The Witcher 3 is days away from release, and as its launch gets nearer, we’re starting to see plenty of gameplay footage from the console and PC versions spread across the internet. What’s nice is that the console footage looks great. However, what’s equally surprising is that the PC version doesn’t appear to boast a substantial boost in assets quality and detail over its console brethren.
RPGs are often huge, sprawling endeavours. With limited playtime, we have to choose wisely, so here's the best western RPGs available today.
"I started playing games yesterday" the List... Meh!
How about a few RPGs that deserve some love instead?
1 - Alpha Protocol - Now on GOG
2 - else Heart.Break()
3 - Shadowrun Trilogy
4 - Wasteland 2
5 - UnderRail
6 - Tyranny
7 - Torment: Tides of Numenera
And for a bonus game that flew under the radar:
8 - Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
Not only glorious jank, but the idea that the story can completely change depending on what you do, or say, or side with, makes it one of the most forward thinking games ever. The amount of story permutation is the equivalent of a Hitman level but in Story Form. And it wasn't just that the story changed, no, it was that you met completely new characters, or missed them, depending on your choices. Made Mass Effect feel static in comparison.
Alpha Protocol was absolutely glorious, indeed. And it was, and still is, more Next Gen than most anything out there these days. In this regard at least.
Pity.
During CD Projekt’s Fiscal Year 2023 earnings call, CEO Michael Nowakowski said that the company is keen on licensing its IP rights to third-party developers to create mobile adaptations of its titles.
CD Projekt, the developer behind The Witcher/Cyberpunk 2077, has stated that there is no place for microtransactions in single-player games.
MP games need micros to keep the lights on. Path of Exile is a good game with micros. It can be done as long is the game is not the scheme itself.
You end up paying more than $70 in micros for a game specifically designed around them and that’s not a “scheme” by design?
I’ve played plenty of great MP games that didn’t have micros. I love how at one point we were like micros bad, GaaS bad, and now we’re like, well GaaS is MP so it’s ok.
Path is a free game. How else are they supposed to keep the servers on? You don't need up spending more . I've been playing the game since the beginning and I've spent less than $20.
Destiny on the other hand....
An MP game embedded in a SP game shouldn't have them.
I know you understand this. I have to be optimistic here.
@anast
I’d argue “free to play” are more egregious than just a traditional pay to play game. You end up spending far more on a game than just $70 and I think the “free” games are sneaky by design to make a consumer think “well, it’s free, let me dump money into it.” I mean, they’re specifically designed to make you continuously put money into them. I heard with Path of Exile you hit a point where the grind is obnoxious without buying micros.
I agree, I never pay for microtransactions, and in the few cases where I have, I've felt dirty afterwards, especially when older games used to give you so much content for free (like cosmetics).
That first gif was depressing to watch. I still remember seeing The Witch 2 and Crysis 1 maxed out the first time, it was amazing.
NO im sorry to say this but the weak consoles did hold the witcher's 3 performance down with the graphic.
They messed up the foliage.
what justice? not only did they lie to and deceive PC owners, myself included, but their damage control is a disgraceful attempt to make fools out of them with more lies.
add this pain to your collection of betrayal:
http://a.disquscdn.com/uplo...
"2013 was a tough time for CD Projekt RED simply because we were trying to create an entire bulk of the game on the older DirectX 9 renderer that we had in place for The Witcher 2. Most of the assets were created during the time we were creating our DX11 solution render pipeline to bring the next-generation experience to everyone. A lot of the footage including the debut gameplay trailer was done when the consoles were not even out and we only had an idea of the specifications of the system. This landed itself into problem territory when we realized the next-generation systems could not simply meet our graphical output to the desirable level of quality that we needed. There were several options: build three different builds or consolidate to the nearest denominator, which is what we did. We took the specifications of the lowest performing throughput system which I don’t care to mention here at all to avoid that discussion, and worked our way up from there. As almost a 250 man team, we sequentially had to take out/turn down a lot of features not just from our NVIDIA GameWorks pipeline but our normal game solution scripts as well – these include the following:
Level of horizon detail (essentially the draw distance had to be completely tuned down to tax the consoles less)
Volume based translucency
Ambient occlusion and foliage density / tree count
Flexible water simulation / tessellation we resorted to a (script texture effect similar to most games than physical based simulation)
Ground/building tessellation
Forward lit soft particles (this is the fire, smoke, fog that you would encounter while going through thick terrain into open space)
Real-time reflections in the water are completely off and replaced with a cheaper render solution estimator (this is a primary reason blood splatter was also removed from water)
We just did not have the manpower, budget or the console power to produce the vision we intended before the consoles were released to create a more visually stunning game of higher fidelity like 2013 assets. The PCs themselves had more than enough power to achieve this vision, almost certainly. But working on the game across 3 platforms did not make it feasible to keep features included that could potentially break the game as we kept building around it. All the 2013 trailers were actually in-game footage (not prerendered or vertical slices) but essentially just not an entirely finished world running on a high-end PC at the time."