Disclaimer: GOTY is stupid. I don't care about GOTY. I am not discussing GOTY. I am discussing The Witcher 3 and the unending circlejerk surrounding it.
I don't think it's fair to call Witcher 3 groundbreaking. Or the best RPG ever (not by a long shot). Or even a particularly good game. It was good, but it was not the best thing anyone's ever touched in their lives, and if it is, I feel sorry for them.
What about this game is groundbreaking?
The dialogue system? That's found in tons of modern games, and in The Witcher 3, it affects next to nothing. Winner: Other games. Where it matters.
The storyline? Other games have storylines, you know. People act like before The Witcher 3 came along, no game ever had a plot. The Witcher 3's plot isn't the theatrical masterpiece it's made out to be. Nothing in particular about it really stands out and it does a poor job for players who haven't played earlier titles as well (despite the devs claiming it's not necessary). Some of the sidequests had cool stories, but that's just it. Cool stories. Is that really that incredible? The sidequests took me out of the game half the time anyway because there's a whopping 8 NPC models or so used for all of them. I did a voiced quest involving a werewolf and a woman and some other guy and it was cool. Then I was immediately taken out of it when the next quest I did featured the exact same woman and guy who was just moments ago a werewolf. They weren't even unique character models. Other games have plenty of unique character models for unique situations, what is this game's excuse? These character models are on the level of an early GTA game, heavily repeating with little to no randomization of features. But even early GTA games made sure that voiced dialogue and "quests" were given by and involved mostly unique character models. Not "that lady in the sun hat" over and over.
The complete failure of an open world that tells you exactly where to find every secret as soon as you check a notice board? Yeah, that's fun to explore- a world where you know exactly where you are sure to not find anything, and where all the secrets are marked on the map. Checking a notice board revealed a note about missing chickens, a slutty farmer, a dog, meat for sale, a quest, and general news from the town. From these 6 snippets of information, Geralt is able to activate one sidequest, and also know the exact location of all recently bandit-killed bodies in the area (of which, conveniently, there's many), all the monster nests, all the point thingies you find hidden in tombs nobody's gone into in years, all the treasure nobody's claimed for a century. That's not fun. "But you can turn off map markers!" you say? Well, it's still badly designed, and I want some map markers, just not the ones that spoil the locations of every single thing in the game. Turning off map markers doesn't solve the problem, it creates a new one- notice boards are worthless.
The combat system that was done in the previous two games and is pretty clunky all things considered? The combat feels like Fable 1 way back on the xbox, it's heavy and sluggish and clumsy, not in a gratifying way like Dark Souls. All the enemies have more range of movement and agility than you. Speaking of Fable 1, Witcher 3 also has awful refrigerator-in-a-shopping-cart-with-broken-wheels controls where your character turns on a monster truck tire instead of a dime. That's not groundbreaking. It's awful. They patched it, because it was awful. But before they patched it you'd be lucky to find people who wouldn't rush to defend the controls because "real people move like that". I can only assume these people are severely disabled, because real people do not mimic circling a redwood tree to get out of a doorway. They turn around.
Perks? Skill trees? Super original stuff, there. A whopping two weapon types and 5 spells? You know what had more than that? Final Fantasy on the NES. Hell, Dragon Quest (arguably a smaller scale title) had more than that.
A progression system so poorly designed that you cannot complete sidequests without fear of being too powerful to actually get rewards from later quests (you don't get exp from quests beyond a certain level threshold), and where your armor and weapons are always stronger than the loot you find? I played for about 20 hours and never once found any loot better than what I had on me. There was no point to looting anything. Every single weapon and armor dropped by enemies or found in chests or whatever was bad. It was always underleveled. And if you did too many sidequests, others became too low level, and you were no longer rewarded experience for doing them. Then you'd advance to the next area and be overleveled, resulting in the quests you do there giving you no experience. This was a huge problem when the game came out, and I htink they fixed it after a while but I don't know. Completionists were punished for completing things.
The level progression is some of the worst I've ever experienced, including in games like Oblivion (where you literally fucked up unique loot if you found it too early, because it was leveled to your character and thus would be useless a few levels later). At least in Oblivion finding weapons made you stronger, even if they were eventually outclassed despite being the best sword in the game base-stats-wise. In The Witcher 3 finding weapons is just the same as finding junk. It's never worth using.
UI issues that the previous two games in the series also launched with but the developer somehow didn't learn from and didn't fix until a month after launch? They had menu problems in this game that were also in Witcher 1 and Witcher 2. The exact same poor design choices. The exact same solutions implemented in patches for those games. But after screwing that up twice, they couldn't figure it out for the third game, either? Books, notes, randomly slapped in with other miscellaneous objects, consumables slapped in with unusable items. This was a problem in Witcher 1. They patched it. This was a problem in Witcher 2. They patched it. Then they developed Witcher 3 and not one person ont eh dev team said "HM, PERHAPS WE SHOULD LAUNCH THE GAME WITH A COMPETENT UI THIS TIME", and it launched with the same problem, and again, they had to patch it later. The UI is also entirely console focused and clunky as balls on PC. Try interacting with an object that's at geralts feet. What's that? You can't? Yeah, because the camera can't see it. Makes sense, right? The camera isn't able to see an object, so it doesn't exist to be looted. So walk away from it (turning in a 4 foot circle in the process), then walk towards it, BUT DON'T WALK TOO FAR TOWARDS IT, because then you'll be too close to loot it, and have to wander away from it and try again. This got through testing. They tested this game and apparently every person involved said "yeah, I love finicky controls where I wobble around next to an object for 40 seconds before I can finally interact with it and accidentally light a candle instead".
Complete lack of interactivity with the game world and NPCs? The entire game world is a bunch of setpieces with no purpose. Every building is as interactive as a building in a JRPG, there's nothing groundbreaking there. The buildings can be entered without a load screen? That's nice, but they're just four walls and static objects. Of course you don't have to load them. They're simple setpieces. It's not like in a Bethesda game where you can pick things up, or where objects are visible in the game world, or whatever. It's the same models of the same furniture over and over again, except it's "a container" and it has different stuff in it when you interact with it. The NPCs are a step below even the most remedial JRPG, they just parrot the same canned dialogue, if they say anything, and next to none of it has any use to the player, and you can't talk to anyone who isn't part of the storyline. Even FF1 on the NES had NPCs you could talk to for flavor text and general information (and again, the more remedial Dragon Quest), but not Witcher 3. But at least we know Chetty's that one kid's best mate and his alzheimer's dad keeps forgetting he already punished him.
What about this stuff is groundbreaking? It's a Far Cry game with an RPG slapped into it.
Far Cry- follow the map icons to complete repeating concepts across the landscape such as clearing camps, finding caches, and taking down a source of strife. Collect resources to craft new equipment that outclasses anything you find. Gain perks that change your combat in vague ways too far spread out to feel satisfying. Take down spooky wild animals.
Witcher 3- Follow the map icons to complete repeating concepts across the landscape such as clearing camps, finding caches, and taking down monster nests. Collect resources to craft new equipment that outclasses anything you find. Gain perks that change your combat in vague ways too far spread out to feel satisfying. Take down spooky wild animals.
The only difference is that there's more dialogue and more story. But it's a just-above-mediocre adventure game (akin to far cry, uncharted, etc) with stats, not a groundbreaking RPG from which all future RPGs should be molded. It is an interactive movie, and not even that good of a movie, with clunky everything, and zero replayability to speak of.
It's pretty. It has an interesting-ish storyline. But god damn is it mediocre in pretty much all aspects. It's fun! But I don't understand what the big deal is about it.
Submitted December 04, 2015 at 08:48PM by FinalMantasyX http://ift.tt/1PEyfJd pcmasterrace
No comments:
Post a Comment