June 20, 2015

A brief rant about my admittedly small problems with The Witcher 3

I am actually kind of pissed at CD Projekt RED. There are bugs in various Witcher 3 quests/activities that make them impossible to complete. Which I mean, okay. That happens with massive games like this. No matter how big your testing team is, you can't simulate millions of people all playing your game and doing every possible thing. No matter how big your testing team is, you can't simulate millions of people all playing your game and doing every possible thing. And yet they've immediately patched out exploits and shit when they pop up. 

You could buy seashells and turn them into pearls that sold for a higher price? Gotta patch so that merchant doesn't sell seashells! Someone has hundreds of thousands of gold? Gotta patch in a max gold cap that works in the dumbest possible way! The gold cap is 65535 or something. When you exceed the cap, when it resets, it will remove full increments of 65535 and leave you the rest. So if you have 67000, instead of dropping you to 65535, it drops 65535 and leaves you 1465. 200000? it drops 65535 3 times and leaves 3395. How dumb is that?

And yet, mutagen bonuses still won't save properly. Every time you load up to play some more, you need to go to your character screen and unequip/re-equip your mutagens so it will redo the math. Not to mention any number of bugs in various quests or activities that make them impossible to complete. For example, Person(s) In Distress map activities are commonly bugged in that the Bandit Leader doesn't spawn, so you can't loot the key to the cage. Of course, that's if the merchant in the cage spawns anyway. HOORAY.

Many of these bugs were posted within days of release. You can see the threads on their forums where players posted them, and you can see the replies from CD Projekt RED acknowledging the bugs. Consoles are on their 4th patch version now, and many of those issues are still not fixed, with no word on when they will be (edit: I guess 1.05 is supposed to fix mutagen bonuses, and stop the gold cap reset). And yet every time someone finds a way to exploit the games systems (not a glitch or a bug, but exploiting something as is), the developers have rushed to patch that out.

So...why the priority for patching out gold or experience exploits in a single player, non-competitive game over actually fixing shit that's broken? Because someone is playing not how you think they should? Because you decided the economy should be A and so nobody is allowed to B? First of all, that's bullshit, and second of all, at least fix actual broken things first!

I mean, there's not much reason to exploit for gold anyway. I know I at least haven't had any real trouble with having enough gold when needed. But I can see the appeal of getting a nice stash built up, so you can just buy missing alchemy or crafting supplies when you need to or whatever. And again, these exploits hurt literally nothing! Players that want to use them will, players that don't won't. They only people impacted by patching them out are the people who want to find and use them, and they're affected negatively.

Also, less annoying, but...um...they could maybe add something that makes it a little clearer when a quest require IMMEDIATE attention. I don't mind being able to fail quests if I screw up; I actually like that. But when nothing about a quest tells you you need to do it the minute you accept it, that's kind of a bummer. Like, it's of course smart to do side quests in Act 1 before advancing to Act 2, but for example, Bitter Harvest makes sense to do it right away. When a guy says ghouls are on the way, please fight them, it's safe to think accepting the quest will mean be ready to fight right then. But Love's Cruel Snares is not even a little bit obvious. Nothing in the quest giver's dialog or the journal entry says you gotta go right this minute, but if you decide wiping out the nearby bandit camp is a bigger deal and go there first, then quest failed with no reason whatsoever. I mean, spoiler alert, you only find the guy's dead body and pass along the bad news...what, did he get too dead in the five minutes it took to deal with the bandits?

So yeah. That's my complaints. Get better priorities on your patches, and maybe a tag in the journal for shit you have to do right away. Please?

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