• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

The Witness |OT|

xxracerxx

Don't worry, I'll vouch for them.
The fact that £30/$40 is now considered 'mid-budget' concerns me. Wasn't that long ago that £30 would the price of any big brand-new game on PC, whether on Steam or in-store.

One of the reasons for going into PC gaming used to be the cheap prices on software. Now it's the same prices as the console games, without any chance of them lowering in a second-hand market.
Not really sure what you are trying to say here. Don't want to pay full price, wait for a sale.
 

Afro

Member
Those are the coolest review excerpts though, c'mon. How could you not just instantly buy the game after reading those?
 
Very nice OT. I'm downloading this first thing tomorrow (probably for PS4, still debating), then I'm not going to touch this OT for as long as I can hold out. Really want to parse as much of the game as possible on my own.
 

inm8num2

Member
I don't know when I'll get a chance to play this game. Hopefully sometime this year. Super excited that the reception has been positive.
 

GDJustin

stuck my tongue deep inside Atlus' cookies
This sentence is making me not want to get the game. I suck at puzzle games, struggled with portal 2, and probably will struggle with this. If its simply too hard for my mind to comprehend, then i feel like i will just have a bad time and could spend my money elsewhere. But there's also the chance i might get it and have a great time. So im conflicted.

Yeah, I mean, The Witness is a brilliant game, one of my favorites in recent memory. But it's harder and requires quite a bit more from people than Portal 2. I'm not afraid to say it isn't for everyone, and if someone struggled with Portal 2 it might be hard to get through much of The Witness without resorting to guides.

Edit: This game could really benefit from a crowd-sourced hint system, like oldschool adventure games. Wikis will just show you where to put the line. Hints could say something like "look around you before trying to solve" and then get gradually more obvious from there.

Is sound used for puzzles at all or will I be able to play with other music playing over top?

There is one set of puzzles, all in one area, that deal with sound. None anywhere else in game. You should know when you find them.
 
I'm looking for a quote Blow had a while ago about the puzzles not all being easy? Something along the lines of "if they were all easy and meant to be solved, than they're just exercises." Anyone know which one I'm talking about?
 
If i remember correctly soma which was in the same situation as the witness regarding no preorder status, was available on the psn store at 12:30 gmt.
So i guess ill wait up till then, to see if it gets put up.
 

TheJoRu

Member
I was sold on this game and now I think you just unsold me. I'm so torn right now

image.php


But seriously, I feel the exact opposite after reading that post. I'm so ready for a challenging puzzle game. For sure there will times in which I just want to give up and never play the game again, but the lure of those moments of epiphany when you solve something complex that you've struggled with for a long time is just too great for me.
 
image.php


But seriously, I feel the exact opposite after reading that post. I'm so ready for a challenging puzzle game. For sure there will times in which I just want to give up and never play the game again, but the lure of those moments of epiphany when you solve something complex that you've struggled with for a long time is just too great for me.

I guess it all depends on your confidence to be able to solve them. Like for me, since i struggled with portal 2 at points and this seems to be way harder, im worried i will repeatedly have to consult a guide or risk literally never getting past a puzzle even if i spend 10+ hours on one lol.
 

Menome

Member
...what?

Also, have you heard about a little thing called "inflation"? That, coupled with increasingly high expectations of better graphics, means games can't stay the same price.

Bioshock Infinite was almost exactly three years ago and was £34.99 on Steam. Now we have a game described as 'mid-budget' that's only a fiver cheaper than that was and games like Street Fighter V at £44.99. That's way beyond normal inflation rates.

Console game prices have stayed at pretty consistent levels in the past three years, save for the launch-window 'Next-Gen Tax' on PS4/Xbox One games which has settled back down again now. For some reason, PC games are seeing a hike in general prices.

EDIT: I'm buying the game tomorrow. It doesn't mean I can't voice a concern at an unfortunate trend.
 

Alienous

Member
I guess it all depends on your confidence to be able to solve them. Like for me, since i struggled with portal 2 at points and this seems to be way harder, im worried i will repeatedly have to consult a guide or risk literally never getting past a puzzle even if i spend 10+ hours on one lol.

Trying to out headbutt any problem isn't the right way to go about it. If you're willing to be patient, even if that means sleeping on it, I can't see why The Witness wouldn't be manageable. Braid certainly was.

Looking at a guide does miss the point - the value of a puzzle game is in triumphing over puzzles.
 
I guess it all depends on your confidence to be able to solve them. Like for me, since i struggled with portal 2 at points and this seems to be way harder, im worried i will repeatedly have to consult a guide or risk literally never getting past a puzzle even if i spend 10+ hours on one lol.

It's very unlikely you'll reach a point where you're unable to progress anywhere on the island, at all. So yea, if you can't progress on Puzzle A, go somewhere else. What's more likely to happen if you consult a guide is that you find out that you hadn't even reached the area that contained the clue you needed in order to progress with the puzzle you were stuck on.

The thing about this game is that you're never told if you have the tools available to solve a particular puzzle yet. Sometimes you approach a puzzle and you're just not ready to solve it yet. That's part of the design. Come back later.
 
Yeah, I mean, The Witness is a brilliant game, one of my favorites in recent memory. But it's harder and requires quite a bit more from people than Portal 2. I'm not afraid to say it isn't for everyone, and if someone struggled with Portal 2 it might be hard to get through much of The Witness without resorting to guides.

Edit: This game could really benefit from a crowd-sourced hint system, like oldschool adventure games. Wikis will just show you where to put the line. Hints could say something like "look around you before trying to solve" and then get gradually more obvious from there.



There is one set of puzzles, all in one area, that deal with sound. None anywhere else in game. You should know when you find them.


What was your opinion on Braid? And how would you say this compares to that? Mainly in terms of difficulty(and maybe atmosphere, story, theming effectiveness, if you want to discuss that). I thought that game was about perfect, where I was often on the edge of wanting to look up answers, but I always felt like I knew just enough and had just enough experience and was sooooo close to figuring it out that I'd stick with it. It wasn't punishing of mistakes and allowed experimentation, but you couldn't really accidentally stumble into answers either, so every puzzle was satisfying when solved.

Obviously this game has way more puzzles, and apparently plenty of the sort that require pen and paper to solve, by your own suggestion, so a direct comparison isn't possible, but any insight would be interesting to hear.
 
I bought Braid years ago, played it for half an hour and thought "this is great, but I have other games to play right now".

The Witness gets announced. I'm not very interested.

Years pass.

I come to Neogaf and people are very excited about The Witness. I ask why, people explain, I'm intrigued.

I fire up Braid. Holy shit, the game is freaking amazing. Two days later (today), I finish the game and the ending is absolutely mind-blowing.

I am now very excited about The Witness. I'm so glad it took me this long to play Braid, because the long wait for The Witness would have been unbearable!
 

Catvoca

Banned
Looks like the OT title is fixed on mobile, good job whoever did that! Can't wait until tomorrow afternoon when I can really dig into this, haven't been this excited to play a new game in ages.
 
I bought Braid years ago, played it for half an hour and thought "this is great, but I have other games to play right now".

The Witness gets announced. I'm not very interested.

Years pass.

I come to Neogaf and people are very excited about The Witness. I ask why, people explain, I'm intrigued.

I fire up Braid. Holy shit, the game is freaking amazing. Two days later (today), I finish the game and the ending is absolutely mind-blowing.

I am now very excited about The Witness. I'm so glad it took me this long to play Braid, because the long wait for The Witness would have been unbearable!
I'm glad this had a happy ending. I was going to be pretty upset if you didn't go back to finish Braid.
 
It's very unlikely you'll reach a point where you're unable to progress anywhere on the island, at all. So yea, if you can't progress on Puzzle A, go somewhere else. What's more likely to happen if you consult a guide is that you find out that you hadn't even reached the area that contained the clue you needed in order to progress with the puzzle you were stuck on.

The thing about this game is that you're never told if you have the tools available to solve a particular puzzle yet. Sometimes you approach a puzzle and you're just not ready to solve it yet. That's part of the design. Come back later.

But the impression I got from GDJuistin was that some puzzles will just simply be too hard for some people even when accounting for all the clues you can find by exploring, id imagine eventually at some point you will have to come back to the harder puzzles
 

GhaleonEB

Member
I bought Braid years ago, played it for half an hour and thought "this is great, but I have other games to play right now".

The Witness gets announced. I'm not very interested.

Years pass.

I come to Neogaf and people are very excited about The Witness. I ask why, people explain, I'm intrigued.

I fire up Braid. Holy shit, the game is freaking amazing. Two days later (today), I finish the game and the ending is absolutely mind-blowing.

I am now very excited about The Witness. I'm so glad it took me this long to play Braid, because the long wait for The Witness would have been unbearable!
Very cool, glad you went back to it. Braid is a very particular game and I find I have be in a certain mindset to play it, and that's not always the case. And that ending is still the single greatest epiphany I've had in all of gaming, seeing what was really going on. Also one of the best examples of story telling through gameplay I've experienced. It's why I'm so excited for The Witness.
 

icespide

Banned
so on a scale from Portal 2 to Fez, how obscure and difficult are the puzzles and progression in this game?

I had no issues with Portal 2, but I eventually gave up on Fez
 

WITHE1982

Member
If i remember correctly soma which was in the same situation as the witness regarding no preorder status, was available on the psn store at 12:30 gmt.
So i guess ill wait up till then, to see if it gets put up.

Damn you Gwyndolin!

*puts lid back on cocoa and waits another 5 minutes.
 

Servbot24

Banned
The fact that £30/$40 is now considered 'mid-budget' concerns me. Wasn't that long ago that £30 would the price of any big brand-new game on PC, whether on Steam or in-store.

One of the reasons for going into PC gaming used to be the cheap prices on software. Now it's the same prices as the console games, without any chance of them lowering in a second-hand market.
Why can't games just sell for whatever they're worth, without having weird and arbitrary labels of constraint like "mid-budget"?
 
I bought Braid years ago, played it for half an hour and thought "this is great, but I have other games to play right now".

The Witness gets announced. I'm not very interested.

Years pass.

I come to Neogaf and people are very excited about The Witness. I ask why, people explain, I'm intrigued.

I fire up Braid. Holy shit, the game is freaking amazing. Two days later (today), I finish the game and the ending is absolutely mind-blowing.

I am now very excited about The Witness. I'm so glad it took me this long to play Braid, because the long wait for The Witness would have been unbearable!

Unfortunately, I had the ending of the game spoiled for me years ago, before I knew I'd ever play it. And, even without context, I somehow managed to remember it years later when I played it just because the very concept was so interesting to me. I still really liked the ending, but I do wonder what my reaction would have been if I got to see it for the first time while playing.

Likewise with the
secret stars to collect, which I unfortunately saw when I looked up the game after beating it to see impressions and such on it more in depth.

I had an inkling that there was something up there, and I was interested in exploring the game more to find their signifigance anyway, but even still, seeing their existence (and the location of one or two, accidentally) I think is a bit of a shame on its own, having no more sense of mystery and eventual discovery around it.

There's only one puzzle in the whole game I didn't particularly enjoy, but there's something special about games when you can pinpoint the moment that made you say "wow, this is special."
The painting puzzle in World 1 was this for me.
I'm excited for that moment in The Witness too. I've already gotten a sense of that just from
the reflected praying figure in the trailer
, so I really couldn't be more excited for this.
 
But the impression I got from GDJuistin was that some puzzles will just simply be too hard for some people even when accounting for all the clues you can find by exploring, id imagine eventually at some point you will have to come back to the harder puzzles

But how do you know if the puzzle you're stuck on is one that's "too hard" or you just don't have the information? Until you go look it up, read the solution, and then find out "oops, I could have actually solved that"
 
Top Bottom