Recent reviews by JoeyYoung

This DLC is about 2 systems, 3 if you count the one that you'll forget exists within minutes...

First up, the big one: Plagues
This DLC expands on the plagues system which received a lot of criticism at first and has had a lot of changes which made me very neutral on this system: not bad, but also not good.

At seemingly random times, plagues will pop up, and when they do you'll sometimes get an event where you can call your physician. Depending on their skill and the severity of the plague, the physician will make a recommendation on what to do:
- Soft approach
- Hard approach
- Mystical approach (only if your physician does mystical stuff)
You then get to choose an approach and depending on the severity of the plague and the skill of your physician, it may be successful or a failure, effecting how quickly it spreads.

Plagues have 3 different levels of severity:
- Minor
- Major
- Apocalyptic
The higher the level, the further a plague will spread, the more damage it will do, and the longer it will stick around. If a plague is happening close enough to your own holdings, a distance described by the devs as "about one Ireland", you may get additional events tied to the plague.

From my experience each plague works pretty much the same, going through 3 "phases", the length of which depending on a number of factors including:
- Severity of the Plague
- Plague resistance of the effected area
- Effectiveness of the actions taken by the Physician, assuming you got the event I described earlier

1: Emergence
This is when the plague first appears and will spread quickly, how far it will spread depends on severity.

2: Frozen
At this point the plague will have spread as far as it ever will.

3: Eradication
During this phase the plague slowly dies out. If this phase concludes and there are no other plagues in your realm, you will get an event saying "Hey, there's no more plagues around, want to put money into the economies of the effected areas?"

You might have noticed that the descriptions of these phases are very short, that is because there is barely anything to say about them. Outside of the event right at the start of a plague and the potential one at the end, there are no events tied to specific phases. Throughout the entire duration of a plague, it will be drawing from a static pool of events, a pool that is rather limited.

The recent update fixed some of the biggest problems: Plagues being far too common, you having to deal with every plague in your realm which became super annoying when your realm started to get big, and events firing way too regularly with no cooldown. It is also cool that plagues will generally spread along rivers or coastlines, following trade and transport routes.

The biggest issue is still here however: A lack of player interaction.
You might have noticed that I didn't describe anything the player can actively do to fight a plague, this is because there really isn't much:
- There is a building chain that gives an area plague resistance but those take time to build so these are more preemptive measures and they still aren't that involved.
- There's the events tied to the plagues but there aren't many of them and the effects they have are very hard to notice.

Why can I not manually shut down trade routes or burn down infected villages to prevent spread?
Why do I have to wait for random events to let me do something about a plague?

There's also far too little difference between different severity levels, the only plague that ever felt truly apocalyptic was the black death and that was scripted to cover the entire map and absolutely wreck every single economy in the game. It was a cool and interesting struggle, but it is also a one time event in every game you play and will pretty much always play out the same way.

These are mainly problems with the system itself, NOT the 3 diseases this DLC adds, but those 3 diseases are just a thin coat of paint on a boring system.

Most of the time, the way to deal with a plague is to wait, and waiting is not fun or interesting.

Next up: Legends
This is the second big system. At some points in the game a so called "legend seed" may become available to the player. Pressing a button starts a process in which you will be having people work to spread the story of your legend, the further it spreads before you hit the "Complete" button (which becomes available 5 years after you started spreading the legend), the bigger the bonuses you get when pressing that button. Counties that a legend spreads to will also get small buffs.

While spreading a legend, you can get events to change the "story" of your legend. Some of these events are tied to specific types of legends, religions, or other things. The story itself is pure flavor and has no actual effect, variations in the stories are very few from what I've seen, and the changes are very obviously just pre-written fluff with some names inserted into it, they don't flow from one to another and can sometimes even make no sense at all: describing you and the war you waged when the legend should be about your son for example.

This system commits the same sins as the plagues: far too little variety in the events and far too few ways for the player to interact with the system. Why not have people seek out the subject of a Legend, maybe to kill them in a duel to become a legend themselves, or to serve them, or perhaps another reason?

Legends are at least worth spreading, the buffs they give can be powerful and the rewards you can get for completing a max level legend are insane:
- Convert a massive portion of your domain to your religion instantly,
- Get a new type of war goal that basically works like "force vassalization" but without the size restriction (You can use it on just about anyone),
- Get another use of the "Holy War for Kingdom" war goal,
- Each type of legend gives you a free building slot to be used for a special "legend building"that give powerful bonuses.

The entire legend system needs to be reworked, maybe instead have legends revolve around certain milestones or events where your character will inflate the truth regarding their deeds and accomplishments:
- Win a crusade? Legends start spreading about a holy king blessed by God who could kill heretics with a single stare.
- Reform a religion? Legends start spreading about how God came down and spoke to a ruler.
- Succeeded at a legendary hunt? Legends start spreading about how a lone hunter faced off against a massive beast some say was created by the devil.

The rewards and buffs one can get from Legends are great, a really good motivator to interact with the system, but after spreading a few legends the system itself gets really boring.

The third and final system that gets added is legitimacy.

I really don't know what to say about it. For as far as I know, there are no unique events tied to the system, the only "direct" interactions you have with it are that some pre-existing decisions (as well as some of the ones added by the Legend and Plague systems) or other things now either add or remove legitimacy.

The only time I THINK it had any effect on my game, was when my character died of old age and the heir died that same year (old age as well). This should pretty much be the nightmare scenario, and literally nothing happened. No uprisings, no factions (that I noticed), nothing.

This could have been because that first character had max legitimacy, but I truly don't know.

The only things I can say about this system, is that might exist, and that it might have an effect, but I am uncertain on both of those points.

In short, this DLC is a lot better than it was before, but it still seriously lacks options for player interaction. I don't even know if I can recommend getting this DLC when it is on sale because 95% of it happens in the background and the remaining 5% consists almost entirely of small set of events which you'll know like the back of your hand far too quickly.

it good

online is a bit unstable... but it fun

TL:DR
Some slight performance issues, but god it's fun
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After first experiencing major and inexcusable problems, they turned out to be my fault and went away when I updated my graphics driver. After updating I began playing only to regain consciousness about 6 hours later and realizing I have been so engrossed that i have forgotten to eat or drink anything in the past 6 hours... Once I'm done writing this review, I'm going to eat, drink and then get right back into this game.

In all seriousness though, this game feels like a perfect combo of all of FROMSOFTWARE's big titles combined into one Magnum Opus. Never before has a game successfully made me just wander around, exploring, getting into fights, stumbling into a dragon and spending an hour fighting it only to go right back to exploring the moment I finally kill it.

There are still some performance issues in the game and the early game is not as challenging as I had hoped, though this is only an issue for FROMSOFTWARE veterans.

I highly recommend this game, though I do recommend you play with controller. Because if there's one beast FROMSOFTWARE is yet to conquer, it's making a good control scheme for keyboard and mouse.

Short version: though the game has it flaws i absolutely love it. This game is not only beautiful but also massive in both scale and things to do.

Longer version: Before i begin i must clarify this is the first and (currently) only final fantasy I've played so when i started i knew almost nothing about FF lore. Despite that I never felt lost in the story as everything is well explained in a way that doesn't feel forced.

This game is fantastic, it's not only beautiful but also massive in both scale and things to do. FFXV has amazing voice acting which really helps bring it to life which is complimented by its wonderful soundtrack. There is real and meaningful character development throughout the story with expertly placed twists and turns. Despite all this the game isn't without its flaws:

The first flaw I ran into is the awful tutorial which is only made worse by the odd controls. While the tutorial does a decent job introducing you to the very basics of combat it frontloads the player while doing so. Instead of having the player first get to grips with one part of combat and using it in a variety of ways, the game has you preform each posible action in combat 3 times and just assumes you'll remember the paragraph of info it threw at you before you preformed the action the first time. When i said odd controls i meant it: while the prompt to block seems to tell you to press RMB to block you just have to hold the button down which took me quite long to find out, they might have mentioned it in the tutorial but I probably missed it in the entire paragraph on blocking they wrote for me. Other confusing controls are, for example: holding down LMB to sprint when not in combat making sprinting while in combat impossible, holding down shift to lock on and you better not let your finger slip off because the moment you let go you will lock off.
On top of all this the game froze for several seconds quite a lot and crashed often at first though the crashes suddenly stopped despite no update being released so it probably had to do with my machine, you cant customize the controls to your liking because you can only chose from 3 sets, and those sets display the console controls meaning they tell you nothing about how the setup would work on mouse/keyboard.
The biggest flaw in this game however is its pacing: at one point you are told the main quest will take you away from the open world for a while so you won't be able to do any sidequests for a long time, the game doesn't tell you how long this will take or what level enemies you'll be facing before you can go back into the open world. The problem area appears when this isn't the first time you are temporarily away from the open world but the other ones lasted 30 minutes at most. Because of this, by the time i could do sidequests again i was severely underleveled because i hadn't been able to grind for levels between story missions. This forced me to restart my entire playhrough and overlevel myself severely so i wouldn't be underleveled later.
one other thing i should mention is that when you are using an item which the game claims to be incredibly powerful against deamons (basically the most powerful enemies you'll encounter in the open world) isn't all that powerful against deamons that are kinda big or bigger and its also useless against moderately sized or bigger ones that are a few levels higher than you, making this supposed super powerful weapon.. pretty much useless in any actual real fight.

Despite these flaws though i love this game and do highly recommend it because non of the flaws are so big that they distract from what the game does have: a beautiful, deep, massive and highly immersive world that truly feels alive.

i'd rate this game's quality 8/10 because of its flaws, \
and its price rating (how i think the game's price represents the content you're getting) is 6/10 as I feel the price fits very well with what you're getting

This game is amazing
Let me start with the open-world aspect of the game since it's a first for the witcher franchise.
This game has a massive number of side quests and activities, many of which suprise you with depth, moral/ethical dilemmas or both. On top of that many of the side quests or even events that you manually trigger that aren't even part of a side quest or activity have a notable effect on the in-game world. This makes the already massive and beautiful world seem alive and real. When I was in a tavern in some random town I got in a fight with guards from some nearby city, forcing me to kill them. When I eventually got to that city I heard the following conversation as I passed by some guards:

Guard 1: They got their arses whipped like some Novigrad ♥♥♥♥♥!
Guard 2: You surprised!? They tried to dance with a witcher!
Guard 1: Where'd he come from anyway?
Guard 2: How should I know!? if you're so curious, go ask him yourself!

Now this is just amazing design. With these 4 lines the devs use a random and unscripted event to impact the world just slightly. To me it seems like every little dialogue choice has an impact of the game's world and how some npc's view you and think of you.

This isn't the only thing that is done to bring the world to life. The devs put in many, and I mean many, little details that all help to immerse the player into this wondrous world. For example: Geralt's beard, YOUR beard, grows in real time! if you don't like how long it is you can go to a barber for a shave but it will eventually grow back.

Like I mentioned earlier this game has a beautiful open world but it all feels and is handcrafted. With beautiful cliffs overseeing cities as the sun sets giving you a beautiful view. Somehow this game manages to take war torn lands with corpses, bandits, monsters and still make it look beautiful.

The game does all this so well one would think that CDPR messed up on some major aspect of the game, like combat... but nope; combat is amazing as well.
Before I go on a quick game animation 101: in order for a game to seem real all the actions must have weight to them, every action must have some sort of anticipation. The player character's anticipation musn't be long or the game will feel unresponsive, nor must they be very distracting or the player wont be able to focus on combat.
Few games get this right to the degree Witcher 3 does. Both heavy and light attacks have the correct amount of weight and momentum to them with beautiful combat animations that somehow manage to not be notably distracting. The combat system itself also works well, it is easy to learn but hard to master making a clear cut difference between skilled and less skilled players.

If I have to say something negative about the game it would be this: i have gotten stuck on objects several times but it was nothing a single press of my spacebar couldn't fix.
I should also mention one more thing: when not in combat you're very maneuverable but when you're in combat, a waist high fence might as well be a 2 mile high titanium reinforced wall because you wont be jumping over that.


TL:DR
This game is huge, beautiful and worth way more than it costs. If you are not sure if you should buy the game, allow me to put an end to your doubts: you should definitely buy it.

I rate this game 9,9/10 for its quality and 10/10 for its price/quality balance. this game is worth twice the price you have to pay.

i love this game; its fast, expansive and best of all: YOU DONT HAVE TO PAY AT ALL TO UNLOCK EVERY MOD, WARFRAME OR WEAPON IN THE GAME!!!!! though it will take a long time grinding away for materials it is possible to fully complete for free, and that brings me to the one real downside to the game; to get some of the better weapons you will have to grind a lot. but still..... fantastic

IN DEPTH REVIEW:
first of all you are going to grind wether you like it or not but you should know that's the case with every free to play game. of course the game isnt perfect but nothing is. but if you like a ton, and i mean a ton, of different ways to equip yourself this game will hook you due to its modding system. whenever you kill an enemy there's a slight chance they drop a mod wich you can equip on your frame, primary, secondary, melee or companion to make the item faster, stronger, give it more health or a larger magazine, shorter reload time you name it...... it is really satisfying to watch as you mod a weapon and see its base damage go from a couple hundred to maybe even twelve thousand damage in one shot with a 95% chance to fire two shots at once.

there is honestly no reason to not try this game because its a completely Free to play game in its purest form. in other words: every weapon that is obtainable by spending IRL money is also obtainable without paying at all. wether you have loads of time to play games everyday or only an hour or less each week this game always has something you can do.

this game is a lot of fun and massive on its own, once you think you have nothing more to find in the game you can just visit the workshop and a few moments later you are fighting in japan, italy, a post-apocalyptic world or somewhere else.... this game has some downsides but they dont count for much; the biggest one might be just me but i always find myself in a sort of grey area at some point where i am strong enough to defeat noble armies but will get my ass kicked when i try to capture a town or castle, causing a lack of great battles so my party morale goes up way to slow to get a big army fast. but most important is the following: this game is good for short, medium or long playsessions. the player has enough ways to easily remember what quests he had, what NPC's do or dont like you etc. you have a whole F****** encyclopedia wich keeps notes of what lords are loyal to what king, what villages, town or castles they own and almost everything possible other bit of information. in short; ITS FANTASTIC

this game is getting botted to all hell... I wouldn't be surprised if at any time 70% of the player count reported by steam is bots, Valve seems to be at least somewhat aware of this and is doing nothing, so stay away

great game:
smooth combat and smooth gameplay
this is a must play