Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales Falls Short of Initial Sales Expectations

[FordGT90Concept]

Swordplay? Janky.

That's like 99% of the gameplay. It's unforgiving, not "janky." Think Dark Souls but more sane.

Stepping up on a 1 inch step? Nope. Go around to a gentle slope, Geralt, steps are for sissies.

That's not a problem unique to Witcher. It's an engine issue involving step size, clipping and limiting the player to the game world. I don't recall running into that issue in Witcher but even if it is present, it's a bug, not a gameplay feature.

Impossible to master crossbow? Check.

The crossbow only exists for one reason in that game: make flying enemies land.

It was the well-written and rich narrative with great dialogue and choices that made the games great.

It was that too but remember the original Witcher game was a market failure because the gameplay sucked (long load times, bad translations, poor animations, etc.). They had to create the Enhanced Edition (fixing or improving just about everything) in order to make the game profitable.

 

[Valantar]

That's like 99% of the gameplay. It's unforgiving, not "janky." Think Dark Souls but more sane.


That's not a problem unique to Witcher. It's an engine issue involving step size, clipping and limiting the player to the game world. I don't recall running into that issue in Witcher but even if it is present, it's a bug, not a gameplay feature.


The crossbow only exists for one reason in that game: make flying enemies land.


It was that too but remember the original Witcher game was a market failure because the gameplay sucked (long load times, bad translations, poor animations, etc.). They had to create the Enhanced Edition (fixing or improving just about everything) in order to make the game profitable.

Gameplay and narrative are intrinsically linked, and can't be separated no matter how much people like to try to do so. Either has the power to break immersion, make flow impossible, and ruin the feeling of play, which is why both need a minimum level of quality for the game to work (that doesn't mean they need to be equal, of course, as great gameplay can make you forget a clichéd story or a great story can make you forgive janky gameplay - but if one is shit, the other suffers for it).

The link lies in the game world - the game world is fictional, and thus a narrative element (as in: it tells us a lot about the game and its setting, and changing it would fundamentally change the feel of the game), and the world is what provides the player with the potential for agency, without which there would be no game. In other words, even on the most fundamental level you can't separate narrative/fiction from gameplay. In games, they're part of the same whole.


Personally, I found TW3 to have an engaging and beautifully rendered world, a clichéd but okay story (but with horribly boring characters), and somewhat janky gameplay. Thanks to nothing being terrible, it stayed on the "good" side, but that was in large part due to world-building and neither concrete narrative nor gameplay.

 

[Fx]

I don't think they're milking this or anything - I mean it's been 3.5 years since the last game in the series. I just think the lower sales are two-fold - a.) it was on GOG initially and not Steam which limited the # of people who even knew it was out there and b.) the style of game isn't going to be as exciting as W2 or W3, so some people are probably turned off by that. I'll pick it up on Steam once I finish some other games I have in progress.

I firmly fall under point #2 and because of that, I have zero interest in this title.

I am all for sequels, prequels, spin-offs, inspired by, based, on etc etc titles, but the game looks like bunk.

 

[Deleted member 177333]

I firmly fall under point #2 and because of that, I have zero interest in this title.

I am all for sequels, prequels, spin-offs, inspired by, based, on etc etc titles, but the game looks like bunk.

I will find out in a month or so. I've read it has good RPG elements and story - my expectations aren't high when it comes to graphics, etc. I know it's a card type game. I'm still hopeful that they'll do another Witcher game that's like W3, just with a new character.