What The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Can Learn From Its Predecessors
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With all the talk concerning The Witcher 3's undoubtedly impressive scale and visuals it's nice to see an editorial that instead focuses on what its predecessors did right and urges the folks at CD Projekt to not forget it, penned by VG247's Stephany Nunneley. Here's an excerpt on choices and consequences and quest design:
Both Witcher games have moral consequences regarding decisions made when accepting a quest. For me, decisions I made or quests I took in the first game seemed to matter more, especially when it came to side-questing. When any decision was made, large or small, the consequences of your actions were made known along with the ability to see what would have happened had you chosen a different path. This was not the case in the sequel. Yes, your decisions mattered to the world as a whole, but not when it came to the little things. In The Witcher, someone you decide not to kill could lend you aid further into the game, while in the sequel, the NPCs wouldn't play as large a role. Basically, quests in the first game seemed to all tie together somehow, but in The Witcher 2 they didn't.
I'm not saying the path you took in The Witcher 2 didn't matter, I just felt there were more decisions to be made for good or ill in the first game. It felt slightly linear but at the same time it provided you with more replay value.
In short, I would like to see quests great and small in Wild Hunt extend over into the main game, to cause a ripple effect. The bug you decide to squash in Quest A may mean that come Quest Y a little girl won't help sneak you into the castle because you killed her pet bug. This would cause you to have to go clear across the game map to find someone who may or may not sneak you in, and if not, you will just have to run in with sword in hand and slaughter the entire place. Which will also have major consequences.
I would also like quests in The Witcher 3 to be more similar to The Witcher than Assassins of Kings. In the first game, it took much longer to get to your objective than in the second. With Witcher 2, when given a quest, it was never far away. And if there was a chain involved? You just went around the next corner
. I want to be able to travel further than up the road a ways' for quests again. Not all need to incorporate traversing the entire map, but it would be nice to go off the beaten path once more and have many dangers present themselves along the way without all the constant respawning. I don't want to have to kill every monster in my path through a forest, get to my quest objective, only to have to go back through the forest and fight the exact same monsters again. Take a page out of Skyrim's book: once an area is cleared, it's cleared but only for so long.
