I wouldn’t undercount the difficulty in filling a world that large with meaningful quests, something that seems simple (interesting narratives paper over repetitive mechanical interactions) but has eluded Bethesda despite them correctly identifying and charging at it since Oblivion (their structure, in which designers own and write the quests, is the main determinant of their fractured, uneven writing (and, well, everything)).
And they did it without ever feeling zoomed-out or less-realized than the traditionally-structured Witcher 2, super-heroically avoiding the potemkin-village feel that even Rockstar’s mega-budgets can’t conceal.
And they managed a consistent and occasionally subtle tone across what must have been a half-dozen writers, at least!
Phenomenal in raw production skill, very very smart design.
I think Witcher 2 isn’t as impressive because it’s mostly on the same scale as Bioware; 3D, character movement, action verbs for combat, dialogue trees. Very impressive because they were doing it best but it didn’t feel like something inconceivable at the time.
The context of Ciri as the (coercively) adopted daughter of an infertile woman and an infertile mutant man who are each hundreds of years old and themselves in love (only?) because of a mischievous genie was weirdly affecting.
All good points, though I was still astonished at how Witcher 2 got every single one of those elements perfectly right (and how relatively little press it received for this) when everyone else working in that space had been so generally incompetent for so long. I pretty much wasn’t paying attention to big-budget games from 2006-2011 or else just gradually taking notes and catching up and with Witcher 2 I was suddenly amazed: that writing! those graphics! the combat! it’s all so worthwhile!
the difference in scope of 3 is certainly impressive as hell but it meant less to my overall experience.
I think people are operating with a more narrow definition of CRPG than I have been. My rubrick is “roleplaying game that is released primarily on computers”
like, action rpgs are still crpgs if they came out on pc.
There’s less in common between dungeon blobbers and Fallout/Arcanum/Witcher style games than there is between dungeon blobbers and diablo 2
Elfquest sucks and the creators are racist.
The first Jak game is pretty good but Crash Bandicoot is where Naughty Dog is at and if you say Crash Bandicoot is ugly i dunno if we can be chums anymore.
i was so worried when i saw an sb thread had accumulated 24 new posts in a couple hours, but this is alright.
i recently gave up on the witcher 3 after 72 hours of gameplay. it’s good but i don’t feel the need to play any more, and it was taking up a crazy amount of space on my ps4. i like how the hearts of stone expansion doesn’t add a whole new map or anything, it just lets you play a really cool side-story that’s way better than the main plot.
(if anyone is interested, i gave up near the end of the blood and wine expansion, when i was getting murdered by vampires every few steps and then having to sit through the incredibly long load time that happens when you reload after death)
yeah that’s the exact thing that’s galling about people giving plaudits to bioware, it’s literally het dude porn fantasies masquerading as progressive representation
it has good bits but overwhelmingly more bad bits that I can’t go back to it as an adult.
Looking it up yes you can be a gay dude that flirts with men but only after the official patches are applied. With the unofficial patches I think there’s fully 3 gay dudes besides the potential MC…