The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

I can't recall them all properly. I just know what each button does what.

Left trigger is flamey - Igni is easy to remember, like ignite.

B is shieldy. I think that's Quen?

A is force pushy. Aard? I dunno.

X is stun/mind control.

Y is trap. I think one of those last two is Yyrd or something. Or is that a kind of yoghurt?

It does mean that when I get a place of power buff I'm not actually sure what's being buffed.

The Witchers should use my naming conventions.

This is the way of the Witcher.

I actually can't seem to work how to enable signs to the controller, I've checked the option box but for the life of me I can't seem to get it to work properly.

I just went back to the original method.

I mostly used Aard and Igni. Lie down and burn, fuckers.

The mind control one, axii, should be more powerful but it's not that great for balance reasons, I think Lambert describes how he made somebody shoot his companion and then kill himself.

Best Geralt can manage is a temporary mind control.

OHHHHH, Christ thanks for that. I was very wary of being like Geefe but I honestly couldn't work it out. That actually does seem better.

Blood and wine is excellent

You can get your own estate! And witcher it up.

I have to be honest, as much as I'm loving this game the crafting UI is one of the worst I've ever experienced. The way it is set up and organised is so... Messy. Just for instance, how it orders upgrade schematics.

The quest menu isn't great either - again particularly the treasure hunt quests, it would be nice to see all the school of the cat quests together, for example.

The completed quests section is also a mess.

Ostensibly it's all alphabetical but it could really do with being subdivided

Finished Blood and Wine (at least the main story quest), so that brings my Witcher 3 replay (thought Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine were new to me).

Yeah it's pretty good. I do think Hearts of Stone is probably one of the highlights. There was just a grimness to the tale that was quite rivetting, and the characters in it were quite engaging. The ghost in particular was a real highlight, but Gaunter O'Dimm and von Everec were great too.

Blood and Wine is okay, - it was still good and narratively better than a lot of other games, but just not quite as interesting - it did offer a lot more new content but tbh I was getting a bit tired, hence why I didn't touch most of the side quests.

I think my main problem with Blood and Wine is that I don't really like any of the conclusions.

I guess it's telling that my favourite part of Blood and Wine was the subquest that refers to Gaunter O'Dimm.

Of course the OG game is still pretty good. I think it maybe starts to drag a bit towards the end of the main questline, but there's some good stuff to be found throughout.

Anyway that was a fun way to spend 100 hours and 33 minutes.

I guess one criticism is that although the narrative and writing and worldbuilding do a *lot* of heavy lifting the gameplay isn't exactly amazing. It's perfectly fine, but towards the end it was very noticeable that essentially most quests involved going somewhere, using detective mode, following a red trail then fighting. And most of those fights aren't spectacularly different - another thing HoS did well was introduce some very unique bosses.

It's no worse than most other gameplay loops and it's presented in such a way as too feel original, but it did become noticeable towards the end.

I've got to say, this doesn't run perfectly on PS5 - I get brief stutters every time a quest is updated or the game auto-saves, which is a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.

Less minor was riding Roach into a shallow stream, falling through the world, and ending up in the middle of a lake outside the boundary of the map. Reloading my latest save resulted in a crash to the dashboard.

Adding insult to injury, my current quest is now bugged! Apparently it's a common issue, but I'm still a trifle peeved.

I also have a persistent graphical glitch on the inventory screen - a flickering bar that obscures Geralt's face.

Kind of disappointing and frustrating, really, for a game that's almost eight years old (and a remaster that was more than two years in the making).

I'm one of those people (weirdos?) who quit the game and turn off the console between every session, and I'm *still* seeing the inventory screen glitch on a daily basis.

Last night's bugged quest/falling through the map/hard crash was a new low for me. Hopefully it was an unfortunate aberration, rather than a drastic shifting of the goalposts - by comparison, I'll gladly overlook all the other stuff I've mentioned!

Huh, loaded up the PC version and it now appears to be actually in working order, Raytracing and all that stuff turned on and it's actually running pretty smooth.

I was wrong about my earlier comment.

It was running okay because the settings had all turned down to medium.

On balance it still looks better with everything on ultra and ray tracing off.

Worse though, whenever I fast travel with ray tracing effects on the game would suffer a *MASSIVE* memory leak and start running at less than 1 FPS unless I restarted the game.