Even talking about this is just absurd. It's just more conservative sour grapes and fear-mongering. No one is interested in a gay wedding at a church under such circumstances, especially when there are churches that perform gay weddings all the time.

No one discriminates against Christians. Another faux "war on Chriatianity". However, rational, critical thinkers do ridicule their goofy magical beliefs, a trend that I sincerely hope not only continues, but intensifies.

Also a good point. Btw, what's your stance on churches refusing to hold a gay wedding?

@Wickerman777:

I see, good point. What's your personal opinion on forcing someone to bake a cake for a gay wedding?

No, I'm certainly not ruining them. I'd say that playing on normal mode, a difficulty mode which is basically challenge-free for most games, is ruining games for you. Normal mode is balanced such that bad gamers can complete the game.

I would never play a game on normal unless for whatever reason normal is the hardest difficulty mode. I would say that nearly every game that has difficulty modes is only interesting on the higher modes. For example, take Thief: the Dark Project, a 1998 PC stealth game, one of my top 10 single player games of all time. On normal mode, you can get spotted, you can fight back and live, you can only loot a small portion of the loot to move onto the next level. On the hardest difficulty level (IIRC it was called master thief or something like that) you instantly failed when you were spotted, fighting back was practically impossible in situations where you wouldn't get an insta-fail, and you had to loot damn near everything to finish the level. This radically made the game more interesting. For a more recent game, look at Styx: Master of Shadows. On the highest difficulty mode, Goblin, enemies will flat out kill you when they see you and get into melee range. You're a little goblin and they are bad ass knights, so they just pick you up by the scruff of your neck and ram a sword through your belly. This is, hands down, the best way to play the game. In my humble opinion, the only way to play the game. The other difficulty modes don't even really exist to me.

If there's no challenge or difficulty, then I don't find the game interesting, period. That element is mandatory for me to appreciate the game. And your statement that there's something wrong with a game to require turning it past normal doesn't make sense to me because, as I've said, I would say that that is true for EVERY game with multiple difficulty levels.

That's not how I played Skyrim. I would use shields to block melee attacks and respond with counter attacks. I would dodge and juke enemy attacks. You say that you just charge forward and attack and chug potions but that doesn't work on Legendary mode. On Legendary mode, two arrows from a Falmer Warmonger will kill you, and this happens nearly instantly. So charging out in the open will get you killed. You have to summon creatures to block attacks, you have to carefully lead enemies out of the area they are in, and you have to be very careful to not take damage at all because it will most likely be fatal once you start getting hit.

It seems to me that you didn't play Skyrim on Legendary mode or you abused some of the glitches that were patched out of the PC version with the unofficial patch mods. Skyrim is a brutally hard game on Legendary mode and it never lets up because the toughest enemies level up with you (and the higher level you are, the more of the higher level enemies will show up in general). The only saving grace is that you can quick save and quick load. If it had a checkpoint saving system, Skyrim on Legendary would probably be the hardest action RPG ever made, at least 10-15x harder than Dark Souls game.

I only play games on harder difficulty modes. Not necessarily the hardest, for example I found the first 40 or so levels on Skyrim to be far, far too difficult on Legendary mode so I didn't bump it up to that level until that point. But I don't think talking about the default difficulty mode is all that valuable. That's the casual difficulty mode where you can ignore the mechanics in most games. That's the difficulty mode that's there for bad players so they can see the story.

However, The Witcher 3 on the hardest difficulty mode is really, really easy.

Even Skyrim's somewhat janky combat was much more visceral and exciting and challenging and skill based than TW3's combat.

I actually think the combat is more realistic than a lot of games - the fact that he has weight to him and you really need to practice your dodges and sidesteps. Circle your enemies... if you run in spamming attack or assume his dodge is going to move you 10 feet and render you immune to all attacks you're in for a nasty surprise ;-) I think combat tends to be too easy in games, so IDK

Clearly a lot of people hate the combat. I'm fine being in the minority. FWIW, I hated the combat in TW2... although this is very similar design, I don't hate it because it feels much more responsive and refined to me. But to be honest a lot of RPGs have combat that's a joke, so maybe this game's combat is only half a joke :-P

As far as him being a macho meathead. Well I can see how someone new to the series would get that perception. The game, IMO, jumps in with a lot of pre-suppositions about what you know surrounding the world and its lore. It gives really brief get-you-up-to-speed intros along the way for newcomers, but frankly, without context, a lot of what is going on probably comes off as totally generic. It's only by having read the books and/or played the previous games that "RANDOM BADGUY!" becomes something less black and white and less generic, and Geralt's "TOUGH VOICE FOR DUDE WHO HAS A LOT OF SEX AND CARRIES A SWORD!" becomes a more nuanced person.

At the end of the day, that's maybe a fault of the game designers, although one has to pause before jumping in on the 3rd of anything story driven (book/movie/game) and think - is this really the place I need to be at to enjoy what I'm about to experience? Still, as I acknowledged, I think the efforts CDPR put forth to introduce newcomers and get the enthralled are cursory at best.

TLDR: "probably not" - yes the game's story develops and the skills get cooler, but if you don't have the right context for the story side (or simply never liked it to begin with) and/or don't like the control scheme - I can't see it magically becoming your thing with another 10 hours