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Two areas in Witcher 3 are 3.5x larger than entire Skyrim

erawsd

Member
50-hour main quest and 50 hours of side quests. That's 1/3 of the playtime as Skyrim, which was described by Bethesda's Todd Howard as having 300 hours of content.

So....1/3 of the stuff to do and 3.5x the size to do it in..... I find that disconcerting.

300hrs? Is this the same guy that played Ground Zeroes for 100hrs and was still finding new content?
 
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How does this count as "bragging" about it? They simply gave the sizes in a presentation at GDC. It took two weeks for someone on reddit to just do the math and make the comparison. This isn't PR hype, this is fan hype.

Reading comprehension is hard, people don't bother with the OP and just start replying to the thread title.
 

UrbanRats

Member
Because there is no median between the two. Good world design/game design rules over everything else.

"Good world design" is a very vague, and in this context almost pointless term.

Of course good world design is better than bad world design, but whatever that actually means in practicality is to be seen.

I wouldn't want Dark Souls to have a 50 square km forest, but something like Shadow of the Colossus could use something of the sort to great effect, so it changes from game to game, too.

I'm arguing that "smaller more densely packed area" isn't necessarily better at all.
It works best sometimes, and sometimes it makes the world feel like a dumb theme park.
 

Dresden

Member
I'll take the illusion of a big bustling city over hamlets masquerading as metropolises.

Either way I trust in CDPR to deliver.
 
Skyrim was extremely dissapoint on its sense of scale. Every singlecity is barely populated and quite small. I fully welcome cities that actualy feel like one.

One of my biggest issues with Bethesda games.

The Imperial City had like 5 people living there, 3 of which were guards.

Megaton had about as many people as Little Lamplight.

Whiterun, trading capital of Skyrim, has 3 shops.

So bring on the age of actual cities. I care not if the buildings and citizens are copy pasted, that's what cities usually look like and I don't examine peasants very closely.
 

Sycophant

Banned
One of my biggest issues with Bethesda games.

The Imperial City had like 5 people living there, 3 of which were guards.

Megaton had about as many people as Little Lamplight.

Whiterun, trading capital of Skyrim, has 3 shops.

So bring on the age of actual cities. I care not if the buildings and citizens are copy pasted, that's what cities usually look like and I don't examine peasants very closely.

Go play some CRPGs - they do exist. Notable mentions go to Arcanum, Baldur's Gate 2 and the like. The reason why Bethesda and their ilk cut down on scale and content is because they could, and because console limitations. By the sound of it though, CDPR has managed to avert that by going full next gen, and using Umbra.
 

whoszed

Member
Haven't played the previous Witcher games but for some reason I'm interested in this one. Might be a game that'd make me buy PS4
 

HeelPower

Member
Go play some CRPGs - they do exist. Notable mentions go to Arcanum, Baldur's Gate 2 and the like. The reason why Bethesda and their ilk cut down on scale and content is because they could, and because console limitations. By the sound of it though, CDPR has managed to avert that by going full next gen, and using Umbra.

yeah because these games are exactly as detailed graphically as The Witcher 3 aspires to be.
 

elhav

Member
Just Cause 2 had a huge map, but it wasn't really for the best.

Prefer a map full of unique content than huge empty fields.

If Witcher 3 can pull off both things than it would be awesome
 

Sentenza

Member
"Good world design" is a very vague, and in this context almost pointless term.

Of course good world design is better than bad world design, but whatever that actually means in practicality is to be seen.

I wouldn't want Dark Souls to have a 50 square km forest, but something like Shadow of the Colossus could use something of the sort to great effect, so it changes from game to game, too.

I'm arguing that "smaller more densely packed area" isn't necessarily better at all.
It works best sometimes, and sometimes it makes the world feel like a dumb theme park.
Precisely.
 

Dennis

Banned
Exploration-based open-world games need to be huge.

There has to be big, mostly empty, sections for the actual important discoveries to feel earned and have meaning.

Skyrim wasn't empty ENOUGH.
 

Hyun Sai

Member
How does this count as "bragging" about it? They simply gave the sizes in a presentation at GDC. It took two weeks for someone on reddit to just do the math and make the comparison. This isn't PR hype, this is fan hype.

This.

Seems like reading a simple short post is definitely too hard for many.
 

ironcreed

Banned
Exploration-based open-world games need to be huge.

There has to be big, mostly empty, sections for the actual important discoveries to feel earned and have meaning.

Skyrim wasn't empty ENOUGH.

Hell, I love the feeling of trekking across the beautiful countryside, mountains and forests in any direction. It makes the world feel alive and more believable.
 

injurai

Banned
Witcher 3 has no loading screens, that's the whole idea behind umbra + next-gen only.

I thought occlusion culling was a pretty standard thing for quite some time now. Is the idea this is just implement and deploy as opposed to manual rigging or something?
 

Sentenza

Member
Is the combat in Witcher anything to write home about?
it was the weakest point of the first chapter and, while marginally improved, still underwhelming in the second one. So no, not really.
They claim massive improvements in the third which should specifically address some of the weakest parts (animations that you were no able to interrupt, heavy input lag and poor responsiveness, etc) so there's hope at least.

Skyrim wasn't empty ENOUGH.
Sort of. Skyrim, like Oblivion before, was a bad mix of "potato landscape" where everything felt downsized and super compressed, lack of interesting things to do on the road (random encounters weren't exactly exciting stuff) and terrible and dull "points of interests" even when you reached your goals ("Look, here's another dungeon which is essentially a straight line where you walk until the hand mashing the attack button. Your reward is some autoscaled random shit into that chest").
 
don't make it as useless as red dead's map.

hate open worlds because nothing is interactive in the environment. can't cut down trees, can't burn bushes, can't scoop up water, can't dig up land, can't pick up as tone to throw it, can't go into houses, can't even break a single window, can't do shit.
 

RetroStu

Banned
I don't believe it to be honest. Maybe 3-4 times bigger than Skyrims towns or 3-4 times biggest than Skyrims towns put together (and even that doesn't sound that likely) but 3-4 times bigger than the Skyrim map?, no. And even if it is, it will just be a huge expance of nothingness.
 

Prototype

Member
Exploration-based open-world games need to be huge.

There has to be big, mostly empty, sections for the actual important discoveries to feel earned and have meaning.

Skyrim wasn't empty ENOUGH.

I agree with this.

Skyrim at times had too much stuff. But overall, I think it was extremely well done. I really enjoyed Skyrim and had tons of fun just looking for stuff on my own. Nearly every time I played for the 1st 6 months or so I would find something new every time. That felt good.
 

Brannon

Member
I shall patiently wait for this game.

There will probably be fast travel because it's in the lore. Sorceresses could teleport given the right equipment. That said, if it goes by lore those will most likely be very limited in usage. In fact, it would be sort of ideal if you could fast travel to a few major hubs and were forced to traverse manually from there.

So sorta like Dragon's Dogma? That's acceptable. But then, DD is much smaller so who knows. And in the world of The Witcher, you may just have to gather reagents for the sorceresses and pay them in gold or... sex... or... both...

....

WHEN DOES THIS GAME COME OUT?
 

abunai

Member
Just give me atmosphere akin to The Witcher 1 and I'll love you, CDPR.
I'll love the game to the moon and back anyway, but TW1 felt much closer to how I imagined the books in my head.
 

Hellshy.

Member
Is the combat in Witcher anything to write home about?

I know there a lot of people who dont like it but I enjoyed the combat system in the witcher 2. I was playing on 360 and noticed a few things that could be improved but thought it was a welcome change to other combat systems. I thought it was especially good for a relatively small team whose only output I am aware of at the time are witcher and witcher2. I am eagerly looking forward to the witcher 3
 

RetroStu

Banned
I know there a lot of people who dont like it but I enjoyed the combat system in the witcher 2. I was playing on 360 and noticed a few things that could be improved but thought it was a welcome change to other combat systems. I thought it was especially good for a relatively small team whose only output I am aware of at the time are witcher and witcher2. I am eagerly looking forward to the witcher 3

The problem i had with the combat ( in Witcher 2) was the amount of hits enemies took, i mean even when you had leveled Garret up or had a brilliant sword, you still stood there for 10 minutes swiping away at enemies lol (10 minutes is a slight exaggerration)
 

JackHerer

Member
I have the Witcher II for PC (pretty good specs) but have yet to play any of it past the first few sequences, in which I was thoroughly confused having not played the Witcher !. Witcher II also just felt more like an action game than an RPG in the brief time that I played it. The constant and overly long cutscenes (which,again, I did not understand at all) definitely put me off a bit.Maybe I'll go back to it now and give it a solid chance to impress me within a couple of hours playing. I have heard almost nothing but praise for the game over time. Hopefully I love it.

Let me tell you a story: once Skyrim first released, I tried playing it on my xbox 360 (this is way before I got into PC gaming). I pretty quickly wrote it off and stopped playing after a few hours because it just felt kinda boring. After getting into PC gaming about two years or so I decided to give Skyrim a second chance because of how many awesome sounding mods existed.

I now have rough 900 hours playtime in Skyrim and was about to start a new build, but ESO just came out so thats had most of my gaming attention - in addition to Titanfall. Sorry for the ramble post. One thing that cannot be denied is that The Witcher 3 looks phenomenal and if it's fully open world a la Skyrim, that's even more impressive.
 
That 300 content claim is completely bogus unless you factor in mods. anyone can easily complete everything in skyrim under 100 hours.

HA HA HA Oh god I'm dying.

No no no no no. That's complete 100% bullshit. If you're trying to do all the sidequests, clear all the dungeons, actually do all the stuff in the game it's easily 300 hours. Saying it's under 100 hours is just admitting that you've never played the game that much and don't know what you're talking about. You might be able to 100% it in under 100 hours if you try speedrunning it, but I doubt it.
 
Just Cause 2 was 20x20 miles, that's 400 squared miles. That was big, but still manageable because of the fast modes of transport.

And most of it was vast stretches of nothing, giving little inspiration to explore as opposed to just grabbing a chopper and flying to the next military base
 

-tetsuo-

Unlimited Capacity
"Good world design" is a very vague, and in this context almost pointless term.

Of course good world design is better than bad world design, but whatever that actually means in practicality is to be seen.

I wouldn't want Dark Souls to have a 50 square km forest, but something like Shadow of the Colossus could use something of the sort to great effect, so it changes from game to game, too.

I'm arguing that "smaller more densely packed area" isn't necessarily better at all.
It works best sometimes, and sometimes it makes the world feel like a dumb theme park.

I agree?
 

Sentenza

Member
The problem i had with the combat ( in Witcher 2) was the amount of hits enemies took, i mean even when you had leveled Garret up or had a brilliant sword, you still stood there for 10 minutes swiping away at enemies lol (10 minutes is a slight exaggerration)
Yeah, no, not really.
First things first, he's Geralt, not Garret.
Second point, even at the hardest difficulty setting, once you started to get some level up and gear improvement, you were dangerously close to one shot pretty much anything in the game.
 

Hellshy.

Member
The problem i had with the combat ( in Witcher 2) was the amount of hits enemies took, i mean even when you had leveled Garret up or had a brilliant sword, you still stood there for 10 minutes swiping away at enemies lol (10 minutes is a slight exaggerration)

i dont remember it being too bad. Its been awhile but maybe its b/c I always had the best swords possible for that point in time and always used oils and anything else that increased damage. I also leveled garret up as efficiently as possible. I learned quickly trying to be a jack of all trades wasnt the best decision.
 
In this thread I learned that Skyrim was both too big, empty and boring, with nothing to do. While also simultaneously being shrunken down, theme park-like, and crammed too full of stuff in too small a map. People spent hours wandering around in vast, boring, areas of copy-paste nothingness - in between towns that were less than a minute apart from one another on foot!

What an amazing game!

Oh, and the Witcher will be even more/less/bigger/smaller!
 
I thought occlusion culling was a pretty standard thing for quite some time now. Is the idea this is just implement and deploy as opposed to manual rigging or something?
Yes, they are making the process more automated and much more efficient. Same with many parts of the engine.
 

klaushm

Member
The combat in the second game is okay. To make fell like Geralt from the books they need to add something like Batman/Assassins Creed kind of combat.

I agree with people saying Skyrim had to much stuff, you need some space to explore.
And would be awesome if they put more stuff from the books.
 
Exploration-based open-world games need to be huge.

There has to be big, mostly empty, sections for the actual important discoveries to feel earned and have meaning.

Skyrim wasn't empty ENOUGH.

SHADOW. OF. THE. COLOSSUS.

That is how they made the whole world explorable without the nonsense fetch quests. Getting lost here and there may end up going to very unique locations that only serves as exposition. Pretty ballsy for a game that is extremely linear in nature. I love that kind of aesthetic where taking detours really give a sense of the world history without any sort of text and notifications. I wished more open-world games followed this example.
 
One of my big issues with Skyrim was that is was a big open world filled with nothing of great interest. If they feel confident they can pack an area that size with worthwhile content then more power to them.
 

charsace

Member
Go play some CRPGs - they do exist. Notable mentions go to Arcanum, Baldur's Gate 2 and the like. The reason why Bethesda and their ilk cut down on scale and content is because they could, and because console limitations. By the sound of it though, CDPR has managed to avert that by going full next gen, and using Umbra.

You forgot to factor in the cost of creating assets and introduction of voice acting.
 

JackHerer

Member
I wish more games were as mod-friendly as Bethesda's games - particularly single-player games. For example, Watch_Dogs. It would be great if developers were open to the community creating more content and tweaking the game. Bethesda goes above and beyond with this by even releasing developers tools to the community. It's kinda their thing in that, the PC version is practically built to be modded, but I don't see why any other developers couldn't be successful with this strategy.

GTA IV was a pain to mod because you had to go back to a previous old build for any of the mods to work. If the developers had made it a bit easier to mod their games (e.g. GTA IV) I think we would see many, many more mods being produced for that game. The Witcher 3 seems like a good candidate for community mods and support.
 

angrygnat

Member
As long as it's meaningful space. New Vegas was huge but a lot of it was dead. Skyrim was huge and every bit of acreage was amazing. Lots of nothing is still nothing. I'll wait till I see it to be excited.
 

AmyS

Member
Hopefully the PS4 version will look, run and play good enough so I don't feel envious of those with highend gaming PCs,
 

Some Nobody

Junior Member
I'll take the illusion of a big bustling city over hamlets masquerading as metropolises.

Either way I trust in CDPR to deliver.

Co-signed. Nothing bugs me more than entering what's supposed to be a huge city only to discover it's not huge at all.

That said, no fast travel? That's the thing that bugs me about some gamers. If you don't want fast travel, you don't have to use it. But don't ask them to take it out so none of us can have it.

The fact is, it's impossible to make travel so interesting I won't ever use fast travel. Unless you gave me like a dope-ass flying mount or flying base ala the Highwind.
 
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