alternine said:
Id say Witcher 3 brought the action RPG back to the forefront. Hopefully Cyberpunk 2077 will be just as good. |
I liked the story, inovations in quest design, good characters and combat in TW3 - but I didn't like too horizontal world design, especially flatish design of whole Velen, Novigrad felt quite uninspired, bad quest directions (which in Velen, given how overgrown yet flat is, pretty much forced playing with POIs on), restricted interactions with NPCs and most of all general feel that the game is missing a lot of proper RPG mechanisms of the old - the price for going mainstream I suppose.
On top of that, I find that TW3, with it's fairly structured story and characters, was not really suited well for open-world game in the first place and that it lost a lot of fine details that TW2 had.
I can't blame them much for going too mainstream though, they have to justify high production costs, but on the other hand, that's exactly what I mean by whole action-RPG genre, especailly of open-world variety, going downward...Skyrim and Witcher 3 have become role models for the industry, but honestly, neither of those games are really that good - TES loosing a lot, and I mean a lot of its good mechanisms from Morrowind onward and Witcher 3 being too restricted and not fully fledged as open-world RPG.
Now, I admit, I am pretty harsh when it comes to open-world action-RPGs - even my favourites, Gothic 1 and 2, had their share of flaws and I rate them "only" 9/10. But in the span of year and a half there were two Gothic games plus Morrowind and the genre seemed to be heading in the right direction - maybe action elements weren't as good as they could've been in those games, but RPG elements were quite good and promised bright future for the genre. Sadly, these days, I feel that future I was hoping for never came, and while there were fairly good games after, genre as a whole went too actiony and lot less RPG-ish.
In the end, I liked TW3, but I didn't love it. It was pretty good attempt from CDPR to bring Euro-RPGs to mainstream, while at the same time dipping their toes in open-world genre, but I honestly expected way, way more....sort of a genre renaissance, if you will. For some, it was exactly that, for me it was missed opportunity. And while I'm looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077, I'm hoping that CDPR will revisit fantasy setting, this time unrestricted with too structured character and story of Witcher and give it another go at trying to do proper open-world action-RPG.
