I've played both, but The Witcher 3 didn't engage me at all. In gameplay it felt like a poor imitation of Skyrim. Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, is repeatedly delightful and entertaining, and has me exploring just for the sake of discovering what's out there far more than any other open world game ever has.

I can kind of understand why The Witcher 3 won a load of awards, but it just wasn't my thing (and I kept getting stuck on collision boxes where I really didn't think there should be any, which is utterly infuriating).

I am expecting to see Breath of the Wild winning absolutely truckloads of awards. How it will stand up in the future remains to be seen, but in this moment it's a fantastic new milestone in the history of the open world RPG.

I found Skyrim devoid of meaning and context. Being "anybody you want" actually means you are nobody. It takes a while to actually realize how well written Witcher 3 is, and how engaging even the smallest side quest can be.

Besides, Witcher 3 had an intimate sex scene on stuffed unicorn.

The Bloody Baron quest is a great example of the depth of the side quests. It's tragic and discusses important topics in a way that isn't just black & white.

Bloody Baron is a main quest, though. Anyways, side quests are indeed very well written. The werewolf quest in Velen comes to mind. The one where where you help Cerys an Craite on her own quest is also amazing (the one with the oven).

I also enjoyed the serial killer quest line in Novigrad.

> It's tragic and discusses important topics in a way that isn't just black & white.

That's why I love the Witcher lore. It's one of very, very few fantasy settings where ethics are fuzzy and ugly. It makes other fantasy settings look like rom coms.

Blame Tolkien's World War I trauma, with which he coped by writing a series of therapeutic novels where ethical nuance quite understandably wasn't on the menu - novels which inadvertently inspired a genre that has tended mostly to be more of the same sort of flight from modernity, but without the originator's nigh peerless world-building skill.

(I used to write Quenya and Sindarin in the tengwar! Probably still could; I'm sure I kept those notes. Brilliant languages, if heavily systematized in the same unrealistic way as Esperanto. But I still to this day can't make it through the main trilogy without running out of patience. Would you believe, I used to think I was the one with the problem?)

Just finished reading the whole LOTR series to my daughter night after night. It is very long winded, yes. But she actually had little problem with it, and she actually preferred the portions that many consider long winded and tangential (Bombadil and Scouring of the Shire for example) But he was trying to do something with the English language that others haven't got, trying to bring back an Anglo-Saxon poetics to it. It is quite lovely when read aloud, tho the landscape descriptions... oh my long winded.

But yeah, the good vs evil stuff is pretty ham-fisted and always was. And there's some pretty racist stuff in there.

Agree. The Bloody Baron in itself was a huge demonstration of why Witcher 3 is just so different compared to all the other games out there. It's so well written.

Already the first witcher contract about the ghost in the well blew my mind. Many great stories and two DLCs worth every penny. That whole storyline of Hearts of Stone may be the best ever in any game.

I have a WiiU but I still don't know should I get a Switch or buy the WiiU version of Zelda. I'm a massive Nintendo fan but mostly playing with a PC nowadays.

I bought the WiiU version of Zelda and will hold off on the Switch until they get more games and get the glitches out.

The WiiU version plays fine. A few frame rate hiccups on complex scenes here and there but nothing terrible. And I hear the Switch has this when docked anyways.

What I love about the Witcher stories are how well they can be looked at as a fantastical commentary on modern life, especially with business and politics.

Right now I’m playing through 3 and seeing Geralt as a monster-slayer consultant that occasionally has to deal with deadbeat clients. Interesting to see how he protects his finances before and after these encounters with the buyer (there’s only one quest I can recall where he actually asks for a deposit, since the quest giver reeks of thievery and corruption).

well Skyrim has that with the globalist vs nationalist debate represented by the empire vs stormcloaks. That's the only political issue I can remember from it though

Same here... I tried to like Skyrim a lot (using SE edition), and its just a very boring sandbox.

I feel better now. I actually played Skyrim recently and thought "Man, do I just not like video games anymore?" It's nice to see people describing how I felt and why I stopped playing it.

Skyrim is a fun game to pick up once in awhile, but it gets very easy and very empty quite fast. I should be enthralled by the appearance of a dragon, and it should be a significant challenge to take it on, but after a few encounters, it becomes rote and mundane. There's also no consequence for dawdling on completing various objectives - I took a good few days to go to Kynesgrove after Delphine told me to get there ASAP. Little things, i guess, but they all add up to a pretty hollow experience.

Pick up Witcher 3 - it is excellend and fun game compared to Skyrim. Plus it treats you like an adult when it comes to choices you are given.

Skyrim feels like a boring MMO with no other players. If you have done MMOs, you wonder what the big deal is.

"there are serious rails."

A.K.A. an emotionally engaging story, which would be very hard to do without some sequence of narrative. A complete sandbox is an endless timesink - if I'm building something freeform I'd rather do it using a medium which provides lasting value - art, 3D modeling, programming or such. But these are just personal preferences, I'm not claiming any objective value of one over the other (narrative v.s. sandbox).

I don't enjoy the default Skyrim game all that much. However, the Requiem mod which gives it more of an old school feel allows for more emergent stories. Because it's not on rails and combat is intense you will spend 15 minutes running away from something and not always make it to safety. One of my strongest memory's is a fight that took all of 8 seconds but I was riding the edge of death the entire time. This was not chasing some boss for epic loot, this was just not dying.

One of my favorite side-missions in TW3 is Fencing Lessons.

This article[0] goes into detail on why I think it's so great, but contains spoilers.

[0] https://killscreen.com/articles/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-att...

My previous favorite game was fallout 2 if that helps, and my previous favorite recent game was Ori and the Blind Forest.

I don't normally like open world games, but I loved the Witcher 3 and Fallout New Vegas.

The world of the Witcher 3 feels more real, but Breath of the Wild is more fun to explore.

What were your feelings on FO3 and FO4?

Not the parent, but I love FO1 and 2 dearly.

FO3 felt too linear and too hand held. FO:NV on the other hand was actually decent.

FO4 is not fun at all if you want the open world RPG element. It's a shooter more than anything else, and you have to avoid settlements completely. The survival difficulty mode was decent in difficulty, but it lacked "oh shit" mechanics so random encounters don't just kill you at will for the first many hours of gameplay until you get some gear.

This makes a lot of sense. 3 and New Vegas are remakes of 1 and 2, which were respectively linear and open. 4 is the first one where Bethesda hasn't had earlier work to use as a reference, and it sounds like that really shows.

Have you played them FO1 was not linear at all? 3 and NV are not in any way remakes of the originals. But NV was not made by Bethesda, but a different studio with some of the orignal developers and that really shows.

I have played them both several times, starting not long after they came out. NV is much more like 2 than 3 is like 1, fair enough - but I don't think it is unreasonable to characterize 1 as being much more linear than 2. "Remake" is probably overdoing it a bit, though; the similarities aren't quite that strong.

The Witcher 3 was a solid game, but it's the kind of game that doesn't really have a lasting impact beyond rounding out a platform's lineup. Typically you have a few of those on each platform every year. This is like Tier III on an imaginary scale that I just created.

The general consensus on Breath of the Wild so far is that it's at least a tier above that - the tier that defines a console generation. Games like Mario 64, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, stuff like that. That's Tier II.

In Tier I are the games that are in consideration for the greatest games of all time: Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VII, etc. Some people think it'll end up here, but we won't know that until we look back on it in a few years.

If we follow your system, I would rank The Witcher 3 as Tier 0. It's simply the best game I've ever played in my 37 years of existence bar none.

OOT, LttP, FF VII ar all decent games but not even close to "greatest games of all time". I'd classify them as Tier 3 at best.

> Typically you have a few of those on each platform every year. This is like Tier III on an imaginary scale that I just created.

Really? I don't think there is ANY game of the quality of Witcher 3 coming on a yearly basis...

In 2015, Fallout 4, MGS, The Witcher 3 and Bloodbourne split the GotY awards, so game critics think there were a couple others that year.

Had The Witcher 3 come out in 2016, it would have certainly been behind Overwatch. Had it come out in 2014, it would have certainly been behind Dark Souls II. In 2017, it would be behind Breath of the Wild, and it's only March. There are equal or better games every year.

Luckily, there are people who aggregate this kind of stuff. I don't think the data supports your claims at all. Witcher 3 won an extremely high proportion of the awards in its year. Almost double what the three other 2015 games you list got combined if you look at awards from critics, and even more lopsided if you looked at fan awards.

https://gotypicks.blogspot.com/2015/09/2015-game-of-year.htm...

(And really, a suggestion of Dark Souls II as some kind of awards powerhouse is totally detached from any reality).

> I don't think the data supports your claims at all.

I'm going off of Wikipedia's GotY list, which includes only more notable publications. That lists adds in a ton of small gaming blogs and regional user's choice awards, which I don't think gives you better data. In Wikipedia's list, TW3 is winning, but a little less drastically.

I think you're attacking a claim I'm not making, and we're not even disagreeing, though. I didn't claim TW3 was worse than other contenders in 2015, I said it's one of a few solid games that come out every year. Everything you're saying and everything I'm saying supports that.

Edit: GotY is a decent signal, but discussions about which videogames are better are always going to be highly subjective. The Walking Dead won in 2012 and most people don't consider TWD to be on the same level as a lot of the other GotY games.

Fallout is certainly nothing like w3 quality and mgs 5 was flawed in many ways and unfinished. Next?

> Fallout is certainly nothing like w3 quality and mgs 5 was flawed in many ways and unfinished. Next?

Well, a lot of game critics disagree with that. Many of them gave GotY to MGS or Fallout instead, and MGS has a higher metacritic score than W3. I'm not going to debate beyond that because it'll devolve into complete subjectivity, but it's pretty clear W3 isn't a once-a-generation game.

GOTY awards and game ratings in general are such a corrupted payola system that they can't even be taken with a grain of salt. And even mediocre games in established IPs will be lauded to high heaven, out of all proportion to their quality or enjoyment value.

In the open-world RPG space, you are probably right. But across all genres you'll find at least one title.

I'd say Witcher 3 was a little below or on par with Mass Effect, Fable, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Fallout or a Final Fantasy offering and combined you likely see at least one of those a year on average.

I've played all of the mentioned games except modern Final Fantasy titles and I think it's a big disservice to the TW3 to say it's at best on par with those games.

The only way I could imagine saying that is if you focus only on the mechanics of the RPG game loop and ignore world design, dialog quality, voice acting, characters, breadth of content, quests, etc.

Quite frankly, I feel Skyrim and the Mass Effect series blows Witcher 3 out of the water in regards to the criteria you just listed. I found the game rather boring given the limited character customization and rather linear skill progression. I couldn't bring myself to complete it and it sits on my shelf gathering dust.

Wait, what? "Regards to criteria you just listed"? His criteria was "dialog quality, voice acting, characters, breadth of content, quests, etc.". And you cite something completely different (skill progression, character customization)?!

The first sentence is its own statement, the rest was my personal experience with Witcher 3.

I'd second that the game is good enough to warrant a Switch purchase on its own, assuming you have that disposable income.

[BOTW puzzle spoilers below]

Comparing it to the Witcher 3 is actually a great way to highlight its strength--the insane depth of the mechanics. It feels almost like you're playing Nethack or Dwarf Fort in terms of how deep the mechanics go and how much the game designers allow you to do. Not _as_ deep, nothing's as deep as Dwarf Fort, but deep enough that I can make the comparison.

For example, both TW3 and BOTW have a mechanic where you can mix different ingredients together to give yourself stat bonuses. They both have you harvest the ingredients from the in-game world. Very similar so far. But in TW3, you mix them by going through some menu screens and clicking on the appropriate items. In BOTW, you take the items out of your inventory, hold them, and return to normal gameplay while holding them and can then choose to drop them anywhere in the outside world (ideally in a heated cauldron). But you can choose to drop them just in an open flame, and while you can't get potions this way, you _can_ cook ingredients like apples and meat to have them restore more of your health. But if you leave them in the fire too long, they'll catch fire themselves. And if it's a dry day and you're standing in the right (or wrong) kind of terrain, the grass underfoot may catch on fire, too. And it may spread (and start interfering with enemies--but that's another story). And there's more to it than that--if you drop certain ingredients in snowy landscapes or icy streams, they'll freeze over and give you heat resisting properties when they didn't before. And if you drop them in areas that are too hot (think side of an active volcano), they'll start cooking immediately, as if you had dropped them over an open flame in a standard area. You can distract certain a certain type of enemy by dropping food in front of it too.

The entire game is like this. For example, in another dungeon I got stuck on a puzzle that clearly wanted me to put two magic electric orbs on two switches, about 5m apart from each other. But for the life of me I could only find one of the orbs. After fifteen minutes of running around, I remembered that my metal weapons conducted electricity--I had found that out because I had gotten killed by a lightning strike while I was flying through a storm earlier, I ignored the warning sparking around my back and had to reload a save. So I dropped every metal weapon I had and dragged in a metal chest from another room in the dungeon and made a circuit from one switch to the other with the single electric orb in the middle. And it totally worked to solve the puzzle. (Looked up where the second orb was later and I was blind to not notice it, whoops.)

It doesn't have the depth of writing that TW3 does, the characters are more cartoonish and less nuanced and the plot itself is much more straightforward and doesn't have a tenth of the subterfuge. But the writing isn't poor, either, it's done extremely well for its style. It comes across as very Ghibli-esque to me. Zelda's character in particular is nuanced and an interesting examination of their old tropes without fully subverting them, and the way they reveal the story to you is through a series of clever small vignettes that overwhelmingly choose these small intimate moments that manage to imply so much more than they outright say.

It's unabashedly 11/10 GOTY and maybe "game of this generation" to me, though I'm trying to give myself some time to get over the initial rush before I make that kind of call. Blows TW3 out of the water, and I loved TW3.

Thanks for a great explanation :)

Witcher 3 is you doing things whilst exploring the world. BOTW is you exploring the world whilst doing things.

There is no handholding or quests you must be complete in a particular sequence or being locked in a particular part of the map. You can just go anywhere and do anything. And everyone you do go is incredibly well designed, polished and interesting.

It isn't on par for me with Uncharted or The Last of Us for the depth and quality of the story but it is a pretty damn good game.

Presumably you meant those the other way round?

Usually doing 'a' while 'b' means you are primarily doing 'b', and 'a' is a bonus.

> How does it stack for example against The Witcher 3 which won a landslide of awards?

I would not compare a game aimed at kids (Zelda) vs a game which is clearly more adult-focused (Witcher 3). It's like comparing a Disney movie vs an Aliens episode and asking which one is the best.

But I think we can agree that Alien 3 is a pretty mediocre film, while Wall-E, Up, or Inside Out are superb film making that at least I would recommend to just about anyone.

Who was talking about Alien 3?

You didn't specify the episode so reasonably any episode is a good fit.

I don't think the target audience really matters. Film critics regularly cite Disney fare like Snow White, Fantasia, and Pinocchio as some of the best films ever made. Analogous lists of video games are pretty much required to have some Mario games on the list. Good is good.

Why wouldn't you compare games aimed at to similar audiences? And that analogy is pretty weak, I'd say Zelda is aimed at kids to adults, Witcher 3 aimed at teens to adults. I'd say it's more similar to Harry Potter vs. Lord of the Rings. Both "dorky" things to outsiders but slightly different range of audiences.

I agree, but the commenter claimed it was the "best" game, so a comparison, for better or for worse, was implied.