There aren’t any other devs that I know of, who have gone to these lengths to keep fans happy. Additionally, CDPR employed an enhanced technique to render the textures, and as a result Blood and Wine looked prettier and performed better too. The second expansion pack for The Witcher 3 in the form of Blood and Wine added more content than most games offer as a whole. Not only are the DLCs overpriced, they don’t add that much content.
However, many of them cost as much as the base game, the most glaring example being EA’s games.
Geralt’s creators proved it’s possible to support an AAA game with continued updates for more than a year, with lots of free stuff to boot.Įxpansion packs are an important part of any game in today’s day and age. Furthermore, support in the form of patches, updates and even DLCs to some extend is an important responsibility of every developer, something many studios ignore these days. Making an AAA game is hard and expensive, but charging players for weapons and armor is just plain unethical. Publishers like EA and Ubisoft charge a good 5-10$ for the same kind of DLCs. One thing I absolutely loved about The Witcher 3 was the developer support and the free DLCs CD Projekt would release from time to time. It’s also important to note that it’s easier to manage when you’re a smaller studio with relatively less people than if you’re a publisher controlling more than a dozen studios over the world. All I can say is that they were dedicated and not that worried about profits. All said and done, you may ask if an established publisher (EA) can’t do it, then how did an indie studio (CD Projekt Red) create a masterpiece like The Witcher 3 all on it’s own. Although you can’t blame them as profits are important to avoid, you know, bankruptcy, but you can’t help but find faults in their planning. In turn the single player campaign suffers, and instead of solid writing and innovative side quests, all you get are boring linear fetch quests with generic characters and a cliched plot.įurthermore, all these games seem to have been rushed through development to meet publisher demands, and in the process a lot of decent content gets butchered. So one thing you can conclude from this is that developers are putting more and more effort into online co-op and multi-player component of games, putting it where it’s not even needed. As if breaking the lore wasn’t bad enough, this was like spitting in the faces of those who worked their asses off to complete the final part of the game. On top of that, the BoG DLC’s ending kind of contradicts the main game’s ending. Granted it’s not that bad, and the first half of the game is actually quite fun but the third act is a repetitive mess than requires an insane amount of grinding to finish. Okay, maybe I’m making it sound a bit too severe, but Shadow of War was just not upto the mark. The sequel turned out to be the spoiled kid who wastes all their parents’ fortune and destroys the family name. It’s nemesis system was unique, something gamers had never seen before. Shadow of Mordor was one of the best games of 2014, and it got GotY awards as well. They were published by major publishers and had an online multiplayer component that sucked bigtime and relied heavily on micro-transactions. Some massive titles that failed in a rather spectacular fashion in recent years include Star Wars Battlefront II, Mass Effect Andromeda and Shadow of War. What’s Wrong With RPGs And Most AAA Titles These Days?īefore we move onto The Witcher 3, let’s discuss the core problem with RPGs and big open world games these days. On the game’s 3rd anniversary, I’d like to pay some tribute to The Witcher 3 and it’s developer, CD Projekt Red and discuss why it’s still one of the best open world games (not just an RPG), and why you need to play it ASAP, if you still haven’t. CD Projekt Red is now considered as a foremost RPG developer and their upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most anticipated upcoming games. Mass Effect Andromeda failed to impress and EA has sunk ever further below in the eyes of gamers. A lot has changed in the RPG landscape in the past couple of years. Before Witcher 3 came out, Skyrim was considered to be the absolute best medieval RPG, and no one even knew about a certain Polish studio, named CD PROJEKT RED.