Witcher 3

Mods and Witcher 3

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I am spending an excessive amount of time roaming around the world of Witcher 3. Last night I finally wrapped up most of the loose ends in the Velen/Novigrad areas and made my way over to the Isle of Skellige. I specifically love this sequence of the game, so often times I try and wrap everything up so that when I get there I can feel like I can really explore it freely. Writing blog posts when I am actively playing a story driven game… that features a large number of spoilers for anyone who has NOT played it… always lands in this really weird place for me. I don’t want to accidentally ruin an experience for someone that might follow in my footsteps and become interested in the game. However at the same time there is only so much time that I can spend talking about things in only the most general of terms.

Instead this morning I thought I would talk about some of the care and feeding of this current Witcher 3 play through. If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know that I greatly favor the PC as a platform, and one of the main reasons behind this apart from my love of keyboard and mouse controls is the fact that I can easily modify the game to behave the way I want it to. If there is something that annoys me with a console game, I basically have to make a decision if I am going to suck it up and deal with it… or just quit playing the game. On the PC however we have another option… to fix whatever behavior I personally find offending and then move on with the modified and more enjoyable experience. Along with most of the internet… I use NexusMods as my core source for all my modding needs and maintain a subscription to it just to speed up data transfers.

I am going to take a little bit and talk about the mods that I am running on this particular play through of the game.

Over 9000 – Weight Limit Mod

One of the things that I hate almost more than anything in a big open world like this is being limited in my ability to loot and scoot. I hate inventory management. It is legitimately the bane of my existence in games, and when I can either install a mod or run a console command and never have to worry with it ever again… I am always going to take that option. Thankfully the mod scene has made this extremely painless and given me a mod that takes my item weight limit from around 100 to 9999. This allows me to run around for days without caring about managing items while still looting until my heart is content.

Autoloot – Autoloot the Items You Want

Going hand in hand with this is a mod that just automagically loots everything when you kill anything or interact with a container. It converts the notifications to a little toast window in the lower lefthand corner of the screen giving you a quick notification of everything that was just sucked into your inventory. The specific variant that I am running is the file set that will keep you from accidentally stealing anything. I am contemplating swapping over to the Herbs and Corpses variant however which apparently auto picks up any herbs that you run past that are in your loot radius. If a corpse has an item on it needed for quest progress, you still have to manually loot it.

Fast Travel from Anywhere

The map in Witcher 3 is massive, and this one is largely a quality of life change to make navigating around a bit easier. By default you have to make your way back to a signpost marked in green on your map, which will then allow you to teleport to any other signpost you have already unlocked. This mod is pretty straight forward and cuts out the travel time allowing you to just crack open the map and teleport directly. This is phenomenal for when you have fought your way down into an area and are nowhere near civilization and just want to pop back to town to do something quickly. Essentially it makes Witcher work more like other games with fast travel points.

Lamp on Player’s Boat

The older I get the harder time I have with nighttime and picking out details… and this carries forward with video games as well. In general if I am running around at night in Witcher 3, I have my torch out but there are a number of actions that keep you from using your torch. One of these for example is piloting a boat and this mod simply adds a torch to every boat in the game giving you some illumination. It also makes it way easier to spot the boats in the world scattered along the coastline. Like most of the mods I am using it is the little quality of life things that I tend to tweak.

Cheap Dyes Everywhere and Dye-able Starting Armor

One of the cool features that was added into the game with the Blood and Wine expansion, is the ability to dye certain armor sets. This is a feature that I did not even know existed until I went searching for a mod to change the look of my favorite armor set. I love the Ursine Witcher armor, but I am not a big fan of the cream/green/red look that it comes with by default. What I wanted was the ability to dye my armor black like a proper Witcher armor should be. Now you cannot even start the Blood and Wine expansion before level 35, and the dyes don’t show up on vendors until then… but this mod changes that and makes a large number of vendors around the early parts of the game sell armor dyes and for cheap. Now I have my Ursine armor in darker shades and am significantly happier with life.

That is it folks. Those are all of the mods that I happen to be running at this moment. There is one that I have been eyeing that changes the scabbards for the swords to black but I have not messed with installing it because often times you have to deal with mod conflicts. For example there is an addon that I would love to use that marks every quest that you have in your journal on your map, so that you can know if there are other quests in the near vicinity that you can complete at the same time. However it conflicts with the Fast Travel mod, and I have not wanted to mess with figuring out how to manually merge the two. For me a lot of the mods that I end up using remove friction that I do not personally find meaningful. Modding is ultimately just that a very personal choice, and while I would not say anything that I am doing is “required” to enjoy the game it absolutely improves my enjoyment.

Good Chorfun

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Good Morning Friends! I am slowly trying to get back into the swing of things. My last day of work for the year was 12/17 and as a result I am good and toast when it comes to actually getting up at normal times. Normal for me being 5:30 in the morning, but I am struggling forward regardless and trying to make a blog post happen. Apologies for the extremely sporadic nature of my posts over the last few weeks but I was very much “in vacation mode”. The truth is you didn’t miss an awful lot and I have fallen back into a single player gaming binge. For the last few weeks I have been getting up around 8 am when the synergy of my bladder and the cats wanting food coalesced into forcing me out of the bed. Now we are returning to being governed by an alarm and so far… the progress is mixed.

Thanks to watching my way through the second season of Witcher over the break, I have found myself returning to playing Witcher 3. This will be my second full play through of the game and it is just as good as I remember it being. There is something about the end of one year and the beginning of a new one… that seemingly drives me to wanting to play a big meaty open world single player adventure. The weirdest part about this most recent turtle is that it isn’t really due to me being stressed and needing a break from humanity. If anything I have the latent desire to be around other people, but my brain just wants to be playing these sort of games instead of diving back into the Endwalker alt leveling and gear grinding process.

It started initially as a good intentioned “lets have a break to let other people play this extremely congested game”, and has more or less turned into an obsession with completing all of the things in Velen and Novigrad. I love this world and setting and I love being my kind-hearted version of Geralt. Someone really in need and shouldn’t be spending coin in my services? Well if given the chance I will take the “you keep the coin” option. I will say that the game actively fights against you trying to turn Geralt into a questing knight however, because often times things don’t go down as you might hope. I’ve found a number of quests this time around that I somehow missed last time and me trying my best to save the say… has not necessarily been good enough. Then there are the comedy relief quests like the Trolls… and I love Witcher Trolls. It was also only on this playing… that I finally grasped what “Chorfun” meant.

The thing that I have been struggling with is that initially I had decided to give Yennifer a try this time around. However… I just can’t do it. Triss is just better in every possible way and I kinda hate that Yennifer is so hardly pushed as the “lore correct” answer. Yen is just not a good match for my kinder gentler soft-hearted version of Geralt. Yen makes sense if you are leaning into the whole “two hopelessly fucked up people who deserve each other” aspect of The Witcher universe, but just feels wrong to me personally. That said if you are a Yen stan I won’t get in your way… but I have a feeling I am going to keep choosing Miss Merigold over and over each time I play through.

All of this said… I have picked back up the novels and started up again where I left off with Blood of Elves. This time last year I read through the first two books… which are largely a collection of short stories. By the time I got to Blood of the Elves, it was just dense enough to make me bounce after reading the two much more casual reads in a row. For the last several nights I have been reading for about an hour on my phone and while I read terribly slowly… especially when my wife keeps trying to talk to me while reading… however I am about halfway through at this point. My wife and I have completely different “going to sleep routines”. For her it is like she needs to get all of her talking out of her system before she can sleep… but for me I need silence to wind down and the more she talks… the more I wake back up. Generally speaking through reading something is one of the better ways for me to drift off to slumber and reading the book on my phone gives me these perfectly bite sized chunks of the book formatted to fit the small screen.

Well this is a blog post down… and I am still awake so here is hoping I can get back into the swing of actually waking up on time and knocking out a post each morning. I had a great break and I hope you all did as well.

Regularly Playing: January 2020 Edition

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For those who have read this blog for awhile, you will know that I have this semi-monthly column in which I talk about the games I have been playing regularly and also use this as an excuse to update my blog’s sidebar. The fourth quarter of 2019 was not a good time for regular updates to this because I failed to do one in October and also completely failed to do one in December. With the new year I am hoping to get back on track and keep these, but I have to warn you… today is going to be a bloodbath. Many games are being dropped from the list because quite honestly some of my gaming patterns have changed drastically over the last few months.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 – PC

Destiny 2 represents one of only a few games that I am regularly playing that would classify as an endless game. I’ve had a shift away from Massively Multiplayer Online gaming towards more finite single player titles of late, and as such those evergreen games that I always spent time in have suffered greatly. I’ve come to realize that I had not really finished many games because I always wound up getting distracted by the online fare, and if I instead ignore them I find I actually do enjoy polishing games off. Destiny 2 however is near and dear to my heart and is the sort of thing that I can return to over and over again for short bursts. While I am sure that I am making Thalen sad for not playing much, I have missed out on a bunch of things and am mostly okay with that. I do want to finish the seasonal grind at some point but I have 40 some days to do that.

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch

Diablo 3 is another one of those games that is so much part of my core identity that I am not sure if there will truly ever be a period of time when I am not at least idly playing it. Since the time of last posting I completely finished the PC Seasonal Content as a Demon Hunter and made it up through Slayer on the Switch with a Whirlwind Barbarian. The Switch is excellent for grinding a bit from bed before falling asleep, but even of late I have been opting out of that for a few reasons that I will get into later. With the talk of Diablo 4 on the horizon and the conversion of Torchlight Frontiers to Torchlight III, I still find myself extremely connected to this now aging game. I’ve just not found an adequate replacement to truly scratch the same action rpg ich.

To The New and Returning

Here is where the sad bits come in… there really isn’t anything new to be adding to this list. I have played several games but none of them are the sort of things that I expect to be adding to the list in any sort of a permanent manner. Instead I think I am going to implement a new feature called “Ships Passing in the Night” where I talk about some of the games that I had short but intense interactions with, but feel the chapter is either closed or will be closed once I complete them.

Ships Passing in The Night

The Witcher 3 – PC

I have so much love for this game, and while I fully expect to go back and play it at some point I am effectively done with it for the moment. For years I found this game incomprehensible in the way it sorta just drops you in the middle of everything with limited explanation. It was only through watching the Netflix Witcher series that I was able to gain proper purchase and glean enough information to make me feel firmly planted in this games universe. Since then I have been on a tear of playing through everything I could stand from the Witcher games and even reading the novels. The first Witcher will likely always be an impassable wall for me, but I have accepted it. This third game however goes on the top games of all time list for me personally.

The Witcher 2 – PC

After playing through the first Witcher game I had so many unanswered questions, and as a result I opted to do things backwards and go back searching for the answers in Witcher 2. While it was a bit of a struggle to get used to the interface, I eventually mastered it and had a phenomenal time doing what was effectively a golden path play-through of the non-human side of the story. I even was engaged enough to restart and try playing through the human side, only to determine that I had absolutely made the correct choice the first time around and wander away like a bored toddler. This game is always going to have a soft spot in my heart, but it is a deeply flawed experience, but one worth experiencing. Unfortunately I realized too lately that the answers to all of my questions lie in the books and not the past video games.

Greedfall – PC

Another flawed but phenomenal gameplay experience is that of Greedfall. It is a game that is tackling some themes that I have never quite seen a game tackle, which are really spending time exploring the sins of the colonial era. While there are some weird things going on at times with the interface and with combat, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience playing this game and as a result it has caused me to be interested in a deep dive of the developers back catalog of games. If you love the Bioware style of games you might legitimately be interested in exploring the games from french developer Spiders.

The Technomancer – PC

This is the second game I have played by Spiders and I am enthralled. This is currently my gaming main squeeze, at least until I finish it and It is a thoroughly interesting experience. The game is set in a post colonial Mars where it is ruled by rival corporations and military powers that end up creating a pretty damned oppressive environment. That said the game threw me a massive curve ball yesterday and opened up considerably and I am so there for the long ride. Imagine a setting that blends Blade Runner, Dune, Total Recall and the Red Faction games with a dash of Fallout into a single setting. I actually am enjoying the combat in Technomancer way more than I did Greedfall, and I am curious what things are going to be like if I keep going backwards in the Spiders catalog.

TemTem – PC

It is possible that this game might make it to regularly playing status, but for now I am throwing it in this category because I am just not sure. It is a Not-Pokemon MMORPG and it is charming as hell and does a really good job of both mirroring the best parts of Pokemon and bringing new things to the genre. The only thing that I find lacking is there is no xp sharing system and you legitimately have to fight with your not-pokemon to level them instead of doing what I do and just dragging them along for the ride. I’ve only played a few hours on this latest build even though I was a backer and have played various builds along the way. Time will tell if this becomes something more serious for me or not.

To Those Departing

Dragalia Lost – Android

Sorry Dragalia… you had a really good run but there are two things that happened. Firstly the gameplay finally reached its point where it became repetitive to a fault. Secondly I have been trying to read more often and as such that time when I was spending playing Dragalia Lost got replaced with time in the Kindle app. I am not the type of player that ever opts to play a mobile game if I have access to other options, so once it lots its prime real estate for bedtime gaming it really dropped off my radar. I am happier to be reading each night than to be spending time in a repetitive grind that doesn’t really go anywhere.

The Outer Worlds – PC

Sorry Boo, it’s me not you. This is a game I expect to return to and finish up, but in truth it is one of those things that should have graced the new category and not really added as a regularly playing. I’m somewhere around halfway done with the game and I figure when I deplete my current run of bioware-like games I fully expect to dust this off and finish it up. I love the game lots, but just have not been playing it.

World of Warcraft Classic – PC

It just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I can’t fully explain it, but after the absence when I was frustrated with Blizzard over the Hong Kong thing… I found it impossible to get reconnected and actively start playing again. Someone let the magical blue smoke escape and it just doesn’t do much of anything for me right now. I am for whatever reason in the wrong mind state to be enjoying it and as such it leaves list.

World of Warcraft Retail – PC

While I know without a doubt that I will be back and playing Shadowlands… for the moment I have zero interest in anything going on in this game. It is sad because I dearly love my Facepull family, but for now at least I am loving them from a distance. There is just something about World of Warcraft at the moment that I find a massive turn off, because I have tried to log in a few times but jettison in a perpendicular trajectory really quickly. Battle for Azeroth really did ruin the game for me, and I guess I hope it is not a permanent condition because I still have fond memories of how much I enjoyed Legion.

Summary

So there we have it, like I said it is a bit of a bloodbath because I have whittled down the regularly playing list to two titles. I am pretty sure this is the smallest it has ever been since the implementation of it. For now I am very much on a kick of not playing MMORPGs, but time will tell how long that will actually last.

Chasing a Different Tale

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Last night was one of those nights where I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I burned the shit out of my hand while making dinner, so after that I sat down to a relaxing evening of retreating ground I very recently visited. I decided to restart Witcher 2 since there are very binary path options that you take through the three chapter journey that I am imagining lead to very different experiences. In the last play through I followed the non-human path and this time around I am going to follow Vernon Roche and see where that leads me. The first time playing I was very much in a rush to see the story, and this time I am wandering around a bit more and exploring all of the side quest options.

My eighteen or so hour play through of the game focused largely on the golden path. I did very little but the main story quests and as a result it was a very short experience. Now I am letting myself chill out a bit and especially now that I understand the lay of the land and the interface of this game the entire experience feels more enjoyable. A lot of the first play through was trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing given that the mini-map system does not exactly give you high quality advisement and messaging. There is a sameness to a lot of the textures and as a result the objects you are looking for to interact with don’t really appear obvious most of the time. I wish there was a fix for the whole having to wait until combat is over before you can begin interacting with things again.

The armor I am wearing in this shot always makes me feel like Beetlejuice. I’ve already made enough different choices to have seen a number of different things in the prologue, so I am really looking forward to watching this first chapter play out. If you are playing Witcher 2 and noticing that my screenshots look way better than the game on your screen, there is a reason for that. About halfway through my first play through I decided to venture forth onto Nexus Mods and look to see what tweaks were available. As it stands I have two different mods installed and I will talk a little bit about both of them.

Better Texture Environment: Enhanced Edition

This is the big one that replaces a good number of textures in the game for higher fidelity alternatives. I swiped one of those before and after comparison images from Nexus mods so you can see the sort of effect the changes have on the game. Prior to the patch playing in higher resolutions made everything feel blurry for lack of a better term. Afterwards the objectives are way easier to pick out because everything feels more in focus and detailed. If you do nothing else than I highly suggest taking the time to download this almost 800 meg archive.

Zero Weight Mod

One of the constructs of games that I hate the most is item weight and encumbrance. If given the option I will remove this from the game because the last thing I want to be doing is playing the game of carefully trying to keep under some number. For some people this adds enjoyment and realism but for me… it just makes me want to curse and throw things. As a result when I noticed a mod that simply goes through the item catalog and sets the weight of every single item to zero… I was completely on board. Now I can loot until my heart is content and just not care at all about trying to keep under some number on my stat page.

The only other mod that really interests me is one that allows for the dismantling of all of your junk items to get raw resources. A number of the mods available are among the more cosmetic variety, adding and removing hoods from armor sets that either have or don’t have them, making Geralt look more like the character from Witcher 3, and of course a truly nonsense number of nude mods because Nexus Mods is apparently thirsty as hell. The two I listed however have greatly improved my enjoyment of the experience and installing mods for Witcher 2 is pretty straight forward. You simply find your Witcher install and look for the “CookedPC” directory and then extract the downloaded files into that. I didn’t bother with a Mod Manager, but I did make a back up of this directory before starting.

I admit when I first tried to play this game I was none too certain of what I thought about it. However now that I have played through it once I am beginning to appreciate the simplicity of it. It is a very straight forward experience and is likely a much better starting point in the Witcher universe than jumping straight into the 3rd game. Witcher 3 deluges you with choices and as a result I bounced from it originally just because there was too much going on and too many things I had no clue about. Witcher 2 still uses the veil of Geralt still having amnesia to do a better job of introducing characters and concepts, whereas Wild Hunt just sorta expects you to have played all of the games and read all of the books to understand the context of what is going on.

I think my next goal after having played both paths is to decide which one I liked better and import that save into Witcher 3 and replay that game.