Just wanted to share my appreciation of the game.
I grabbed a copy of this game a year ago, taking advantage of a sale and ahead of the massive update. Then forgot about it, never touched it.
Fast forward a year later, and now I got a steam deck and decided to dive into the game. I love it. I’m just a few hours in but I can already say this is among my favorite games. The broad openness of the world, the level of detail, the characters, the interactive dialogs, the items, the strategies, the game mechanics. It’s a very involved game. It really is up there. Thank you CDPR for this game and this remake.
It’s in my top 5 of all time, and i get lost in it any time I boot up a save lol.
One thing I’d like to recommend to any new player, don’t neglect side missions. Even ones that seem like generic one-offs, just do them. Yes, they might be short kill contracts or something, but every once in a while it’ll string into a 1-2 hour long mini campaign that ends up being a beautiful, incredibly memorable story in itself.
It’s such a shame when I talk to people who’ve played “the whole game” and never encountered any of those awesome mini sagas
Oh and don’t forget the seemingly unimportant quests that might lead to extra dialogue/cutscenes or follow-up quests dozens of hours later. I’ve had quite a few “oh sh*t!” moments with those, lol. It’s astounding how intricately connected some of the individual storylines are.
Absolutely! The big godling payoff comes to mind, which requires you to have done like 3 random side quests at totally different points in the game, none of which even tell you that godlings are involved until you do them, and even if you do them all, you need to make certain choices in order to get the final result.
Thanks for the hints. Are you referring to contracts on the bulletin board in the middle of the towns for instance?
I haven’t tried those yet, they could be interesting. My experience so far has been to try to interact with the people directly, who seem to need assistance of some kind, but I’ll keep the first option in mind too. Thanks!
Yes, some are disguised as simple bulletin board contracts, but then others are either only slightly hinted at during dialogue or even completely unprompted, and you just have to stumble upon them and interact accordingly.
My favorite one in the game started with me strolling into a totally random, unremarkable cottage in the middle of skellige that I had no reason to go into. Then it quickly unravels into a shitstorm of local clan drama that you’re forced to deal with for a while, and ends with the most visually beautiful scenes in the game IMO. If you don’t go into that cottage, chances are you’ll never know it exists.
CDPR put an insane amount of effort into this kind of stuff to make the world feel dynamic and alive.
Thanks for the advice! I’ll make sure to keep an eye open, I am definitely exploring and the other day I landed on a totally OP monster that the game warned me I definitely wanted to flee from, I shat my pants and laughed, both at once.
Also, on the topic of dialogue, the various responses have different shades of yellow (ignoring options which require higher skills to unlock). I interpret the intense yellow options to be necessary responses to pursue the dialogue from a storyline perspective and the fades yellow options more to fulfill my curiosity, is that right?
Yup, exactly. The yellow ones will progress the conversation into the minimum necessary dialogue to complete the mission, and the others are usually just extra context. I say usually because occasionally there are clues in those sections that will let you make better decisions later on that wouldn’t have been obvious, or even open up new “yellow” options if you keep digging at them.