The Witcher 3 Is The Greatest Open World Game Of All Time

Are you serious ?

The Witcher 3's foundation is way younger than TES's. CD Project Red has to be way more original.

Bethesda can just stick their hands into that 25 year old lore pot and their set.

If Skyrim didn't have lore and only had it's story as the storytelling of the world......The game would have been atrocious.

@charizard1605: so then how is Witcher a better open world when it's less open, has less to do and less believable?

Because the last two aren't true, and for the first point, an open world does not need to be a sandbox to be the best.

@acp_45: and if Witcher didn't have it's lore it would be an assassins Crees game with good writing.

I agree on the sandbox and the music.

Emergent gameplay depends a lot on presentation and not on lots of scenarios. The Witcher 3 might not have as much as in Skyrim but they are better in TW3 in my opinion because they are better presented.

If you want more scenarios.....Skyrim wins. Yes.

Even in that case, TW3 is emergent , you stumble upon the unexpected, and immersion for me is not about randomness, it's about a rich world and the story being narrated in that world, story of my character and story of the stuff revolving around the characters which gives me sth to care for, it should be well-written and i have to be the one that determines the path , i have to see the consequences of my actions then i can feel for the characters .... this is immersion for me, i'm not saying there's no immersion in Skyrim , it's just that TW3 does it way better with focused, meaningful, branching and player-driven story.

Well, I don't know- the emergent gameplay in Witcher is usually unscripted, which means it lacks a larger context (unless you mean the context that the story and narrative of Witcher provides everything that happens within the game to begin with, then I agree).

What I mean is.... Even if The Witcher 3 didn't have lore, it would still do fine. Lore is a build up of events. The Witcher 3 isn't lore focused. It's more focused on the actual story you have in the game. It doesn't represent it's lore. It represents it's story. Skyrim represents it's lore. That's the only way that game stays significant.

@charizard1605: there is no such thing as open world games and sandbox games. They're the same thing.

Skyrim is way more sandbox than The Witcher 3. That's what he was referring to.

It's a pretty clear distinction, man. A sandbox is a game that relies primarily on its openness and emergent gameplay as the central attraction. An open world game is a game with a whole host of other mechanics and narrative considerations, and the open world happens to be the setting, not the point of the game.

Skyrim is a more open game than Witcher, but that comes at the cost of focused game mechanics, a focused story, and focused level design. I'd take those latter three, over a world that's slightly more open.

@acp_45: then what I don't understand is how Witcher is a better open world but a worse sandbox because all open world games are sandboxes. Some of them are just worse than others.

Because you understanding is wrong, being a sandbox is not central to being a good open world. I don't know how many times I have to say this to you before it gets through, man.

Sandbox doesn't necessarily mean better.

I think we're going into more subjective territory here.

Oh, in that case, yeah, I absolutely agree. Skyrim is a lore/emergent gameplay focused game. Witcher is a more guided, focused experience.

@charizard1605: agreed .

i played both skyrim and witcher , and i totally loved witcher 3, it really is a perfectly balanced game . not that i didn't like skyrim but bethesda could have done better .

The greatest is subjective, but it's easily one of my favourite!

The world itself is indeed incredible. Not only it's huge and detailed, but there is not a single loading between the main map, cities, interiors, dungeons, caves, etc. Everything is seamless! Bethesda should take some notes in this department.

I wish they would.

Bethesda games always feel like they have the ultimate potential.

@acp_45 said:

@charizard1605 said:

@acp_45 said:

@charizard1605 said:

@acp_45 said:

TES lore is broad as it is focused. Look I don't want to argue with you about why TES's lore beats TW's. Just go read the damn stuff. You're just spouting a bunch of nonsense now.

TW lore doesn't serve it's story well at all. The Witcher 3's story is self maintained and would do absolutely fine without any lore at all.

The Witcher 3 never had a focus on it's lore. You're comparing a some pretty ridiculously outscaled things here. Go read TES lore to an idea.

Eh, Witcher 3 does have the Wild Hunt and the Conjunction of Spheres as its central plot point. That's lore, and it is directly tied to the main story.

What I mean is.... Even if The Witcher 3 didn't have lore, it would still do fine. Lore is a build up of events. The Witcher 3 isn't lore focused. It's more focused on the actual story you have in the game. It doesn't represent it's lore. It represents it's story. Skyrim represents it's lore. That's the only way that game stays significant.

Oh, in that case, yeah, I absolutely agree. Skyrim is a lore/emergent gameplay focused game. Witcher is a more guided, focused experience.

o/\o

The best open world would probably be X3.

Exactly.

Which is why neither Skyrim or Twitcher 3 are sandboxes. And while I am at it, a sandbox doesnt necessarily need to be open world. Take the hitman series as an example.

@charizard1605: of course being a good sandbox is central to being a good open world. Thats the entire point of an open world. If it wasn't then Witcher 3 could have been small hubs like witcher 2 was. If you're saying that Witcher is a great game that happens to be an open world game but say that skyrim has a better open world then it's not the best open world game.

Thats like saying fallout 4 is the best shooter of all time. You're not playing to the game's strengths. Witcher 3 is great in spite of it's open world. Its not a bad open world but it is far from the best. Witcher 3 is a great RPG, it's not a great open world game.

No it's not. Again, i don't know how many times I have to reword this for you, I don't even know if you're really not understanding or just trolling for the hell of it, but I will do this for the last time, just in case: an open world that goes all in with freedom sacrifices focus and design. An open world that focuses on focus and design sacrifices its freedom. Doing one does not entirely preclude the other, and a de-emphasis of one does not preclude an overall preclusion from being an open world- that's asinine.

The long and short of it is, an open world can either be a sandbox, or a focused, designed open world. Skyrim provides one experience (the former), The Witcher the other (the latter). But as good as Skyrim is at what it does, The Witcher is better at what it does, which makes it the better overall open world. That's it. Not a hard concept to grasp. I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of engaging in an endlessly circular debate with you any more, so if you reply, make sure you are willing to not repeat, and make me repeat, something that has already been said on four separate instances in this thread.

Same here. I'm loving Fallout 4 (and i actually like how it looks and performs), but the amount of loadings is unnacceptable by current standards! The Witcher 3 is the example every open world dev should follow: You go from Velen, to Novigrad and every single interior without any break. That's impressive!

To be fair, The Witcher has inordinately long loading times when you first load it up, or between deaths.

@charizard1605: if an open world game sacrifices freedom for focus then it's not a good open world game. I don't know why you can't understand that. The entire purpose of an open world game is to give you a sense of freedom. What you're essentially saying is that the Witcher 3 didn't need to be an open world game to accomplish what it set out to do. If they were going for a focused game then it wouldn't have been open world. Not sure why that concept is so hard for you to grasp.

Thanks, i never thought of it that way....it's more of a subjective matter, good insight.

@PAL360: yea, it's really nice but you also can't interact with as many things in the Witcher like you can in fallout. There are more buildings you can enter in fallout 4 though that don't require loading screens in the cities which is nice.

It does, and most games do, but once the game starts you barely see any loading.

One of the best easily yes

@sts106mat: 100% with you man. In love Asylum and while I enjoyed City it lost what made AA special when it went open world. AK was just a bad game IMO. Open world games where you're just going down a checklist are not fun. Asscreed has gone that way, AK was pretty much that as well.

Open World = The Witcher 3, MGSV, Infamous

Sandbox = GTAV, Skyrim, Crysis 1

Open World means you can go anywhere on the map but in a fairly static fashion. You aren't in a living breathing world so much.

Sandbox is a place where you can manipulate the environment, **** about to your hearts content. Crysis 1 fits that bill despite it not being an open world game.

Exactly.

"Freedom" does not have an absolute definition and ppl like the different kinds of it , TW3 gives you the freedom of shaping up a character throughout a journey and at the end you feel that freedom of choice and you be like " this is the ending i got because of the decision i made in part x part y part z of the story" , this is GOLD to me but it's shit to you :D , i like that i was at the center of the story ... i get to know myself better ... it's not just a "videogame" , it truly shows what kinda of a person you are or you "like" to be ! It's an open-world full of meaningful quests... you can't have this variety in a linear game. Skyrim on the other hand feels "meh" to me because i just don't like that kinda freedom ...it feels cheap to me....it feels like there's no purpose... tends to be boring and in terms of the worlds TW3 feels like history and i love history ..it feels alive.

@bobrossperm: personally, I think all open world games are sandboxes but not all games with sandboxes have to be open world. Halo is fairly linear but it has sandbox areas where you can attack in various ways. I think the entire point of an open world game should be to give you a sandbox to play in. Otherwise, why make it open world?

@mjorh: lots of games give you choice without having to put you in an open world. Hell, the choices in Witcher 2 made more of an impact than any choice in Witcher 3.

@mems_1224:

Yeah, that's what i have been saying to people who bash Bethesda games graphics. In no other RPGs you have the ability to pick and manipulate every single object you see in the world. A game that dynamic can not compete with linear ones graphics wise.

That doesn't excuse the loading times, though. I expected an improvement in this department.

Just because The Witcher 3 doesn't use the open world to cater at all points to player agency (like Skyrim does) or isn't a sandbox doesn't mean that it's not playing to the construct's strengths. It's simply utilizing them to different benefit, that being, the scope helps enforce the narrative, which is the game's focus. A massive world with monsters roaming forests. A enormous city and decrepit towns covering the landscape. Vast battlefields covered in fog, littered with soldier corpses that you can accidentally happen upon. Numerous isles to sail between. Just having hubs like in the previous games wouldn't cut it to fully convey the grandeur that CDPR is striving for in their attempt to translate the books to this medium, as all of this being one (ok, two) areas without interruption create a tremendous sense of scale and continuity that helps further establish narrative gravitas. That would be drastically reduced or lost altogether with separate hubs.

It was required to create an open world to fully bring Andrzej Sapkowski's fiction to life, and IMO, they nailed it nigh flawlessly. Say what you will about interactivity, but I've never seen such a beautifully realized environment in all my years as a gamer, nor of one that helped the game come to life so well. It's breathtaking and no other game comes close. Not to be too SW-ish here, but I feel for those playing this on consoles. Having played both versions, the PC looks and plays so much better (and with mods that rectify many of the problems people had), it makes it a much more engrossing, efficient, and overall superior experience. But I digress....

Open worlds can be fully utilized to varying uses, and one approach or priority is not better than another. They're simply different in execution and what they strive to achieve, and both succeed on differing levels. I'll never understand the comparison or attempt to put Skyrim over TW3 or vice versa. It's like the debate between Arkham Asylum and City/Knight. Linear vs. open world. Some people love Asylum more which I can understand somewhat in terms of its Metroidvania progression and pacing, but in Batman's case, to be in line and wholly see his mythos to its fullest potential, open world is an absolute necessity. It's the same with The Witcher 3. To not be open world would be a disservice and impediment to its goal.

We're different :D

i love Batman Arkham games, City and AK more. Because when it became open-world you felt like the Batman that controls the city , not just restricted to a certain place. There's a main story like Asylum and there's a city to control (the gliding is enough :D) i admit that the side quest are not that great , actually in open-worlds side-quests tend to be shallow , TW3 is kinda the exception here and that's why i love it more .... i don't spend much time with open-worlds , i do the main missions along with some good side quests and that's it.

Skyrim isn't a sandbox either.

But they don't have the variety of open-worlds. @MirkoS77 pretty much explained.

That's not a good excuse , they should've done a better job in terms of technical aspects. Frame drops / glitches/ bugs ...all are immersion-breaking.

I always considered sandbox games to be ones where you can change the environment. Like Crysis 1, GTA, Garry's Mod. It doesn't have to be open world like you say, but I wouldn't call Halo a sandbox as much as I'd call The Last Of Us a sandbox because I can attack enemies from any angle. In a sandbox, I should be able to pick up an object and that object should occupy the same physics as every other object in the world, and when I throw it at an enemy, he/she should react accurately to the force I threw it. When I punch an enemy in Crysis, they react differently every time. I can pick up an enemy and throw them any distance. Not so many pre animations like you'd find in a Naughty Dog game.

Infamous on the other hand, I can approach combat from anywhere, spark out enemies one at a time without being seen, but the world is completely dead. And mechanically it's not a sandbox. Halo is the same, it gives you fairly large arenas for combat, but you can't use environmental advantages like you can in a sandbox. Even Crysis 2 and 3 is more of a sandbox than Halo is. Because world objects are a perfectly viable combat option in those games.

As for me, I just can't enjoy a game like Infamous because it doesn't go the full mile. It's a half baked open world experience. But it's stuck in that limbo where if it weren't open world, it would probably be even more dull because traversial is actually mildly fun in the game, and it being open world gives you more room to do that.

Either way, Sandbox games are way more enjoyable on PC where you are given greater access to it.

@charizard1605: Really well written dude. I obviously agree. Witcher 3 is GOTY for me, albeit I haven't played FO4 yet.

It's one of the better open world games released in the past few years, but it still has those artificial moments which tend to break immersion. Not to mention it's a mixed bag when it comes to exploration.

What I'm REALLY not getting though is the insistence in comparing it to Skyrim when in fact both games operate under completely different circumstances.

You're wrong. Not all open-world games are sandboxes.

LOL you and I get on well but we are polar opposites on this. To each their own I guess.

There's a lot of misinformation in your post, the biggest one is that Witcher 3 is an open world game, it isn't. Witcher 3 is as much of an open world as Witcher 2 or Halo 5 are. By definition, Witcher 3 is not an open world game, it's a game with multiple areas to explore, specifically 4-5 seperated entirely.

It's not even a good game. The areas seem to be populated by the same copy pasted tree, every moving object has the same running animations, no seperate animations for men and women, same 3-5 houses populating the cities, all bandits have the same design, same sex animation for all romance interests, embarrassing romantic relationships, 2D foilage in a 3D world, terrible combat and a single swing to win animation for attacks as well as floaty movements and much MUCH more including narrative inconsistencies and terrible story padding. The gameplay is specially bad, and universally panned, despite it being the component you'll spend 50+ hours doing, it's the worst of the entire package.

Geralt is not a legendary warrior, or hunter. He's everyone's bitch, he's the bitch everyone keeps on verbally abusing as he does their errands for. He's the Legendary Errand Boy.