The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt

It did arrive the day after it shipped though, I'm enjoying this free trial of Prime, won't be paying for it after this trial is over though.

Maniacal said:

The map is completely useless digitally. Also stickers, that I'm not going to use. And a hardcover comic book (graphic short novel I guess?). Also a thank you note for buying the game from CD Projekt RED.

Installing from four DVDs is so slow though.

EDIT: It won't let me play it without patch 1.01 :/ Stupid GOG.com Galaxy launcher. I have a long bloody weekend but no, I have to wait until a TUESDAY to play the game. BS.

Click to expand...

Monday evening.

I broke down and preordered this mainly due to the very positive reviews and pre-order discount for having other games in the series. I sure hope this isn't a mistake.

First impressions after an hour and a half of gameplay:

-Graphics are very demanding, RIP my GTX 760.
-Gameplay is very good compared to TW2. Running around is still clunky though. I strongly suspect that a controller would be much better than m/k for this.
-The music! It is extremely good and the ambient sounds in the forest are very high quality as well.

Turn off VSYNC and turn on Hardware Cursor, it will remove the mouse acceleration. The game plays quite well with a k&m, although, like in TW2, CDPR does like designing things to be gamepad friendly. Probably because they're Polish.

It is also capped at 60 FPS by default but you can set that to unlimited (which is oddly placed on the left side of the scale, but I guess that makes sense as it would be the "off" position).

I am running with almost everything turned on and on ultra on my R9 290, it was at 35FPS at worst and 60 at best until I turned vegetatino distance down to high (didn't notice any real difference for the most part aside from an improvement in FPS) and grass density down to high b/c i don't really care about grass and the vegetation & grass quality is the weakest part of the graphics. FPS is generally around 60 now. (I also have hairworks turned off because I don't have an NVIDIA card and it is a massive performance hit even for 970s, I turned both blur and motion blur off and depth of field off too).

The game looks stunning so far, the "cartoony colourfulness" people were complaining about is largely an effect of the lighting during sunny days, even at 1PM in light rain everything got a lot darker (also for some reason 4am is sunrise, and the sun actually starts rising before that). Sound and animation (including faces!) quality are top notch though. Gameplay is very much an improved version of TW2, I still end up dodging a long but there is dodging and rolling, not just rolling). A lot of stuff still is colourful, especially clothing, but for the most part it is quite nice and as I said changes a lot during different weather. Medieval clothing was actually very garishly dyed in reality too.

The tutorial is actually extremely long, it seems like the entire first area is still tutorial land, I didn't import my save yet and the game still hasn't asked me about stuff that happened in previous games in lieu of importing a save.

So, how about that graphics downgrade ? There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but sources have said that the day one patch has improved the PC graphics quite a bit.

I honestly never expected them to be able to keep the "promise' of that trailer from two years ago TBH (it looked a bit too good, I expected them to struggle to match that for the final release), as I mentioned vegetation and grass isn't that great looking, and LoDs can be hit or miss, but the game is still very pretty. It's disappointing they couldn't match it and did decide to go for one set of textures that the PS4/XB1 could also handle (albeit at slightly lower settings), but meh.

but is it fun? Who cares about the graphics, how's the gameplay?!?!

The game looks pretty promising, but I've a graphical glitch which makes it just unbearable : when in exterior, I've shadows (or lights) constantly flashing on and off.
Seems I'm not the only one (there is this video which shows exactly the problem), but it's not prevalent enough (yet) to have a known solution.

And YES I already tried to change graphical options in case it was one which was the problem. No dice.
And it doesn't appear to be a driver problem, people who just upgraded their drivers had it.

Annoying, but I'm a patient man and I'll wait for the patch

So far the only bug I've had is Geralt standing inside of Roach (his horse) during a cutscene and a few NPCs who are floating slightly (or their feet are if lying down). Definitely a number of people I've seen complaining of various problems though, but it doesn't seem abnormal for a new game.

civvver said:

but is it fun? Who cares about the graphics, how's the gameplay?!?!

Click to expand...

So far it is very fun, but I'm still not very far in.

Is there any better way to set up the m/k controls than the defaults? I just got out of the tutorial areas, and the difficulty I had in killing the griffin doesn't bode well for the future.

Whatever works best for you, you can change all of the keybinds (well ,except movement and menu ones for some idiotic reason you have to edit those in the .ini file) in the menus. I ahven't changed any yet but I think I will change a few.

I haven't fought the griffon yet but I did find a griffon nest with a dead one next to it.

EDIT: Also change the game to fullscreen mode, it defaults to borderless fullscreen (still render's your desktop), might give you a few more frames.

So, I just got this email from Amazon.ca:

Playing the game right now.

All i can say is it is WINDY.

Yes they did nail the effect of wind in the forests pretty well, and White Orchard is pretty windy. So is the second region around Velen.

i am looking for the Baron´s daughters right now. So i have visited White Orchad and Velen, and so long wind has been blowing fiercely everywhere i have been at. i agree developers nailed wind effects but it seems they liked it too much.

Once again my discipline failed me. I have two pretty good excuses: a long weekend and actually surprisingly modest hardware requirements that make an upgrade unnecessary. Can't play it on ultra, but it's still the best looking game I have ever seen. Especially the (facial) hair and the wind effects. I also enjoy the fluidity of movement, and the combat is much better than in part two.
I've been playing almost all day and just finished Wandering in the Dark.
Now I'm deciding between who do visit/look for next. The Bloody Baron or the Ladies of the Wood.

Geralt's hair never seems to stop blowing in the wind, even inside. Although caves and most of the buildings I've been in so far are pretty drafty.

I didn't like the leveling systems that much in the begining, but this might be the first game that gets combat vs opponents of a different level right. Other games just make it borderline impossible to survive an encounter with stronger enemies, but here the combat system even gives you a fair shot against opponents with twice your level. You need good preparation and perfect timing for your dodges and attacks, but it is possible.
I've come close to killing a level 15 Bilge Hag with a level 7 Geralt. Haven't killed it, but I got it down to about 30 % health.

Yeah, anything higher than that though and you're screwed. Fair enough though. Some enemies will show a skull next to their names and it basically means "You can try, but I'll rape you".

Unfortunately there isn't much warning sometimes, I go to a random village while doing a low level quest, take a local contract, enemy shows up (and in two cases had no level displayed for some reason) and kicks my arse since it's several times my level.

I (Mostly) finished the Bloody Baron quest.
WTF ?
I knew that things like this exist in Slavic mythoology, but I didn't expect that they would go there.

Yeah the later parts of that quest line are very unsafe for children. I'm getting close to the end of it now, very well done though.

EDIT: Someone is already making a Gwent mod for Tabletop Simulator: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=449368216