Hanley! wrote:@SlightlyJames, damn you for selling me on this.
I have a friend who goes on about the Witcher games all the time, but I couldn't be less interested. They just didn't know the kind of details to focus on to pique my interest apparently. Are the previous two games this rich in detail? There's no chance I'm getting a current gen console in the next year, so it'll be a good long while before I play the third game if ever.
The main thing that always puts me off games like this is the inventory systems and that kinda stuff. I'm not someone who plays RPGs too often. The last one I dropped several hours into was probably Final Fantasy 8 (which also has a collectible card game that I found utterly addictive). I tried to play Skyrim, but I found all the fucking around with the inventory really tedious and gave up on the game pretty quickly. Compared to other games of the genre, do you get the hang of the controls in the Witcher pretty quickly, or is it something that takes a while to get into? My problem these days is that I don't have much time to put into games, so if they don't grab me in the first hour or two of play, I'm unlikely to ever pick them up again.
@Hanley!
The Witcher 3 continues the tradition of the previous games of having a pretty weak tutorial. I think I remember @Everlong saying that he'd played the tutorial of The Witcher 2 and just dropped it completely. Once you move past the hand holding of the first 20 minutes you're given leave to go and do whatever you like. At that point, once the game opens up, it shines.
The inventory system isn't as effective as it could be but it works well enough. The equipment tab for example. If you don't want to bother poring over details to see what equipment is better than the rest there's a general indicator of whether or not the base attributes are better than what you're using. Like if you're holding a sword with 40-50 attack and you find one with 45-55, it will have a
^5 next to it so show you it has 5 more attack.
Generally you can get the job done without bothering to check equipment very often. For me it's generally only when I find myself feeling weaker than I should be that I decide to take a peek at my inventory and see if there's anything I can swap out.
As for the previous games, I haven't played the original. I wasn't a fan of how the combat worked and I didn't find playing it to be particularly satisfying. Luckily in the second game Geralt has amnesia so it's essentially designed so you don't need to have played the first one.
Witcher 2 isn't a massive open world like Witcher 3 but I was quite enamored with it. I played it off the recommendation of a friend and he loaned me his copy, I went through it in a few days and I've been raving it ever since. Obviously, being a much less technically advanced game it lacks a lot of the little things I've mentioned that make the third game as special as it is but it's still a very fine experience and it would give you a bit of context going into Witcher 3 were you to play it.
The Witcher is based off of a series of books by Andrzej Sapkowski. They were originally written in Polish but four of them (The Last Wish, Blood of Elves, Time of Contempt, and Baptism of Fire) have been released in English with more coming. So if you were wanting to see what was going on with the world and all that before potentially splashing for a game, you might want to get a hold of some of them.