I tried to play HofS when it first came out, and was impressed by the setup and writing but when I hit the toad it was just too tedious to beat and too annoying ..... so I just deleted the game.

When BandW came out I gave HofS another try and it seems the devs fixed whatever issue I had with it initially, and the Toad was now challenging but manageable.

I would say HofS is far superior to the original game. The writing is smarter and far deeper and it has an understated creepiness I have never experienced before i gaming. The characters and voice acting are simply outstanding. The original W3 had some great moments there was just too much of not enough. It was depressing too and the whole save the world and politics just dragged the whole thing down.

The devs must also be thanked for allowing us to play standalone. I would have never played HofS if I had to slog though the whole W3 plot. Now I can play HofS and Band W and just pick side quests that interest me.

Thanks

Yeah, Hearts of Stone only reinforced my opinion that CD Project is a lot better at creating short, linear stories than they are at making massive open worlds.

It agree but would put it another way. The Witcher devs made the most compelling open world I have ever experienced but stumbled in leveraging it to make it flow into a story worthy of it.

A good example is the Save the Mages quest in Novigrad. Mages in W3 can teleport. Triss just blinks and she can go anywhere. The whole quest made no sense. Keeping high QC standards in a world as big as W3 is almost impossible.

Devs should focus on making great 10 hour self contained experiences and weave them together into a full game.

As I said,. Several quests in the main and side parts of the game showed that the genius, talent and infrastructure is there ..... IMO it just needed focusing. HofS is just that.

If they could spare the staff I wish they would make some more DLC

Sorcerers -- each and every one -- have to know the destination and equally as important, teleporting is very exhausting. Not only that, not all mages are adept enough to use teleportation. Triss was trying to save *all* the mages she could, master and apprentice alike. There's no plot hole here.

My thoughts are that HoS was trite. It was well put together, but the story was banal. On the other hand, I absolutely loved B&W... yes, even the fairy tale land. Just as trite you might say? Perhaps, but the story had that much more coherence, and was far more gripping.

People like you should install the game but delete themselves

Fucking savage, and true.

Watch this. That's not to say story wasn't trite, but most stories in Witcher are just retellings of classical Slavic tales with a twist, Blood and Wine being no exception.

That said, after finishing Blood and Wine, it's now officially the best bit of Witcher 3 I've played. I do dearly hope CD Project learns from their experience with Witcher 3 and applies it to Cyberpunk, because if they do, something extraordinary could come out of this. ... Well, even more extraordinary than W3.

That was painful to watch (listen to)... that hurried monotonous delivery, ugh! Nothing in there changes my view. Playing HoS continually left me with a "Seen it... seen it... I don't want to be here, I want to be doing something else" feeling, whereas Blood and Wine had me, hook line and sinker, right from the start. Personal feelings, I know, but that's how the one gripped me and the other didn't. I recently started a new game, and played on through the ending (base) and on to Blood and Wine, completely foregoing Hearts of Stone, that's how much it (didn't) captured my imagination.

Yeah, but it's well-researched information so that accounts for something. My point was that most of W3's content is like that, in one way or another, and when the underlying story holds no interest to you, neither will CDP's retelling. The important bit is that due to the way W3's story is structured and due to how it draws inspiration from classic sources, its tone can often be all over the place. Which is good for me as I appreciate variety, but it just increases the chance some content will just entirely miss their target with some players - that was entirety of Gwent and all early monster contracts for me. It's a shame, but what's great is that like 90% of Witcher 3 is entirely optional. It's also a shame you had to drop money on it, but you'd probably buy it anyway so eh... Aww, didn't even like the wedding? The Wedding was great. Well, Hearts of Stone was structured entirely differently from most of the game. Blood and Wine again went back to Witcher 3's structure, condensed in a small area - which is rather cool as I really like White Orchard and Blood and Wine is the same kind of concentrated goodness. Besides, I can't imagine a more fitting ending to the trilogy. Hell, to the entire ... Uhhh... Undekalogy? That's 8 books + 3 games?

I hope I never grow so jaded as to find something as wondrous and magical as Hearts of Stone as banal and trite. That does up my hopes for Blood & Wine though, it must truly be a masterpiece.

The wedding was actually one of the worst parts of the expansion for me. I played this right through from Witcher 1, in which my Geralt romanced Shani. He finally gets to see her again, gets invited to a function and is sidelined by one of the most obnoxious characters (beside Dandelion) one could ever have the misfortune to 'meet'. It was awful tomfoolery. Now if Geralt had been allowed to reform a proper dialog with Shani... get to know her again, that would have made the wedding much more palatable in my book. As it stands, it's a farce (not in a funny sense) in my book.

Well, during the main game Geralt and I became something like "one person" - meaning: as long as the game permitted it, Geralt acted "my way".
Thought HoS could continue this experience.
And, though nothing in HoS is exactly badly done (plot wise), there are a lot of areas where the choices given had not been mine, could not have been and therefore everything had been selecting the lesser evil there.
Then, there is The Man of Glass/Mirror - whatever.
Honestly, there is no single NPC in the whole game that I despise as much! In fact he is the reason I stopped playing HoS two thirds done.
My greatest fear (O'Dimm shows up in B&W, again) had been for naught, and thankfully so, because - in my eyes - B&W is the most fitting end to this part of the Witcher story.

Only my personal opinion, anyway ...

I bet you watch cartoons and the Disney channel. ;)

In all seriousness, it has nothing to do with being jaded; some things catch your fancy and some things don't. Believe me, I'm into wondrous, magical tales of all sorts. This just didn't do it for me.

Now that was me and the entire Witcher 3 when I started playing it. When I realized that what I did in the other games is more or less ignored, I started ignoring them myself. It's generally an unfortunate result of Witcher 3 being as large as it is - making it reactive to previous games would be even more of a nightmare.





!!SPOILEEEEERS!!!

!!SPOILEEERS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually, he kind of does. Spoons?