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The Witcher 3 vs Skyrim: which did you prefer?

Witcher 3. No doubt about it!

I only bought the game a few weeks ago, but it has been truly amazing so far. The world, the quests and the character / monster design are just so damn good. I've spent hours so far just getting lost in the interesting side quests and Witcher contracts. As opposed to Skyrim where I found the story boring and spent about 80 hours exploring and messing around!
 
Tried to start TW3 on 3 separate occasions and each time I get a few hours in and have to stop because I find it so boring. It's wierd as I loved Skyrim despite its many faults, and expected TW3 to be better in every way, but I just can't get it to click with me. I really dislike the combat and Geralts voice is worse than Bales Batman. Not everyone will like the same things, and this is one of those times for me.
 
As a game? Yea I agree Witcher 3 runs over Skyrim with ease. It should it's four years newer and much more focused.

As an experience? It's not even close Skyrim on PC, with mods, is one of the most beautiful games you will ever lay eyes on. The possibilities are limitless want to run around naked? No problem. Talk to dragons, add over 300 fully voiced and fleshed out npc's and relationships? No problem. Every weapon, fetish, atmosphere you can think of? Covered.

The Witcher 3 is a fantastic game but Skyrim really shows what's possible when imagination meets implementation.
 

http://gamerant.com/fallout-4-development-team/

“We’re still a scrappy team. We’re just over 100 people – not nearly as big as some of the other studios."

I'll take them at their word then. That sounds way too low for the type of game they're making, but then again, that might explain a few things about the outdated tech and level of polish. (Coming from someone who remains a big Fallout fan.)
 
Skyrim is just an application you use to mess around with mods. Other than that Witcher 3 is better in pretty much every way.
 
Skyrim is better because I can easily mod it so people are naked all the time.

Witcher is worse because I have to wait for the storyline to call for nudity.

THREAD CLOSED.
 
I liked The Witcher better due to superior writing but I completed Skyrim (got to
the final map on witcher
before I felt burnt out on it). I think I'm leaning towards the latter because it was more pick up and play friendly whereas the wither demand more time.
 
modded Skyrim > Witcher 3 > vanilla Skyrim

Skyrim by itself is entirely forgettable, but the community surrounding it - the amazing mods - make it my favorite video game experience....possibly ever.
The sense of presence and immersion with mods is fantastic.

Witcher 3 is great and I love its narrative branching paths. But as much as I love Geralt...you cannot be anyone other than Geralt.
Modded Skyrim can (literally!) feel like a different game every time - thanks to playing as a new character and leveling up different perks and using different mods.
 
I probably put more time into Skyrim, but Witcher 3 by far. Great world, characters, story, so much so that I was actually sad when it was done. Main reason I've been holding off finishing Blood and Wine is because I'm not ready to let Geralt and Co. go. I'm looking forward to revisiting this one in a few years for another playthrough.
 
I absolutely love the sense of immersion that Bethesda's games, and Skyrim in particular, can provide. I just wish their various systems were better designed. At about the 10 to 20 hour mark, the illusion completely fades for me in every single one of their games. Everything becomes stupidly easy to exploit and you see all of the ugly seams in their simulation. Bethesda is pretty much second to none in making awesome looking worlds and environments that I want to explore, but I really wish they could tighten up the game systems that come with those worlds, because they simply do not feel satisfying or meaningful to me.
 
They're pretty similar but also quite different. Witcher 3 is very much based around all the stories and secrets hidden throughout its world. Skyrim on the other hand is a much more systemic game that's more about inhabiting its world from day to day.

Witcher 3 definitely feels like it had better craftsmanship put into its story, art, and characters as well as the overall construction of its physical world. Skyrim on the other hand has deeper and more varied systems in its world for players to mess around with.

Those differences aside, a lot of people see Witcher 3 as simply being a more sincerely-designed game. Skyrim, like a lot of big-budget games, feels like its content, interface, and other aspects were designed and dispersed to appeal to an extremely broad set of users and because of that can often feel a bit bland in its execution. Witcher 3 just feels like it had more soul put into it, like CDProjekt stuck to its vision and wasn't just thinking about what would sell the most copies. This is what I imagine puts Witcher 3 above Skyrim for so many people.
 
Skyrim. The combat in the witcher 3 is horrible, and considering how much i hear about Skyrim's combat, that was pretty shocking.

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Skyrim is magical. Witcher 3 is one-and-done.

 
Witcher 3 so easily it's not even fair.

I liked Skyrim, it has a nice map, and that... is pretty much all it has going for it. Quests are boring, dungeons are all copy/paste. Fighting was terrible. Barely any memorable characters. Some nice music sometimes at least.

Witcher 3 has amazing story, characters, fantastic music, quests. The side quests feel like main quests. And the DLC + Expansion packs. Just perfection.
 
Skyrim, by far.

Witcher 3 has a much much much better story & characters.

But I loved the exploration you get from Skyrim. Randomly walk around, find caves, buildings, etc. Loot to find.
 
Skyrim when it came out was a pretty great game but The Witcher 3 is a better game in every aspect. The Witcher 3 is the best RPG I've ever played hands down.
 
Those differences aside, a lot of people see Witcher 3 as simply being a more sincerely-designed game. Skyrim, like a lot of big-budget games, feels like its content, interface, and other aspects were designed and dispersed to appeal to an extremely broad set of users and because of that can often feel a bit bland in its execution. Witcher 3 just feels like it had more soul put into it, like CDProjekt stuck to its vision and wasn't just thinking about what would sell the most copies. This is what I imagine puts Witcher 3 above Skyrim for so many people.

It really feels like I played a different games from you guys, there's the Witcher vision (aka the detective vision in Batman), all the usual collectible and point of interest you find in an open world and fetch quests. It has great execution but it still feature a lot of what publishers feel "would sell the most copies".
 
They're offering pretty different kinds of experiences. I think Witcher 3 is better crafted, but I like what Skyrim is offering more and prefer TES as a setting.

Plus you can play as a lizard person in Elder Scrolls games, which probably accounts for like 80% of my enjoyment from them.
 
Neogaf is a practically a church of Witcher 3, so it's not surprising to see the overwhelming number of people saying they prefer that game.

As for me, Skyrim by a mile. The world was actually fun to explore and enjoy. I'm someone who values gameplay much, much more than story, so while the Witcher 3's story was fine, the gameplay and the world left me cold. Will never, ever understand all the praise that boring, clunky game gets.
 
Skyrim...it has more freedom , more choices...

Witcher 3 has weird control, it is somehow laggy...Also skills and magic is not good..Gameplay sucks...Npcs have funny armors, helmets etc

Skyrim has better exploration and of course it has dragons...it has way better dungeons, caves...
 
I think Witcher is a vastly better game in a whole host of areas and I think it's probably one of the greatest games ever made. I also had a lot more fun with Skyrim and would pick the latter 10 times out of 10 over W3 as a "desert island" game.
 
Skyrim. By a lot. Couldn't even get interested enough in Witcher three to put in more than a few hours

While I love both Skyrim and Witcher 3 equally, I'd strongly encourage you to keep playing Witcher 3. The entire first area is basically a tutorial and it doesn't get engrossing until you reach Velen (the second area). I had the same trouble, it took several hours before it "clicked" with me, and like you I was very close to giving up.
 
Neogaf is a practically a church of Witcher 3, so it's not surprising to see the overwhelming number of people saying they prefer that game.

As for me, Skyrim by a mile. The world was actually fun to explore and enjoy. I'm someone who values gameplay much, much more than story, so while the Witcher 3's story was fine, the gameplay and the world left me cold. Will never, ever understand all the praise that boring, clunky game gets.

In your own little corner of the world, Skyrim is apparently a thrill to play, while Witcher 3 is boring and clunky. But no, NeoGAF is the outlier.
 
Come on now the difference in quality is gigantic. Don't get me wrong, Skyrim for its time was downright revolutionary and in relation to the year it came out may have been even more enjoyable to some, but the Witcher 3 has elevated the open world, storytelling, and visual fidelity in the modern gaming industry. If Skyrim would just be released right now it would be received fine but definitely even worse than fallout 4 which is a great game but purely because of how amazing the Witcher 3 is, games post-witcher are judged that much more harshly.

tl;dr: Witcher 3 destroys Skyrim but that doesn't take away from how great Skyrim was for its time.
 
The Witcher 3.
I actually like my RPG games with charismatic characters, good story and great quest game designs)

The only thing that saved my Skyrim playthrough were some fine chaps making the great "Interesting NPCs" mod.
Todd Howard such feel ashamed of the shit work he usually does. CDPR eats his portfolio for breakfast, even TW1 and TW2 is better than anything he has done.
 
In your own little corner of the world, Skyrim is apparently a thrill to play, while Witcher 3 is boring and clunky. But no, NeoGAF is the outlier.

Not saying GAF is the outlier, and Skyrim is certainly plenty clunky, I just enjoyed messing around in that world much, much more.
 
I would I never thought so before playing the Witcher 3, not really liking the first one and thinking the sequel was alright. But shiiiiiiit. Witcher 3 blows away Skyrim for me now after playing it for hours.

The quests all around felt so much more rewarding. I was blown away by how detailed the majority of the side quests were in TW3.

Also, the game world felt much more "lived in" with TW3. Don't get be wrong, Skyrim's world is great too, but you could feel the developers hand a little more.

I also felt the characters were much more interesting in TW3.
 
Skyrim blew me away at the time. The music helped but the gameplay was great for me too - epic locations and so on.

Witcher 3 is fun for me - but it hasn't captured me like skyrim did. Hell I often boot up the skyrim trailer and I still get chills.
 
Personally Skyrim. I played about 5-10 hours of the Witcher 3 before stopping because the controls for Geralt were frustratingly slippery. Also I don't particularly like Geralt, and the possibility space for who Geralt is is much more limited than even Skyrim's condensed RP space.

*edit* I'm not saying Skyrim has great combat, just that I can actually move the character. Also I jumped off a waterfall to escape a fight in Skyrim, personally tracked down and found all the Dragon Priest masks, and had great experiences dealing with the cold with the Frostfall mod. Repeating it makes me remember even more why I prefer Skyrim.
 
Modded Skyrim > Witcher 3. Got over 300 hours in Skyrim just playing different characters with immersive mods - things like iNeeds (eating/drinking/sleeping), Frostfall (hypothermia), no fast travel, no markers and a paper map, etc. Probably one of my favorite gaming experiences once it's modded.
 
Stable Modded-to-hell-and-back Skyrim > Witcher 3

Witcher 3 vs Vanilla Skyrim isn't a fair comparison in my book. Either way, I had more fun playing vanilla Skyrim anyways. I like to RP in these big games, which was much easier. Don't get me wrong Witcher 3 was phenomenal. I beat W1 and W2, but to be honest I got about halfway through W3 before giving up because the story did not hook me at all. Skyrim on the other hand I spent about 100+ hours on vanilla and probably another 100 after adding 200+ mods.
 
Bethesda games combat make Witcher 3 look like fucking Dark Souls.

I feel kind of bad that The Witcher came out close to Bloodborne and was constantly having its combat compared to that, because its combat sill blows away its competition in other open-world Western RPGs. Elder Scrolls combat is the most basic hack and slash imaginable.
 
It took a long time for me to get comfortable with Witcher 3, and much longer to finally get around to trying out all of the game's systems (especially alchemy). Ultimately I completed the main game and both expansions, spending hundreds of hours with the game.

With Skyrim, I was invested immediately, and set out trying to build up the character I wanted. I didn't care about the story much, and my interest in that aspect declined the more I played. Once I developed my character to the point that there was no reason to continue leveling, I stopped playing... only to start all over several months later. This happened a total of three times, with my interest in the game ending after almost exactly 50 hours each time.
 
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