests I found that didn't relate to Gwent, because I hate Gwent; all but one or two of the monster contracts
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has sold 28 million copies or so, so I doubt I need to introduce anyone to the premise. Needless to say, you play as a mutated monster hunter named Geralt of Rivia who journeys across fantastical landscapes on a quest to find a young girl named Ciri, who may or may not be the same as the A.I. who you harass with embarrassing questions on your iPhone. Nah, actually she's just an adoptive daughter with an Important Destiny because of her Magic Blood or something. The game doesn't exactly lean away from overused fantasy tropes, at least in terms of how the main scenario progresses.
This game released in 2015, but, playing on a somewhat old PC, I was still startled by how beautiful and detailed the game's open world was. It might not be pushing boundaries today in terms of sheer graphical fidelity, but it'd be difficult to find a more evocative, fully-realized fantasy world. There is a wonderful level of detail paid to lighting and natural beauty in this game. Sunsets, foggy mornings, desolate swamps... everything in this game, landscape-wise, feels like it was designed to tap into the player's emotions.
The music is also quite good. Unusually distinctive from the bland scores that tend to accentutate the majority of WRPGs I've played over the years. I'm not even sure how to describe it? Epic polish fantasy folk music, maybe?
Consider the track Steel for Humans Banana Tiger, which sometimes plays as battle music.
This unique sound extends to tracks throughout the game. Vocal tracks are everywhere, filled with passionate hollering and yipping. This approach to sound design even extends outside of the music, and you'll hear these sounds, for example, when your character completes a quest.
The area where The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt really excels, however, is characterization. A true-to-form epic, TW3 features an enormous extended cast that Geralt will encounter over the course of his journey: everything from multiple monarchs, politicians, assassins, bards, other witchers, etc. all the way down to common peasants and otherwise normal people. Some of these characters show up more than others, but all of them are sharply characterized and bursting with personality and nuance. More than any game I've played in recent memory, the people in TW3 feel complex and three-dimensional, and it is primarily this humanistic commitment to showing the good and ugliness in everyone that both grounds this otherwise far-flung high fantasy setting, filled with wizards, magicks, elves, alternate dimensions, monsters, etc. and makes many of the quest lines Geralt can take on throughout the game so singularly compelling.
And this is where we transition to the side-quests. The quests Geralt can take on throughout the game (apart from the rote and often somewhat boring monster contracts, but more on that later) are inseperable from the characters animating them. The somewhat dull and uneventful main story, in grand open world tradition, feels more like a travelogue designed to acquaint Geralt with the people you'll meet in these strange lands.
The most notable quality of these side-quests is how organically they blur into the fabric of the larger narrative. Indeed, while there are plenty of disconnected chores and whatnot Geralt can take on that will never ultimately make a difference to anyone, this game goes out of its way to blur the lines between side-and-main quests. Side-quests often transition into main quest objectives. Sometimes, decisions made on side-quests deeply impact the way a main quest later in the game will develop. In the same way, main quests can also splinter out into a variety of possible scenarios to the explore, depending on what happen in them. Just as the characters intermingle and create the sensation that one is exploring a living world, so too does the quest design often give one the impression that most of what Geralt does on his adventure matters, both to the progression of the game's broader story and to the way these character's lives will turn out in the long run.
This rich social tapesty lends the game a narrative depth that is more often a quality associated with good genre literature than it is with video games.
The combat system in TW3 gets a lot of flak online, but I thought it was reasonably fun. Geralt whips and twirls around the battlefield with the grace of a ballerina, and while random encounters with scrub enemies usually tend to be pretty mindless affairs, stronger monsters and bosses often require the player to learn something of their movements in order to avoid being damaged by them. Still, the bosses in this game tend to be rote, somewhat disappointing affairs (the Hearts of Stone DLC actually addresses this complaint somewhat; in terms of difficulty and engagement, the fights with The Caretaker and The Toad Prince blow away anything in the main game), up to and including the final boss, who could be mistaken for a mid-game boss encounter, aside from the tedious health bar padding and waiting the player is made to do in order to disguise how lame the encounter really is.
As a side note, I thought that having to maintain two different types of swords (silver for monsters and steel for humans) at all times would become confusing, but it wasn't bad at all. Even when I had to learn to manually unequip particular swords when fighting enemies because, for some reason, the auto-draw option when aggro'ing enemies didn't seem to trigger most of the time. Particularly when playing on the Nintendo Switch. But I very quickly mentally adapted to pressing different directions on the D-Pad to sheathe or unsheathe my sword. Maybe it's even better this way, because, in a small sense, it puts me into Geralt's headspace. There's a real sense of ownership when you're manually drawing a blade versus having the game draw it for you.
Despite the functional simplicity of the combat in this game, there are apparently a lot of systems underneath that I felt were never really relevant to my playthrough. For example, when you upgrade your character throughout the game, perks will reference something called "Adrenaline Points," and the upgrades make utilization of these points sound quite strategic, but, even reading up on them online, I'm still not entirely sure what they're really supposed to do. It reminded me of my playthrough of Bloodborne a bit, when the game would reference obscure stats and systems that never seemed relevant to how I could actively play the game one way or another.
As far as I'm aware, TW3 is the first game in the series to take place in an open world, and I'm not entirely sure this was to the game's benefit. Open world games have often been accused over the years of being giant, open wastelands full of meaningless activities to check off a list. And this criticism applies to The Witcher 3 as well. The world is NEEDLESSLY huge. Aside from the usual herb collecting, there's very little to do when you're traveling between quest markers. Like many an Ubisoft game, TW3 attempts to address this by spewing out an almost overwhelming number of question mark icons across its landscapes. While some of these will lead to interesting new quests or towns that will unlock fast travel points, most of them are disappointing repetitions of the same boring content over and over again.
I guess you do have encounters with enemies in the open world, but I found that, despite the massive enemy variety in this game, 80 percent of the time I felt like I was either running into groups of wolves, Drowners, or Nekkers. More crucially, though, fighting enemies in this game is a MASSIVE waste of time, because you get almost nothing in the way of XP for defeating even large groups of them. Even considering the loot you pick off their corpses for alchemy ingredients, they're almost never worth the damage they'll end up doing to your equipment. And the game has a really annoying tendency of changing the player's moveset when enemies spawn and making it where Geralt sometimes can't even escape an encounter until he kills an enemy. Even in scenarios where it's a timed quest and there's literally zero benefit to fighting the enemy!
My brief discussion of the pointlessness of wild monster encounters brings me to a larger criticism of the game, though. The worst aspect of TW3 is how almost universally terrible and unbalanced the XP distribution is for main and side quests.
Put frankly, side-quests in this game rarely feel like anything other than a waste of time when it comes to the rewards the game doles out for completing them. You can spend fifteen hours grinding side content and barely inch your way up another level, whereas the XP rewards for completing main story content is so over-the-top that I often found myself gaining multiple levels at once while attending to a single quest. Despite the game's most rewarding narrative content being found in side-quests, the game doesn't really incentivize the player to engage with it otherwise, which is a damn shame.
This criticism actually extends to the way money is handled in-game as well, and my primary issue with taking on monster contracts was that I often felt, just like with the side-quests, that I was engaging with the content in spite of the game's progression mechanics. While the side-quests were usually well-written and sometimes connected deeply enough with the main plot that I could forgive the pathetic way the game doled out a meager amount of experience points to me, it's harder to justify the fact that monster contracts felt like a massive waste of time. There were a few surprises, but most of these contracts felt like incredibly samey, rote affairs: Run to person offering quest. Haggle for slightly more gold than they originally offered (the haggling mechanic itself is so basic that it might as well not be there; 99% of the people in this game are unwilling to part with more than 40 - 50 extra coins, and there's no reasoning with them or extra dialogue that might net you extra rewards. The game effectively locks 20% or so of your money reward for each contract behind a needless extra step, and it's annoying). Run to location where someone had a run-in with a monster. Squeeze trigger to activate Witcher senses. Following glowing trail to monster. Fight monster. Run back to person to collect reward.
Wash, rinse, and repeat.
There were a couple of contracts that tossed in some nicely troubling developments, or moral decisions to make, but the vast majority of them are just... there.
Well, so what? A job is a job, right? Can't expect work to be constantly surprising, and Geralt's work in this game is monster slaying. And, early on, when you're poor and desperate for coin, this makes sense. But the problem is that the monetary rewards for monster slaying as you increase in level never really go up. What once was a windfall becomes barely a pittance. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, mid-to-late game, you'll make triple the amount of money for killing a group of scrub bandits and selling off their weapons as you would for taking on a monster contract. And you run across a LOT of bandits in this game.
Simply put, the moment you're not desperate for money, monster slaying mostly loses its value and the contracts become just more items to tick off of a checklist.
Another issue I have is with shops in this game, and really the way the game handles loot distribution, resource management (like potions and oils), and shop inventories over all. Because, despite throwing loads of vendors at the player, one has almost no reason whatsoever to actually visit them beyond dumping off the loads of loot the player will collect over even a small period of time. In one of the game's most singularly bizarre design choices, once Geralt learns how to craft potions and oils, he only has to meditate and possess alcohol to have them automatically refill. So unless you're ignoring hard alcohol throughout the game (and there is a LOT of alcohol in this game; people in this world must be lushes, because you'll find liquors, beers, wines, etc. stashed in nooks and crannies around nearly every location in this game), you'll never need to drop by the shop to refill on healing items, or ever even really run out.
There's also a pronounced weapon, armor, and runestone crafting element in this game, but, as with the alchemy, it feels unnecessary. The equipment you'll pick off the bodies of fallen enemies, or obtain on quests/in caves/etc. are usually far more than enough for the relatively meager challenges the game throws your way. It doesn't make a lot of sense to spend an hour, or hours, tracking down the items needed to craft these special swords and whatnot when, by the time you'd be able to do so, you're already drowning in good loot that renders the crafting system irrelevant.
Runestone crafting seems like a better way to spend one's time, but it's also poorly handled. The DLC quest to find someone who can do this for you comes INCREDIBLY late in the game (level-wise, and it'll take 50+ hours to accumulate the amount of money you need to supply him with the materials he needs anyway), and, even then, requires the purchasing of rare diagrams, sometimes from characters that aren't even accessible to you anymore. Anyway, putting all that aside, the Runecrafter requires obscene amounts of money in order to supply him with the materials to craft greater runestones, which, let's be frank, are the only ones really worth crafting. Who wants to waste time and money crafting something that only adds a 2% chance of adding a burning effect when you swing your sword, after all? Well, even having saved up the majority of my money throughout the game (because, as I pointed out before, there's almost no sense in purchasing gear in this game; it's NEVER necessary. Shopkeepers are irrelevant outside of the diagrams they occasionally have access to), upgrading the runecrafter to the point where he could craft these greater runestones almost bankrupted me. It's almost like the developers knew that players would have no reason to engage with shopkeepers besides pawning off the obscene amounts of loot they collected every time they hit a new location or bandit camp. Still, when I have almost no money left over, even after completing all of the available Witcher contracts, clearing out bandit camps, etc. it's probably the case that CDPR didn't test this aspect of the game very well.
My issues with this game's RPG and progression mechanics extend also to the game's perk system as Geralt levels up. Because there are only a very limited number of perks that Geralt can equip over time, and, between gaining perk points from both leveling and from Places of Power dotted around the map, it doesn't take long at all to wind up with far more perk points than you're ever inclined to use. Some perks help by allowing the player to pump multiple points into them to increase their effectiveness, but misc. buff perks, some of which are so OP that you've be crazy to do without them (I don't think I'd ever unequip the ones that allows food to passively heal you for 20 minutes), don't allow this. The end result is that I've wound up with tens of perk points that I just have no reason to invest in anything else. Maybe the intention was to have the player utilize multiple 'builds' throughout the game, but once I've found a build that works for my playstyle, I don't want to deviate from it. I'm not even excited when I find a place of power any more, because I know it'll just give me another perk point that'll go to waste.
There's also an entire alchemy system in this game, with tons of recipes, items to use, perks to boost effects from alchemical concoctions, a toxicity meter that seems to go up when using some potions, etc. But it feels like wasted effort, because the game feels complete without having to dip into this side of things aside from the three or four times it forced me too. I think I got some use out of a potion that allowed me to see in the dark, but I would usually just end up drinking it by accident and making the my screen look washed out for minutes on end, so I quickly unequipped that as well.
Geralt isn't the best at taking selfies. Especially not at 540p!
Boy, that's a LOT of complaining, isn't it? I can't deny that the failures of this game as both an open-world experience as well as an RPG keep it from greatness for me. Yet, despite this, I would still count The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as one of the better WRPGs I've played, and a solid modern-gen AAA game overall. Like other seriously flawed games that I ended up loving, TW3 wildly succeeds in certain important areas. Areas, like music and character development, that are usually disappointing in Western-style (and especially Western-developed) RPGs. I can absolutely understand why this title is beloved, and how CDProjektRed could build the majority of its reputation on this one title (considering how massive the hype around it is, I really hope their upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't disappoint). 8/10 for the base game; 8.5/10 for the Hearts of Stone DLC.
This would normally be where I'd end my post, but I didn't just play the PC version of the game, did I? I want to discuss, if only briefly, the improbable port this demanding game received for Nintendo's diminutive Switch console.
So, first, an admission: I'm a BIT of a Switch fanatic, so I'm more inclined to be tolerant of its limitations as a platform. With that said, even I have to admit that, while TW3 on Switch is a perfectly functional version of the game, I... wouldn't recommend playing it exclusively unless it's the only platform you own that can run it. Despite some really noticeable texture pop-in, this version of the game works marvelously well when you're out and about exploring the world. It doesn't look nearly as pretty, sure, but it looks good enough to not be distracting. Especially on the smaller handheld screen. This is one of the best looking handheld RPGs ever made. But, for some reason, the game really seems to struggle with lighting effects and movement in cutscenes. Character movement looks weird and disjointed, almost like they're animating at some absurdly low framerate, which frankly ruins battle sequences in cutscenes. Even worse, though, is the strobe effect that often seemed to trigger when fog or dappling light came into the equation. That reunion scene at the Isle of Mists? I felt like I was having a seizure.
I think it's a great complimentary version of the game, though. It's a lot of fun to just kick back and explore The Continent before going to bed, or when monitoring something that requires you presence, but not constant attention. This won't matter to PS4 owners of the game, but the cross-save and cross-play function works brilliantly if you own the game on PC, as both Steam and GOG support save file transfers from the cloud.
So, long story short, if you go the Switch/PC route, go PC for story content and the more cinematic side-quests, and Switch for exploration/small tasks/ingredient collecting/monster contracts/etc.
@Octane Not 10,000 words, but I hope it'll suffice.
@nessisonett The funniest thing is that if you type "banana tiger" into youtube, this song is the first result. It's how I found it. I guess a lot of people heard the same thing.
@Ralizah Good points made. You finished it pretty quickly. It took me 250 hours, but I also played Blood & Wine, which may as well be its own separate game.
What's your opinion regarding the ending of Hearts of Stone? IMO the whole DLC was brilliantly written. The fact that they set up Gaunter O'Dimm in the very beginning of the game was a neat easter egg. I picked knowledge as my reward, and although it was clear that it was meant to be played before the main game's ending, it was still pretty neat how it rolled right back into the main story.
@Octane Yeah, I'm saving Blood and Wine for later. Like HZD's DLC, it'll give me an excuse to revisit the game at a later date.
I might have fast-traveled a bit more than you. The game is pretty, but once I've been through an area, I like to get on with things.
Still, 250 hours is pretty long! Did you uncover all of the question mark icons? I think I only hit 2/3rds of them in my playthrough. Like with korok seeds, I wasn't going to torture myself with hours of that sort of thing.
Hearts of Stone was pretty fantastic, actually. I might have rolled my eyes a bit at the game's excuse-making for Olgierd's murderous ways (maybe not explicitly, but, no matter how evil O'Dimm is, it doesn't change the fact that Olgierd destroys every life he seems to touch), but learning about his past was still pretty powerful. I thought the whole 'taking his dead brother to a wedding' thing would be tedious, but it turned out to be one of the funnier sections of the game (although it practically forces you to play a game of Gwent, which I automatically threw; was forced to wear donkey ears as a result).
Based on the way you're talking, I take it you sided with O'Dimm? Despite the misgivings I have about Olgierd, it was still pretty clear that Gaunter was a force of evil in the world that needed to be snuffed out. You have to outwit him to banish him, which is more interesting in theory than in practice (I replayed that last section of HoS three times or so due to the confusing geography and complete lack of a map; reminded me of a Souls game, lol). You get a pretty cool reward for siding with Olgierd, though: a snazzy steel sword that turns red and becomes more powerful in battle after hitting the enemy a certain number of times.
It IS extremely cool that they set him up so early in the game, although I scarcely remember it. Something to take note of in the eventual NG+ playthrough, I think.
I actually completed the entirety of HoS right before the point of no return for the main quest, and that entire last bit of the game felt a bit... eh... after Hearts of Stone.
As to Gwent... I dunno. I REALLY don't like the card games that pop up in RPGs, for some reason. Also hated the everliving hell out of that card game in FFIX. Gwent is confusing and boring for me, and having to play it is probably the reason I'll never try that Thronebreaker spinoff game.
Oh yeah, that's why it took you so much longer. You wasted dozens of hours just playing Gwent, didn't you?
Which ending did you get, btw? Ciri becomes a witcher in the one I got.
@Ralizah That's a huge post, excellent write-up. It's a fair point about the levelling and money and that, but overall I think it's an excellent game.
The Blood and Wine expansion is pretty cool. Its got quite a different feel to the rest of the game, as the area it revolves around seems more jolly and upbeat. It's worth playing at some point.
With the Hearts of Stone ending, I did hopelessly bad at it. I chose to beat O'Dimm at his own game, but I kept getting lost and going round in circles. Probably took me ten or more attempts, though I did waste time going for the big sword every attempt. But I enjoyed that part, it's a cool sequence.
Out of the main game and the two expansions, I'd say my favourite is Hearts of Stone. I've always been a sucker for tricksy contracts, being careful what you wish for, those kinds of things. But I do think the main story is better in both expansions than the main game. Expansions move at a faster pace and seem to have more variety, compared to the main game which is just looking for Ciri for much of it.
@Ralizah I think I got most of the question marks, except for all the stuff in the water around Skellige. I figured those were nothing more than useless loot anyway. And yeah, I did play a lot of Gwent. At least 10 hours of those 250 is probably Gwent lol. There are entire tournaments in the game, so it's pretty extensive for what seems to be a forgettable mini game at first.
I don't know why I sided with O'Dimm. Seemed the most interesting option I think. I figured you couldn't really defeat him anyway. So it's better to side with the devil in that case. Anyway, he gives out some cool rewards. And if you pick knowledge he'll tell you about how to get the ''good'' ending in the main game. He gives vague tips on when to help Ciri and how to respond to her at certain times. It's perhaps better integrated than I make it seem to be.
And yeah, I got the same ending; Ciri becomes a Witcher. I don't think it is that difficult to get if you pick the most reasonable options every time.
@Octane@Ralizah Personally I prefer the ending where Ciri goes off to be Empress. The final quest has a lot more emotional weight and she’ll probably help loads of people.
@Octane I still can't get over this mix of a collectible card game and starving peasants. I'm not surprised there are tournaments, though, considering how often the damned game seemed to rub Gwent in my face. There's always a moment of panic when I think I've accidentally agreed to play a game of it.
Interesting on the knowledge reward bit (although, at the point in the story I was at, it was probably useless). Makes me think HoS probably should have recommended the player be in the mid-20s so that the knowledge reward could be more useful for new players. By the time the player is early-30s, they're likely near the end of the game, thanks to the way XP is distributed primarily through main plot quests.
To be honest, I kind of wish we had an option to kill them both. I don't regret my choice, but I don't think Olgierd deserves to live, and I was looking forward to striking him down. Allowing an ancient devil to continue harassing people wasn't going to fly, though.
Most of the 'good dad' options are reasonable, but I still have issues with messing up a dude's laboratory. Not even sure why I opted to trash the place with Ciri, but I'm glad I did.
From your avatar, I take it you're playing Danganronpa 2?
Honestly, a "jolly and upbeat" Witcher story is something I just HAVE to see. The game feels so grimdark most of the time. CDProjektRed also goes out of its way to be a bit... edgier than another developer probably would at times. Thinking of the lovely decor when you corner Whoreson Jr., in particular.
Oh good! I'm glad I'm not the only one who kept getting lost. Like I said, it mirrors my experience with Soulsborne games, and reflects my real-life trait of being terrible at forming mental maps of locations. I've lived in this town I'm in now for... eight years, I think, and I still can't picture the layout. If I stray from a very structured path I take to work or when going on walks, I could get very, very lost.
HoS is a bit predictable, I think (O'Dimm is OBVIOUSLY squirrely when you talk to him on the boat and afterwards, IMO), but the storytelling is pretty good, and it beats the Where's Waldo plot that takes up most of the main game.
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