The more things change…
I’m still grinding out the story in The Witcher 3, but holy cow is it tough sledding, and at this point 95% of the entertainment is seeing how far down the derp trail this game goes.Example: A deadly force is chasing your daughter, quick, put on a freaking comedy play (zero funny jokes during that btw) to help you find this character, who will help you free this other character, who once freed will tell you he doesn’t have any information about your daughter… Has ANYONE played this game past Bloody Baron and enjoyed it? No? Ok, didn’t think so. GotY everyone…
Anyone back to games that hold up past 10 hours and things that make sense even if you do rub two brain cells together; Prophecy of Pendor has been updated to version 3.7, and the change log looks impressive. I was going to stay away from M&B because of the upcoming Bannerlord, but I don’t think that game is coming ‘soon’, so screw it, back to PoP I go.
Hardcore Casual 
Out of curiosity, why does the lack of press to find Ciri bother you so much in this game? I mean, while playing I never even felt it described as a particularly urgent quest. While the Geralt does really want to find her, he is working due to a dream, and based on weeks/month old information, and to me it felt more like a detective trailing than a rush to find someone. It is also not like the wild hunt is a new or surprising enemy chasing Ciri, the hunt has been after her for years.
This lack of push is not a particularly uncommon happening in open world games, all the fallouts (F4 main char is pushing way harder to find his/her baby child, in F3 you can walk away from an exploding reactor to go back x quests later to finalise that), dragon age games (In inquisition the world is being ripped apart, while you peacefully continue the gather 20 objects games before bothering with the main) and skyrim (pretty much every quest ever) also suffer from this affliction.
I understand it annoying you, but what makes it more annoying here than in other games?
A lot of the main quest solutions Gerald reinforces that he is pressing to find Ciri because she is in danger. Even at the near-end of Bloody Baron, the final few steps aren’t part of the main quest anymore (which is also an awkward gaming mechanic in terms of the quest journal) because Gerald ‘doesn’t care’. It’s constant, except that it’s not consistent with what quests you actually have to do. If Gerald really was in a rush, he would have figured out a different way to get what he wants vs putting on a play, or helping some random people a dozen times or more. He is a witcher after all, with the witcher sense the game keeps reminding you about but never having you use it in a way that would really make sense. It’s like if you were playing as Superman, and the goal was to get over a building, so Superman uses his super-strength to help a digging crew so they can dig him a tunnel. Just fly over the damn building…
In F4 you want to find your child, yes, but there is no ‘main bad guy’ that you can see chasing them. Plus once you do find the child, the chase ends, but that’s about half of the main questline. Also you can focus just on the main quest line and the game ‘works’, if you do that in W3 you fall behind in levels/gear, and the game doesn’t scale. Same issue but in reverse is in effect too; if you skip early side quests, you out-level them so can’t go back and get the intended experience. F4 works as an open-world game, the W3 is a fixed-path story placed in a more open-world setup that doesn’t work either for the mechanics or the story it’s trying to tell. That’s a massive flaw, which makes W3 winning GotY so silly to me, and why I think most people play it up until the tail end of Bloody Baron and stop; the game hasn’t fully broken down mechanically at that point.
I don’t entirely disagree with your scaling comment, it is true, just not an issue to me.
What does surprise me is that you say it isnt an issue in fallout. You could massively outlevel everything on the highest difficulty, without much effort at all, and trivialize the entire game. At the same time, if you really only do the mainquest, you will also fall behind. I really don’t think either game handles it better than the other, both are very flawed in powerprogression.
In F4 if you play ‘normally’, the game scales with you. My first playthrough was main-quest only, and I didn’t have a single issue with scaling. Sure you can min/max and break it, but that’s always been part of a Bethesda game, and I don’t see it as a flaw.
In W3, if you play ‘normally’, you will interrupt the main quest often with side quests (which goes back to the problem with the story vs the game mechanics), or focus only on story and screw up a lot of balance/content later on. It’s almost impossible to play the game without SOMETHING going gray. There is no way to play W3 ‘normally’ and have the story make sense while having the mechanics fit what is happening. That’s… kind of a huge flaw.
Now sure, if you ignore either the theme of the story, or you ignore a lot of the mechanics, W3 is fine. At Twitter-like attention levels and thinking, it mostly works. I don’t think its a great game, but even with its flaws its hard to call it outright bad. But not outright bad and GotY is a large difference, and W3 is winning GotY in places, which is the part I find to be a joke.
Because He is buthurt that is precious FO4 did win GTY in all publications.
M&B2 coming out this year as well. I really need to give this game another shot. Played a little MP and that was fun in a medievil COD sort of way. So that mod page warns PoP is for experienced players only – that your opinion? Could someone with just plain ol game playing and fps experience still play it straight off?
You could jump straight in, so long as you understand M&B basics around combat and such. A lot of the details, especially the later-game stuff (once you have a kingdom) you can look up on the wiki or a guide. The hardest part will be the start, but that’s generally how M&B is anyway.
I played it to the end, twice, the “Deadly force chasing thingie” didn’t bother me any diferently then the “Find find the GECK” in FO2 or “get us water” in FO1, not to mention “save Shaun” in FO4.
All those kind of games give you a “MISSION”, give you a “TIME IS RUNNING OUT” or similar and the give you the classic RPG quest
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FetchQuest
I truly enjoy your Witcher 3 articles, just to see how far down the derp trail these go. Although I’d much prefer to read how much you’ve enjoyed Eve, Darkfail 2 (or did they shut down that POS already?), ESO (no wait, it’s not subscription based anymore even though it was the mmo-Jesus at some point, according to you), Final Fantasy XXIV: The Search for More Money, and all the other successful subscription based megahit mmos recently.