The Witcher 3

Anyone alive around here playing it? I just finished the first "zone," and have loved every minute of it. While in some sense I have gotten sick of all the "controversy" over the downgraded graphics, I would still like to hear what the old-school Voodooers think. I think that much of the complaints are ridiculous, with expectations that a trailer from two years ago needs to accurately represent the finished product -- or that CD Projekt Red should have issued "disclaimers" that it did not. Maybe I am just more accustomed to movie trailers, which often feature footage that ends up deleted from the final version. A trailer is a trailer. On the other hand, I am still a bit disappointed in the final graphics, even after the 1.03 patch. I am running it at 1920x1280 with all settings maxed, and I have never even had the slightest trace of a slowdown. I have gotten used to new Witcher games taxing systems to the limit, and this one definitely does not. It certainly looks good, but it is a letdown after how GTAV looks with the settings cranked; that one is a stunner. I have not messed around with the .ini file yet, though nVidia has a pretty detailed tweak guide. Has anyone else played around with it?

I got it on preorder last year on GOG. I have been wanting to play it. Since I just got home maybe I can after getting it downloaded.

I love GOG and it is the only service that I use when I have a choice. You are not going to find all of the titles that Steam offers, of course, primarily due to GOG's insistence on not using any DRM. And a lot of titles lock you into Steam anyway. But given a choice, I always opt for GOG. They are definitely the best source for older titles, period. While in the past you have had to keep track of patches or updates on your own, they just launched a beta version of their "GOG Galaxy" which is a bit more like the Steam client, and it offers automatic updating, as well as other features. Frankly, I do not use any of those other features anyway, and probably never will, but it was worth it just for the auto-updating. (I still launch the games from my desktop instead of using the Galaxy, and it is easier to shop via your browser.) Plus, GOG frequently offer pretty insane sales, like their summer sale going on right now. You can pick up a mighty shiteload of DRM-free goodies for dirt cheap right now.

The patches for The Witcher 3 have been incrementally improving the graphics, so that helps. I still have not bothered tweaking the .ini file. But ye gods, is it an amazing game. It has had some of the best quests and characters in any RPG that I have played -- the whole "Bloody Baron" storyline was truly amazing.

I think I have over 100 games on gog right now, I have a second page. I do deal with steam but it's for those titles I can't get with out DRM, and then I wait for a sale. I found a website called bundlestars that have some very good sales and the games go straight to steam. IF you log into steam the game can be regular price, but you can get it for 2 to 6 bucks from there.

I finally got the witcher 3 downloaded. I will have to see if I will have time to play it before I head off to work. I got to finish swapping the brake master cylinder, plumbing and fuel pump out on the 52 ford. If that solves the brake problems and too much fuel problem that is over flowing the bowls the truck will be "done" except the rest of the bodywork, new weatherstripping and new glass.

I was going to put some of the wedding pictures up as well but we still haven't got them back yet.

Um. . . Wedding? You have been busy, I see!

Wedding, yep. Last time in. It's a girl I have known since I was about 8ish. 37 now, lol. It was bush and hetic the last two months. Worked a month, came home prepped for wedding, wedding, reception at my house, honeymoon. Call from work going to new rig, go to new rig to start new position, layed off after 8 days from middle east division, now they are calling me back to work to work on a drill ship in the gulf of Mexico on the 12th. Up down and left and right the last two and half months worth.

And yet somehow you found time for the master cylinder & fuel pump. You definitely have your priorities right for an aging male! (We have a local talk radio personality who has something that he calls his "cylinder index," which means that the number of cylinders that you own should at least equal your age.)

But congratulations! My wife and I have known each other since I was a teenager and she was a pre-teen -- and I am ten years older than you are -- but we pretty much ignored each other until around sixteen years ago. We will have our fifteenth anniversary this year, so those "finally-get-around-to-a-real-relationship-later-in-life" deals can work out quite well!

ADOR wrote:It was bush and hetic the last two months.

Cylinders aside, ADOR is doing it right!

Congratulations on the wedding, ADOR. I wish you both all the best. Sorry to hear about the work layoff, but sounds like things are better now on that front?

I don't see me having time to scratch the witcher itch, but damn have you guys got me tempted.

It has been a wonderful renaissance for PC RPG gaming the past couple of years, with Shadowrun Returns and the even better Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, and others.  I would probably give a slight nod to Original Sin, at least from a gameplay perspective.  The combat is turn based and excellent, plus much of the mechanics in the game, such as crafting and others, are left for you to discover on your own, and discovering things is very rewarding.  The writing in Eternity is excellent, though a bit daunting as it is introducing a new IP, and I have not enjoyed the combat.

But thanks to adequate mechanics and stellar writing, I am probably having more fun with The Witcher 3 than any of them.  It has one of my favorite things in an RPG: the no-win scenario.  You are frequently put into the position of having to make decisions for which there is no "perfect" solution, and those decisions frequently have ramifications later on.  Many quests interact, and what you do in one can affect others.  You also sometimes see the results of decisions much later on.  If you have played the previous games, there are also very rewarding moments with characters from them -- not sure how well they pay off for first-time players, but they were amazing for a veteran of the series like me.   Few of the quests are "throwaways" like, say, Skyrim.  Most of them have interesting writing and cutscenes; this a a rare game where I do not feel like skipping through all of the dialogues by turning on the subtitles so I can skip as fast as I can read.  

But that "Bloody Baron" storyline: wow.  It involves multiple interlocked quests, and your decisions result in very, very different things happening, and radically different endings.  I have read some stories where people talk about how amazing that storyline is, and when they described what happened in their playthrough, all that I could think was, "That was nothing compared to what happened in my playthrough!"  It looks like I inadvertently ended up with what could be called the "best" solution to everything, but even that involves a lot of moral ambiguity.  And this is all in a fairly low-level point of the story!

Moral ambiguity is a fantastic thing in games. Too bad I have to pass for the time being.

Too bad. I just finished another quest line which was very interesting and very well-written. We shall just say that it involves a character named "Uma." But I understand with everything that you have going on, even the simple pleasures of escaping into a fantasy world may be out of reach for the time being.

I able to read a chapter or two of a book every other night . . .

Ouch.