Not saying it's what happened to you but there's some bugs in it as is the case with every enormous game that gets released. A friend of mine recently had a problem where he lost 11 hours of gameplay because the game simply stopped calculating XP for finished missions. But anyway, a general rule for any large game that doesn't use a checkpoint system is SAVE OFTEN. Especially when it's a huge open world RPG that has recently been released cuz it's likely there's gonna be lots of bugs.

I think Witcher 3 has been a victim of its own hype. Yes, 92 is a good score but all the scores in the 80s on Metacritic that drove it down amaze me. Seems like those particular critics don't at all appreciate the enormity of the game and how difficult it is to deliver something that big with any semblance of polish. So they go and give it the same score they might some 8-12 hour game that they thought was equally fun, albeit shortly. I suspect that a lot of those same critics didn't finish it, just played it a few days and then offered their opinions about what they'd experienced up to that point as though that's the sum of it.

C'mon, we all know that games like Skyrim or this one can't really compete with small, focused games like Halo in small slices. 30 seconds of Halo is definitely more fun than 30 seconds of Skyrim or Witcher 3. But what makes the big games great is the sheer bigness of them, that you can enjoy their campaigns a few hundred hours without having to replay them. When your game is that damned big it seems to me that all you have to deliver on the gameplay front, its 30 second slices anyway, is good to deserve a great score. But when I look at all those scores at 80% I can't help but think that they judged it on its little moments and didn't care at all that it's 10-20X the size, and therefor 10-20X the value, of other games they've given the same score.

And I ain't saying that big is everything, that size is all that matters. But size should be considered. If your 30 second slices are 8 of 10 worthy but they're in a 200 hour game that means a hell of a lot more imo than if they were in a 8-12 hour game.

Right, cuz the whole point of game development is to waste millions of dollars adding mind-numbing amounts of detail to your foliage so some kid can say "Wow, I'm impressed!" and then stop thinking about it 5 minutes later as he settles in to actually play the game.

Really bored with all the incessant Witcher 3 graphics talk. Only need to look at a couple seconds of youtube footage to know it looks more than good enough.

Yeah, that's the thing about Bethesda games ... they're great as making these huge worlds and the games are fun but there isn't as much personality to them as some other games. Little details tend to be on the bland side. Much of the time the huge scale of them puts them ahead of other games despite lacking in the finer points, like natural sounding dialog. What impresses the hell out of me about Witcher 3 is that it's huge AND has the personality of small games. That's an accomplishment.

Well, with the exception of the PS3 version (Which is a tie) Skyrim has a higher metacritic average than Witcher 3 so what's the problem? I personally don't agree with that, I like the Witcher games more, but critics are agreeing with you.

Whoever said it would have no loading times? I don't remember that claim. And anyway, what made you think a game called Witcher 3 would play exactly like Skyrim? Because CDR said it's as big as Skyrim? That's not the same thing as saying "Our game is Skyrim 2" which is what you seem to be claiming it meant.

@Krelian-co: Nah, I agree with that ... it's around 40 percent. That ain't nothing to sneeze at though. I get a kick out of the tech considering adding 2 CUs and then not doing it. Dude, it needed around 10-12 more, different memory architecture, and a better CPU!

@nyadc: In my book PS4 is 75 percent what it should have been, X1 50 percent what it should have been.

@nyadc: I've said repeatedly at this board that PS4's hardware sucks too. Just not as badly as X1's does. But anyway, I didn't mention PS4 cuz the thread is about X1 ... and I'm posting from my phone and tend to bloviate somewhat less when doing that.