The Witcher 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda thread

I don't necessary like things to be dark, though I do prefer more anti-hero character. And my fave character actually happen to be mercenaries. Can never go wrong with mercenaries (why the third Riddick movie is so badass). But what's really important for me is immersion and suspense of disbelief, and turning everyone into a goober in the Andromeda galaxy completely pulls me out and downright makes me angry. My suspense of disbelief was strongest in ME1, while ME2 introduced some issues like how blatantly stereotype Jack's character felt. In ME3 things really took a turn for the worse, with how unrealistic that everyone seemed to know who Liara now was. And everyone's overly fake patriotic reactions to the war, people just don't act like this, no matter how dire, it still brings the worst in people too. The galaxy needs to be more balanced with dicks. I'm sorry.

I generally hate fake-e forced emotions too. I need my emotions to feel much more grounded. Even in real life, I hate fake laughs and fake feel people.

Oh you will love the witcher then, as the style and character match your requirements quite well.

Well, I buy my games specifically for the happy escapism and having experiences that do not resemble the drudgery, disconnect and intense unhappiness of the Real World, with preference to fake futuristic settings over fake medieval ones, so my buying strategy for 2017-2020 is something like

Tyranny when it comes on sale, Witcher -never and DLCs for Andromeda, DA4 -depending on reviews, preferably on sale; finally, Cyberpunk specifically dependant on the reviews specifying if they did stick to the original premise to be anti-Blade Runner & have lotsa hope, or they went even more grimdark and the worst the real world has to offer only worse, lol. Will also watch Obsidian next climb to AAA lol. If I manage to scrape together enough recognition points at work over the next couple of years to buy PS4, I'd love to try HZD. (shrug) games are nice and all, but there is no point buying them if they don't provide what you like just to play games.

I haven't played TW3 so maybe I'm missing crucial context, but from what I've read here it seems like the whole point of having what happened to the gay character is to make you feel pissed off. You should feel pissed off. It is a reflection of the indignities humanity can suffer upon itself. Things are pretty good here in the good ole US of A and much of Western society but there are still places in the world today that just for being who I am I would be dragged out into the street and have my head chopped off.

I get the sense that the writer here is purposefully trying to make the player feel something about what just happened to this guy. Maybe he was a bad guy, and maybe he was doing bad things among a host of other bad guys, but to have this happen to him, possibly just because of his sexuality, is an injustice. If this was just another straight guy getting his comeuppance it wouldn't stand out at all among all the other horrors happening in the game.

To me it looks like that was the whole point. Just from this discussion alone it seems the writer was pretty successful at making people think about that.

Throw in some examples for me then... being careful to compare the same level of side quest to the same level of side quest in each game, respectively (and I'd appreciate you sticking to Velen just because I've quit after just finishing Bloody Baron.  I have ridden to Oxenhurt but really haven't done much there except visit vendors) and keeping in mind that the ME games are much smaller than TW3 overall.

The size of TW3 is more than a pace killer for me... It's totally disconnected me from the story.  I have nothing memorable from the encounter with Dolores after doing The Fall of the House of Reardon.  Her brother killed her husband (or vice verse, can't even remember) and her reaction is basically... so life goes on.  Nothing memorable even from the interaction with Tamara in Oxenhurt... even after encountering her again during Return to Crookback Bog.  What is there to be truly moved by her interaction with her father in the end?  The whole thing was set up to be so much more and, in the end, just fell flat... no big explanations or argument between them nor tears of reconciliation... just basically, because witch hunter cuts in, father and daughter basically just say you go your way and I'll go mine.  The interaction with Garrus in front of the Memorial Wall and with Liara in the lounge after shooting the VS in ME3 was far more moving.

Then I return to Crow's Perch and encounter a guard whom I accuse of allowing his men to pillage the village outside the gates... Thing is, one has to actually go out of their way to trigger the 2 cut scenes that show this pillaging.  The first time I walked through and everything seemed absolutely normal and when I got to that guard, my reaction was a definite immersion-breaking WTF moment.  So, I reloaded and replayed and after 2 additional tries finally managed to trigger both cutscenes prior to reaching the guard at the gate to the Baron's part of that compound... and there is no opportunity to interact with the farmer's wife that Geralt saves nor is there any different reaction by the guards after Geralt kills off a bunch of them to save that farmer's wife.  Just after saving the farmer's wife, one NPC mutters something about giving Crow's Perch a wide berth, but the reality is that Geralt is then able to come and go to get to his stash chest without any real difference being evident from before and after the Baron leaves.

^ I can't remember any gay character from Witcher 2 except that evil guy. Aside from how hush hush LGBT+ handling has to be in games now so don't "represent it unfairly" or whatever I loved how blunt Witcher 2 was. "Fuck" and "Whore" everywhere, people getting their balls chopped off and some yelling "suck my cock!". What a RELIEF that game was.

To other poster above...
Oh, I remember suddenly bumping into General Morvan Voorhis (the guy who teaches you Nilfgaard manners) when strolling Novigrad. Then he asks if I want to go to a horse race with him and his wife (or whoever it was), He won, then we chatted about what he was doing in Novigrad and went home and that was it.

I remember the high stakes Gwent Tournament that turns into a sort of heist plot where you have sex with a foxy thief lady, and then she left a letter for you the next morning after disappearing.

There was a contract quest where I had to find a creature who snatched a woman's husband. His corpse is found in the nest and I return after slaying the monster. I got to tell her how it is or say that her husband disappeared and she seemed slightly flustered but understanding given that it had already been weeks since he went away.

There's the frying pan quest where you help a lady who's locked herself out so she can get her frying pan back. I can't actually remember if she just gets the frying pan and that's it, but what I remember it for was the sense of suspicion I had that this old hag was doing witchery but it wasn't the case IIRC. What's good about a quest like this is that it's just a unqiue little interaction. I don't have to fast-travel to another place in the map to find the objective. I just had to take her request and open the door with Aard, then give her the pan and she thanked me.

I can go on honestly but I'll end with the side-quest that took me the most by surprise which was a random chain quest I found on Skellige where you end up in a cave by the sea with 3 other dudes and inside it you start seeing visions (in the gameplay) of the Wild Hunt and Skelligan legends and signs that inform you as a player of how much Geralt worries about the fate of Ciri, all done visually with floating objects and atmospheric effects.

In DA:I I can't think of anything as interesting save for that strange elven apostate in The Hinterlands who you can take with you into the cave where she'll then ask to keep some amulet or something and a few other emergent moments that felt like that too.

In MEA I mostly think back to storming a Kett Base facility or finding that AI on Voeld, but it always comes back to how depressingly stiff and locked the entire world feels in both DA:I and MEA where one place remains the same throughout the whole game and clearing quests on Eos just makes it feel emptier and emptier and doing the quests are often a chore save from the fast-paced combat and the joy of grinding when you feel like it.

BioWare have better core mechanics for the "gameplay" I would say. From the dialogue wheel to the combat. Whereas DA:I had bad mechanics for each class IMO the ability to play as each squad member and use the tactical cam (if you really bothered...) made it feel like decent gameplay. In MEA from the way the Mako controls to Ryder shooting various guns it feels genuinely good and almost as good as Destiny, but Witcher 3, while slightly wonky and especially the wet soap-like movement of geralt can be grating at times it always comes back to how combat is fun because I have to react in the moment. There's not a single combat encounter in TW3 where I'm not on my toes. In DA:I I'm just holding the R2 button and falling asleep and in MEA I'm just hiding behind cover and shooting, shift cover, shoot, use the 3 abilities and after a while that starts to feel very very repetitive. In Witcher 3 there's such a variety in enemy types across the entire game that while the mechanics are sometimes frustrating I just don't have a negative memory of doing the combat for extended play sessions. I don't consider combat a draw of Witcher 3 at all. It's like ME1. It gets you through the environments and it doesn't feel like you're playing through levels as much as it's just the occasional group of enemies that you're knocking down to get your way.

I just think Witcher 3 gets what it is that many players want from an immersive open world game in terms of quests while BioWare/EA has been fixated on content and quantity ever since starting the entire open-world fiasco they've been doing. I like ME2 the most in terms of raw gameplay (although I consider the dialogue segments gameplay too!) because it had such a simple and arcady feel to it. DA2's combat design was so-so but also much more enjoyable than DA:I in my opinion because of how fast and responsive it was. Part of me just hates when people go "ME3 had the best gameplay" because I think ME2 had much, much better encounter design. Witcher 3 isn't about combat in the same way. It's about going to places to trigger story events and relishing in how alive and breathing the world feels.

And on that note just real quick: the world changes in TW3. Several side quests are locked out after certain story beats and several cities change state. Novigrad in particular changes according to the progress of the war. Some time after the main Novigrad story is completed there will be burning stakes with witches or unortunate strangers even outside the walls of the city. I wanted to use Aard for fun to put out a fire and knock down some Witch Hunters and upon slaying those guards a cutscene triggered where a guy thanked me for saving him. It turns out he wasn't a witch. A certain story quest on Skellige led me to slay the Jarl of a village. In my previous playthrough, I met this Jarl by accident when I started a brawl in a tavern which got me arrested and locked in a cage. I could escape by traditional and blunter means but I ended up appealing to the Jarl and in recognizing who Geralt was I got released.

TW3 is full of surprises that stick. MEA has pockets of side-content that feels surprising but then they still end up disappointing me. DA:I was just lethargic.

Who gives developers more shit over gay characters tho? SJWs complaining about representation or the don't shove it down my throat people? Interesting how the latter group are fine with how "blunt" the witcher 2 was tho. I mean the gays are in their correct place as creepy villains and both get what is coming to them in the end. 

The motion capture to make the guy playing Tarkin look like Peter Cushing in Rouge One was downright freaky awesome (the voice actor was what really hurt it) and worth the price of the movie right there. The 77 Carrie Fisher didn't work. 

1) Voorhis isn't the guy who teaches Geralt how to bow.  Voorhis is the General who questions you while getting shaved.  Since he seems to be a rather high ranking figure in the Nilfarrdian bureaucracy, I'm not surprised you would run into him again.  However, based on the fact that you've mixed two characters up in your response, I doubt the encounter is really that memorable.

2)  Example 2 - Your comment about her being "slightly flustered" and the quest just dying there says it all.  I suspect this is a later quest that I hadn't encountered... so I'll go back to The Fall of the House of Reardon and Dolores lack of reaction to that news.  Even without Jack in Grissom Academy, the other student is far more reactive about the death of her fellow student.  Grace Sato is even more interactive during that little N7 side quest than Dolores is in The Fall of the House of Reardon.

3) Frying Pan quest - The suspicion of her being a witch must have just come all from your head because nothing was written into what notes you found in the cabin that would even hint at that.  The suspicious character was the guy who used the ash build up in the pan to make ink.  I've read that you might encounter that guy later in the game to give him an item you found in the cabin.  However, unlike Ereba in ME3, who you may have encountered in ME2 and actually been responisble for her getting together with Charr; I don't think the player encountered that guy from the frying pan cabin before TW3 so basically that boils down to unknowingly fetching an item that gets you some XP later on in the game.

3) In ME3, you don't have to fast travel anywhere to complete Charr's message or give Tasha the bad news about her bond mate.  Both "fetches' are found amid main missions and can be completed when you're next at the Citadel.

Of course, I can't comment on your other examples... but you should know that because I told where I quit the game.

The best thing about "The Fall of the House of Reardon" was that on the way to her house I found a cave with an Ekimmara inside.

That quest isn't all that, others are better.

I loved the little moment with Charr in ME2. See that I can compare to something in Witcher 3 without having Mass Effect blown out of the water. In ME3 however it was just one of many moments where I rolled my eyes hard when I delivered the message. Everything is so bloody convenient in ME3. You go around the entire galaxy (think about how BIG it is!) and every single mission somehow ties into one of many side-characters or main characters you met from ME2 and none of it is preplanned. It's always "Surprise! It's THAT GUY" and it can't be surprising when it's so convenient.

Sigh, the Charr thing in ME3 was just lame and forced like everything else in that game. It was fanservice that was the word I was looking for.