You can't have both an immersive sandbox with no restrictions and a well-paced non-linear story full of choices and consequences because it would simply be too much. Developers have to choose a focus.

I mean, you could have a sandbox game that focused more on having a great storyline, or you could have TW2 have some sort of limited open world, but having a game with the scope and freedom of Elder Scrolls, and the amount of detail in the environments, AND the branching choices of Witcher would simply take too much money and resources to handle.




As for having a longer and more meaty Witcher 2. Well, I suppose we all want that. But you have to realize that this was made with 8 million dollars and a developer who is just making his second game, with a brand new engine.

You also have to take in mind that almost every quest is very carefully crafter in TW2, there is almost no filler. Making a game with this quality takes a lot of time.

And I rather have a short but sweet experience than a long but boring one.

I totally agree and thought the length of W2 was almost perfect. The only thing a longer game would provide is more repetition which W1 had and it got boring.

I read a lot of complaints about the ending as well, but I think what CDProjekt did was extremely clever and daring. The ending is actually the final hours of the game (from the mage council scene onwards) and you are an active element of that ending. The game successfully concludes it's story while adding a rich background to all these things that have happened in the past and might in the future - no filler. They could have added whole chapters where at the last minute Letho or Dethmold manages to escape once again and you have to track them down... but it would get boring and be very dull stereotypical cliches.

For comparison, compare other games like Assassin's Creed 1 vs it's sequals - first one was horribly repeatative and took much longer to get through it all, or Infamous 1 vs 2.

My first play through was a good 25 hours or so, I expect my 2nd to be around 15-20... which is a lot more gametime than I get from most releases.

Yes I want more of The Witcher world, but the game length was just right.

A few issues with your argument. First of all, it is indeed Kitad's opinion / observation, no need to get derisive about it. Secondly, Skyrim has yet to come out, so as of now it does nothing to support your claims. Finally, if Skyrim turns out not having the same depth of story, or that choices does not significantly alter the plot as in TW2, then do you have to eat your own words?

Putting that aside, I do agree that more exploration, more sidequest, and some rebalancing would be welcome. Seems like we have to wait for a good while though.

I suppose it would be possible, that's not my point. You seem to ignore how hard games like these take to make. To create a good sandbox takes years, and to create a game with the depth of choices and consequences of Witcher 2 it took 4 years. Now, if you want to take both elements together the complexities would multiply exponentially.

On top of that, you want the game to be longer than 50 hours.

I would LOVE a game like that. But I also recognize that developers have to focus and can't have everything in their game.

And no, Skyrim will not have the depth of story of TW2 simply because Bethesda has another focus.

I did mean that Oblivion clearly has an entirely different focus than Witcher. I'd rather the storylines in the TES were a bit more carefully written, but (as the above poster already stated) when endless hours go into developing a game's world the plot is likely to suffer (if only a little). I can understand a preference either way, but I personally love both and feel that Dragon Age just about struck the perfect balance between an expansive world and amazing story/character development (although it clearly isn't as open-ended as TES).

I will admit that I'm relatively new to the cRPG scene; I haven't even played through Planescape, the BG series, or the Fallout series yet (although I plan on getting through at least Planescape and one other before the year is over) - but I will defend DA:O from criticism that I don't feel is constructive as it's the game that really got me into the genre. I feel I'm at the very least just past "noob" status as I've spent 85+ hours in that game as well as the countless hours I've put into the other random RPG ventures I've had in the past (Morrowind, Oblivion, Dungeon Siege, KOTOR, and to a lesser degree the Fallout series and Planescape). At this point I'm not an entirely incompetent judge of a good cRPG :)

As for the Metacritic score, it received at least 80% positive reviews from the non-critic userbase, which is actually quite a good score these days - user reviews are bound to fluctuate a great deal more than critic reviews (with rare exceptions, obviously) as the actual score numbers are more arbitrarily assigned (I can't tell you how many "I'm giving this game a 0 because there are way too many fanboys reviewing...etc" reviews I've seen, and that's hardly fair). You also have to take into account how much video gaming has blown up in the past few years (the increase in the number of people who consider themselves "gamers"). Regardless of the fact that Black Isle made what I hear are utterly incredible RPGs back in the 90s, I would venture a guess that far lesser percentage of the gaming populace (even if that percentage was the entire populace back then) has even heard of Black Isle as opposed to the percentage that has heard of/played DA:O. It is an accurate assumption to say that the people who have reviewed Black Isle's games on Metacritic remember them more fondly than many of today's spastic, unfocused gamers would, and that they therefore probably have a higher user score as a result. This is why I generally lend more trust to Metacritic's critic rating.

I don't see why not TES could have the quality of story and characters of Witcher2, but it would not have the pacing of Witcher because remember that the TES series characterizes for being able to play the story for 5 hours, wander around for 80 hours and then return to the story.
More importantly, while it may have a great story, having that AND the depth of choice and consequence of TW2 would be almost impossible

Slightly off topic here but the TES games do exploration well, and I think CDPR could learn from that. Flotsam is downright empty after eliminating monster nests and there's little in the way of random discovery in the areas of TW2. I'd kill to have some DLC that added some caves or ruins that we could explore.

I agree with you. I mean, I have no problem accepting this game as a more or less linear, pre-defined story, but I'm on my third play-through right now and I miss that feeling of discovering something new. I discovered a bunch of quests by simply exploring Vergen, for example, and now that I know where everything is... it's not as fun. I wish there was more areas to be discovered for the sake of exploration.

I'm pretty sure the developers played and aware of TES games but they are also aware that their game is way better than TES without boring exploration. I don't think anybody would enjoy exploration if it was sub-par quality to the current handcrafted locations of the Witcher. I rushed Oblivion to the end because exploration was too repetitive to be fun (and oblivion gates were atrociously annoying) and the main story was very dull. The Witcher's locations are so amazing BECAUSE there is no free exploration of the environment made by reused patterns through the location generator. If you want to have both interesting locations and a lot of content then you'll wait a next game release for 25 years. Even if you want to wait this long, developers have to eat something too, you know.

Baldur's Gate was pretty close to being both. You wandered around and discovered sidequests and miscellaneous hidden things, but there was also a really good story attached. It really makes me sad that the story has become such a secondary thing (Witcher games excluded, of course), especially since it's a step back from games made in the late 90s.

If you want to get lost in a series of trees, get drunk in a forest. Plot is what makes it an enjoyable escape from reality.

While I agree that it's awesome to get lost in an engrossing plot, it's also easy to get lost in stellar gameplay and design. Crysis is a prime example of this for me - while I utterly adored the first half of the game (plot included), the second half simply wasn't up to snuff. But I still finished it (and still ultimately enjoyed it) because I loved the intuitive suit controls, graphics, soundtrack, and the voice acting.

That's one of the problems of the rising cost of game development: Making games on 3D with huge vistas is more expensive.

Imagine if it would be commercially sound to make a game an isometric game with the budget of Mass Effect 2, for example.

In a recent interview Bethesda said this:
4) Are the main and faction quests branching or linear? What about side quests?
Bruce: We’ve focused on telling one story well. There are decision points in all the quest lines that can change things, but overall it’s a single story. Because the side quests are smaller stories, they are more likely to have major branches. For example, you can decide to save or betray someone, which changes the whole end of the quest. Overall the quest structure in Skyrim is closer to Oblivion than Fallout 3, in that there are many more quests, but they have fewer branches.

See? Developers must choose a focus with their games