Misunderstanding on FFXV Sales Break-even Point (Off-Topic)

by cheapLEY , Monday, February 13, 2017, 13:11 (2622 days ago) @ Kahzgul

This has been my experience of the Witcher series, front to back:

Witcher 1: incredible world, but the combat is so goddamn awful I still couldn't bring myself to play very much of it at all. Incredibly clunky and overly complicated controls at every turn.

Yeah, I feel the same way. The combat isn't hard, it's just boring and unfun. I can sort of respect what they were trying to do--the way Witchers fight is always described as sort of dance-like in the books. They basically all focus on cutting throats or arteries with only the tips of their swords, using weird acrobatics to avoid having to bang swords together. The Witcher 1 tries to make that a reality with it's weird rhythm based combat. It just doesn't feel good to play.

Witcher 2: incredible world, decent combat. The hardest fight in the entire game is the first real boss fight you run into, and after that it's a pretty even level of difficulty until the end. It feels like Game of Thrones the game, except better than the actual GoT game because it's a real game and not a choose your own adventure. The only real downside is that the plot of Witcher 1 feeds into a lot of what's going on in Witcher 2, and that means that you're not going to know who some people are even though the game acts as if you obviously know who they are. Unless you're some kind of extreme gaming masochist or something.

The Witcher 2 has some great story, but yeah, if you aren't caught up on TW1, it doesn't necessarily make a ton of sense. The combat is really just a clunkier version of TW3 combat, so it's fine but not spectacular. On the upside, the forest level in that game is still gorgeous, and probably still one of the best representations of a forest in a videogame I've ever experienced. The forests in The Witcher 3 are great in their own right, but they don't feel dense enough, which is not a problem in that level of The Witcher 2.

witcher 3: incredible world, incredible everything. Play it. You don't even need to have played the earlier witchers for it to make sense.

Obviously, I really think The Witcher 3 is something special. But I really think it's worth noting how well they made the game for fans of the first two games (Lots of call outs and characters from past events) while not leaving new players feeling confused. I played TW3 first, and I never felt confused. Every time Geralt meets a character he knew from the past games, TW3 does an excellent job of giving context for who that character is, but it does it without it feeling unnatural. They just give the player dialogue options that Geralt would reasonably ask and it all just fills in naturally.