The Witcher 3 : Wild Hunt ! [XO, PS4, NX, PS5, XBSX|S, PC]

[Deleted member 13524]

£400?! Just get another 290X, they're selling for as little as £240 and you'll get a VR-ready system to boot!

 

[Cjail]

Played 40 minutes so far and as soon as I got on my high horse I wandered off the road next to the river to have my ass handed to me by 3 drowners lvl.3 I'm playing on 2nd hardest setting where meditation is not regenerating health. Need to upgrade my GPU on PC as single R9 290X is not enough for QHD gaming! Lucky you console gamers as I will have to spend more than £400 for just GPU upgrade ... (before someone says lower quality I say NEVER! I played Crysis on my HD3870 on Ultra with avg. 10FPS and finished it!)

Death March difficulty is cheap IMO.
Your weapons are basically made of butter an counter don't seem to work on monster.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Played 40 minutes so far and as soon as I got on my high horse I wandered off the road next to the river to have my ass handed to me by 3 drowners lvl.3

Lvl 3 p0wnage! Grabbing something to eat then I'm diving in. Let's see if I can make 41 minutes before p0wnage!

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Death March difficulty is cheap IMO.
Your weapons are basically made of butter an counter don't seem to work on monster.

You resolved your digital purchase woes I hope?

Sony really need to sort it out. Their services, when they work, are great but have some really annoying idiosyncrasies. We originally pre-ordered the Witcher 3 digitally on my account, cancelled it, ordered a physical copy from Amazon (because we like stuff!), cancelled that because neither of us knew where we'd be for delivery today, but couldn't re-preorder on my account a second time - it kept telling me I already owned the game - this is a known issue. Fortunately my girlfriend just pre-ordered it on her account.

I think what PSN does, to prevent you from buying things twice, is check the account transaction list (of purchases) and if it sees a pre-order for the game it assumes it's extant and doesn't check to see if it's been cancelled. This is not rocket science, Sony

 

[Lightman]

£400?! Just get another 290X, they're selling for as little as £240 and you'll get a VR-ready system to boot!

I'm thinking about 390X but lets get back to The Witcher III where I already gained my first experience point and sorted out few monsters! Been to battlefield next to game starting point and it was amazing but chilling!
Also after locking game to 30FPS it runs perfectly v-synced on my setup.

Back to game for me as constant distractions only allowed 1h of game play so far :/

 

[Cyan]

Played 40 minutes so far and as soon as I got on my high horse I wandered off the road next to the river to have my ass handed to me by 3 drowners lvl.3 I'm playing on 2nd hardest setting where meditation is not regenerating health. Need to upgrade my GPU on PC as single R9 290X is not enough for QHD gaming! Lucky you console gamers as I will have to spend more than £400 for just GPU upgrade ... (before someone says lower quality I say NEVER! I played Crysis on my HD3870 on Ultra with avg. 10FPS and finished it!)

Well, I think shadows are one of the most performance intensive techniques, and Ubersampling. This is from my experience with The Witcher 2 on PC. @ToTTenTranz advice might be helpful, and I think the R9 290X is DirectX 12 compatible, and it will shine there, especially on SLI too.

Eurogamer have set the bar very high with The Witcher. They have written an article and a review that are one of the most enjoyable texts I've read in a gaming -and, to some extent, non gaming- site.

The article about the coherent world of TW3 was so superb; http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-05-12-the-witcher-3-is-a-masterpiece-of-world-building

...but now Oli Welsh wrote the review and it is another labour of love.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-05-18-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-review

Made by a rogue operator with independent funding (the studio's parent company owns the distribution platform GOG.com), it pays little heed to the franchise-building fads of Hollywood or the focus-tested game design methodologies of Montreal, instead drinking deep draughts from Central European folklore and the narrative traditions of Western role-playing. It exists because a group of people in Warsaw knew exactly the kind of game they wanted to play, and made it themselves because no-one else would. It is that rare thing in contemporary video games: an epic with a soul.

the game feels different than what we are used to play but everything is very familiar because of its European roots and idiosyncrasy. Seeing small villages, close to one another, is like home to me, villagers working around the village, some using forks, others cleaning the clothes, some taking care of the crops, some others in the tavern, a few of them keeping an eye on their domestic animals (chickens, cows, etc etc)...

It reminds me of my childhood and the stories of the elders in the place where I was born and live.

The secondary quests, meanwhile, show an admirable resistance to filler and grind, pushing a form of social storytelling that colours in the messy and morally squalid world of Temeria. There's a war on, between haughty imperialists and fanatical nationalists, and the poor are caught in the middle. More fantastical stories dwell on equally tragic, more personal themes; the game's fearsome bestiary invariably preys on, or is born out of, human frailty.

I am always with the nationalists. Hopefully I will get the whole story after reading the books.

That, for me, is the essence of a role-playing adventure.

Thanks Oli Welsh, whoever you are.

 

[Cyan]

I'm thinking about 390X but lets get back to The Witcher III where I already gained my first experience point and sorted out few monsters! Been to battlefield next to game starting point and it was amazing but chilling!
Also after locking game to 30FPS it runs perfectly v-synced on my setup.

Back to game for me as constant distractions only allowed 1h of game play so far :/

Talking of "monsters" -I like wolves-, I was in the tutorial part, in the road to the first village, when I stopped before a woman and a man crying, and then a couple of minutes later, a huge wolf appeared, everyone was terrified. (thx @DSoup )

The thing is that the typical european setting of the game felt right. Lots of thick vegetation, trees, etc, reduce visibility and animals can easily hide (here where I live people who hunt rabbits have a hard time spotting them and they need the best dogs they can have to have a chance), so no one spotted the wolf until it was very close to the village.

I think most of the myths and fears related to wolfs, and the existence of werewolves come from aspects of the daily life like that. I remember when I was a kid, in the place where I live now, the dens of wolves used to be very close to the villages, in the mountains around. Seeing a wolf was like..."wow!!", and instilled fear on people, because they hid very well, they were fearful of humans, yet they killed their domestic animals, and there was always a secular battle.

Additionally, I also remember the stories of elders. One of them told me not much time ago that when he was a kid his parents sent him to the hills surrounding the village during the summer nights (the rest of the year the weather is very rainy and harsh in this mountainous region) to take care of their animals (sheep and cows) at night. And he could hear the wolves howling, and he used to sleep atop a hillock.

As I said, I feel at home when playing this game, for many reasons.

 

[VFX_Veteran]

This game is using a lot of brute force everything. No way the hardware could handle the 2013 footage. I suspect that that was "target we'd like to hit" stuff.. never really was going to get into the game and stay at a reasonable framerate (especially on consoles). The game, as it is right now, is too much for my GTX 980 @ 4k. I'm barely at 30fps and that's with many settings on HIGH and no Hairworks.

 

[Cyan]

This game is using a lot of brute force everything. No way the hardware could handle the 2013 footage. I suspect that that was "target we'd like to hit" stuff.. never really was going to get into the game and stay at a reasonable framerate (especially on consoles). The game, as it is right now, is too much for my GTX 980 @ 4k. I'm barely at 30fps and that's with many settings on HIGH and no Hairworks.

Do you mean on PC? The game is going to need some extra optimisation on PC, I guess.

On consoles it doesn't seem to be badly optimised. I am playing the XOne version. The thick vegetation and the shadows it does cast are very taxing on any hardware though, but that's the price to pay for the setting to be believable. It is probably the first game where I feel I am playing in a place similar to my home.

Not just because of the setting, but the landscape too, and how everything feels in that sense (thick grass, vegetation, the filtered, diffuse light, the wind...).

 

[VFX_Veteran]

Do you mean on PC? The game is going to need some extra optimisation on PC, I guess.

No amount of optimization is going to make the highest end graphics cards run this game with everything set to Ultra and all features @ 4k (4x the pixel bandwidth of 1080p) @ 60fps. And to put even more features in the game like displacement mapping, more particle affects, actual shaded sprites for the foliage, etc.. it just beyond the scope of todays' hardware. I doubt even next-gen will be there either..

We should just be happy with what we got. CDPR did an excellent job pushing the boundaries and delivering a stellar looking game this gen. Even if it's not on the level of the 2013 target footage.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Given the seemingly identical graphics between the PC on Ultra and the PS4 (minus nvidia features), I'm curious to understand how much you can reduce the PC's settings with (near) zero impact on the actual graphics. Clearly the consoles aren't running at Ultra settings (unless this is the worst optimised game ever made) so presumably there must be very little difference on the PC between Ultra and lower settings.

 

[deathindustrial]

Played about 40 minutes last night. This is my first Witcher game - have the controls / camera always been this janky? Playing the training tutorial was super frustrating due to lock on issues with ladders, the unhelpful camera and character animations often getting in the way. The game also appears to love taking control away from you with zero warning which I am not a fan of (would prefer some sort of indication that walking close to an area is going to trigger a QT).

The tone, dialog and setting however is awesome, from the small sample I played I totally agree with whomever posted that this was like a Euro "Red Dead Redemption". As much as I loved Skyrim it is nice to play an RPG that's not so prudish.

 

[Cyan]

Played about 40 minutes last night. This is my first Witcher game - have the controls / camera always been this janky? Playing the training tutorial was super frustrating due to lock on issues with ladders, the unhelpful camera and character animations often getting in the way. The game also appears to love taking control away from you with zero warning which I am not a fan of (would prefer some sort of indication that walking close to an area is going to trigger a QT).

The tone, dialog and setting however is awesome, from the small sample I played I totally agree with whomever posted that this was like a Euro "Red Dead Redemption". As much as I loved Skyrim it is nice to play an RPG that's not so prudish.

The controls...do you mean controls with the mouse/keyboard? The gamepad controls work really well with this game, trust me on this one -I'd only like to jump with A instead of B, but that's it-

I consider myself a person who was very influenced by the American culture in movies and stuff, where everyone seemed so prim and proper and characters where more the "ideal" type. I thought that that should be the standard, because many movies I loved characterised people like that.

And that's why I am grateful for the European setting of The Witcher, because it reflects the European culture quite well and I identify a lot with it. It feels much more "real" to me.

I love Skyrim and always will anyways, it's one of my favourite games ever. Americans though, have a very immature attitude towards sexuality. Sex is still very taboo and dirty yet hip and cool there. This is probably due to the fact that it's still a very sexually repressed puritan nation.

And that's sort of my point. The greater the puritan roots, the greater the reaction is, so sex is a *big deal*. And you don't see it mentioned -save for a book or two- in Skyrim.

 

[Cyan]

The Witcher 3 launch trailer.

Game running at 4k with SweetFX (SweetFX file download link in the video's description) settings:

 

[Davros]

close to an area is going to trigger a QT

What!!! I thought we were promised no QTE's

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Played about 40 minutes last night. This is my first Witcher game - have the controls / camera always been this janky? Playing the training tutorial was super frustrating due to lock on issues with ladders, the unhelpful camera and character animations often getting in the way.

Played about 40 minutes myself and I had to fiddle with the controls which seemed very twitchy on the default settings. I've got them pretty decent now and will completely adjust to them in no time.

The game also appears to love taking control away from you with zero warning which I am not a fan of (would prefer some sort of indication that walking close to an area is going to trigger a QT).

Yes this caught me by surprise too, I can't see any telltale signs that stepping somewhere will trigger a cutscene of some sort.

 

[Cyan]

What!!! I thought we were promised no QTE's

I think he meant that some cutscenes appear out of the blue when you get to certain areas, not QTEs per se. Hopefully this is only true for the main story missions, although they just happen just once, if you triggered them already and the quest is listed in your diary.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Talking of "monsters" -I like wolves-, I was in the tutorial part, in the road to the first village, when I stopped before a woman and a man crying, and then a couple of minutes later, a huge wolf appeared, everyone was terrorised.

Terrified, I think. Unless the wolf was trained by ISIS, Al-Qaeda or Glenn Beck.

 

[Daozang]

I played for close to three hours today.
The game performs great on my pc at 1440p with everything on Ultra except HBAO+ (for some reason it really brings performance down a lot combined with everything else).
It dips under 60 at some points, (contrary to the results I gave in the pc thread, the benchmark was, I guess, at a place my PC could handle with ease) although I cannot figure out the factors that affect the performance, when it happens, it seems random...
But all that are really of little importance even for this site...
Because the game is amazing.

My first encounter, apart from the monsters at the beginning that you cannot avoid (and that almost killed me), was a level 3 wrath at the cemetery close to the village, where the place of power is.
It was red and had a nice skull right next to his/her HP bar.
But with a few well timed dodges, (two when it teleports behind you) I managed to bring its health down to the middle and then it just disappeared!
I guess it is part of a quest, and the game wouldn't let me kill it!
Combat is fun!
When you fight groups of enemies, things get harder. But I think I like that.

The quests, are interesting, and well written, even the frying pan mini quest!!!
Facial animations are great, the environment is, up to this point beautiful, I can only hope that when I get to the larger map, it won't feel generic.
Alchemy seems to be a lot more viable as an option this time, and I'm hoarding ingredients for potions whenever I can find them.
One thing i find a bit clunky is the camera. I wish there was an options to disable auto-center. I find it somewhat disorienting.
Other than that, I can't think of anything I don't like at this point!
I'd love to play till morning to be honest!

 

[Billy Idol]

Bought the game. I have exactly this issue as well:

My recommendation: don't biy this mess.