this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
156 points (98.8% liked)

Games

37376 readers
1903 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here and here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I know I remember seeing some people talk about how nice some of the environments in Hitman were, and that they'd just walk around as a tourist from time to time, treating it like a walking simulator/virtual tourism thing instead of the stealth assassination game it is. Curious about other things like that, where you play a game totally differently than it was meant to be played.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Like playing Gwent instead of fighting monsters as the witcher?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago

I felt that way about blitzball in final fantasy 10 (I think). Never finished the actual game.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (4 children)

An argument could be made that Gwent offers better gameplay than the larger game in which it resides.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Then you purchased a wrong game and should just play solitaire.

Witcher 3 is absolutely great, but if you just go through only the main quest, won't explore the world and won't do side quests then I can see you ending up disappointed.

What I like is that side quests can impact the main quest and even the ending.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Then you purchased a wrong game

Perhaps.

But you've made a lot of assumptions in your comment, and you're mistaken about most of them.

I played the side quests. Many came with a good backstory, but that is not gameplay. Nearly all were copy/paste instances from a small pool of tedious tasks. There were a few memorable exceptions, but very few.

I explored the world, as much as one can "explore" something that is fully labeled with point-of-interest markers. They lead the player to a repetitive handful of uninspired encounters, cloned over and over again.

It has plenty of other flaws as well. If you loved it, then I'm happy for you, but I found the gameplay boring.

The strengths I found in The Witcher 3 were its story, lore, characters, and Gwent. Not its gameplay.

Meanwhile, Gwent is a surprisingly well-designed strategy game. So much so that it ended up spun off into a stand-alone version (although I don't know how good the spinoff is).

To each their own, I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Gwent is actually a slight hack of an existing board game called Condottiere, which is IMO the better game.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Yep. I played an earlier version but it's the same game.

The key thing that made me notice was the scarecrow cards that allowed you to pick up your units, those make sense in Condottiere as it's divided in rounds where you fight multiple battles, so it made sense to pick up your units if you had excess power and were winning anyway, save your strength for the next battle in the round, whereas it made a lot less sense in Gwent given its 1v1 nature and fixed amount of rounds.

Mind you Gwent evolved a lot afterwards, I don't know much beyond the witcher 3 version, which I still enjoyed plenty.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Are we certain Witcher is the larger game in which Gwent resides and not the other way around?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

There is no argument if the statement is objectively true

The Witcher 3's gameplay was so bad that I couldn't finish it (the map and the quests' gameplay part too, but that's another story). Gwent was pretty cool though