Witcher 3 Dev Admits He Overcrowded One Map With Too Many Points Of Interest

@moodycat Completely agree. BOTW overrated and annoying. Immortals Fenyx Rising more fun and costs heaps less.

@moodycat

The first Yooka-Laylee...

Wasn't really a problem for me. Figured out they were all the same pretty quickly and left them to wait for their rewards to scale up later. I ended up going back and grabbing a few at a time throughout my playthrough as a quick source of cash.

@moodycat You live up to your name.

@Franklin Spot on that game is an empty space of nothing.

@moodycat completely disagree. Hyrule in BOTW is a demonstration of tight game design across a whole open world. As good as The Witcher 3 is (particular with story telling), this copy and paste treasure cache with a ? clearly marked on your map so you never find it organically isn’t tight design and it can be incredibly distracting. BOTW could have filled its map out with ?s marking koroks or the hidden buried treasure chests but it would have been a far worse game for it.

Skellige.......my greatest enemy

@moodycat a ton of ? smuggler caches [infamously tedious and time consuming for the fanbase] isn’t exactly a solution to “empty open worlds”. Even they admitted it was badly implemented.

Would rather have those “empty” open worlds that streamlines the main game then a bunch of collect-athon fillers for the sake of padding a map. Witcher 3 did a lot of things right, but this wasn’t one of them. BoTW ironically was more immersive in the exploration without that UI vomit

Just make the maps smaller if the added size doesn’t do anything for the main game or even planned side content

@moodycat I felt that same way after playing Witcher 3, BotW felt so empty to me. Hoping they use BotW as a solid platform though to build on for the sequel

@moodycat

Nope, other way around. They shouldn't be afraid to let there be empty spaces in a open world game. It doesn't have to be stuff everywhere, there can just be beautiful spots to explore. In Botw 2, Id actually want to see a bit less wild animals and hidden seeds, hunting animals for meat and furs should include an actual hunt, not that you only have to move one meter into the woods to be overwhelmed by wildlife.

@BongoBongo I found and still do find the side quests in BotW unfulfilling so I just don’t complete them, whereas with Witcher 3 there was quite a lot of story built into these. Again, I’m really hoping that BotW 2 builds on the solid foundation of the first game which I’m 100% certain it will
Edit: I should just clarify, I actually skip most of the random ? Locations in Witcher 3 as they are quite pointless/grindy and can be a waste of time

I really hope games move away from this ageing point of interest map route. I find games like this less and less interesting. And having to clutter every game with RPG mechanics and stats turns me right off. Take a note from BOTW & use creativity to produce games that naturally surprise & delight without all this distraction.

When I left Skellige with heaps of ??? I just never returned and left them for someone else to find. Hopefully Jorund finds them and has some fun before he dies.

Yeah, those were a nightmare. Not just because they were all extremely boring tasks, but also because of all those goddamn harpies that were such a pain to fight. Easily the worst part of an otherwise near-perfect game.

And also, yeah, TW3 would definitely have benefitted from having fewer icons on the map.

I found a lot of The Witcher 3 to be great with little stories all over the place. The filler icons and 'quests' where whatever. If you were going for completion then it would be annoying. But those icons really bother people because Elden Ring has hundreds of those useless filler bosses/dungeons that held little to no stories and the general consensus is that's brilliant design.

I think BoTW was much better because of the immersion, lack of UI clutter, and the interlocking systems. While on the board they didn't have a ton of side quests they were fun and had some good stories. I would just say they needed more multipart quests and a few legacy dungeons and it would have been damn near perfect.

I’m fairly sure half the time I’ve put into BotW was spent doing things that didn’t complete any ‘task’ or progress any explicit metric; just running around and playing with everything the world had to offer. Probably one of the most organic experiences I’ve ever had in a video game.

You can tell game is well designed when ‘doing nothing’ is just as pleasurable as actually progressing to the end credits. Simply interacting with the game’s world and mechanics becomes a reward in itself. (The castle grounds in Super Mario 64 are an oft-cited example of this design philosophy in action.)

Give a man checklist and he’ll gradually work his way through it (humans are task-orientated creatures after all). Give a child a playground, however, and he’ll create his own challenges and keep himself entertained for hours.

Against the backdrop of bleak, dystopian, the increasingly cinematic video games put out by many Western developers, it’s not uncommon to see Nintendo games derided and dismissed as ‘childish’. And to a large extent, they are. But therein lies much of their appeal. Nintendo games are for the child in all of us

In every sense of the word, they are invitations to play.

Skellige was ridiculous though!! Sail a bit, fight monsters standing in one spot, grab the loot, eventually overload your maximum weight limit, sail boat back to land, sell/dismantle loot, get back to boat, get to next ? , fight same type of monsters again, and so on... That was definitely copy and pasting gone mad!

@Moonsorrow999

Not going to lie, I'm beginning to think that some of you really need to get out into the real world. Contrary to popular belief among nerds, there isn't action and adventure springing out from every nook and cranny out in the real world. People that actually go out in nature, animal watching, getting some tannage or vitamin D or whatever out in the real world knows that there isn't action and adventure springing up from every nook and cranny with every 10 steps you take LMAO.

When your game becomes Google Maps…
Should’ve probably kept with the seagulls, but that admittedly eats more resources.

Eh, at least it kept me entertained into looking for all of them, wondering what kind of ? it would be

... Unlike in Breath of the Wild, where there's literally almost nothing of interest to be found, unless you get REALLY close.. only to discover it's another boring enemy camp OR a shrine.. if you manage to find something at least. I found I was running around for ten minutes without encountering anything interesting at all. I'm hoping against hope that BotW fixes this, but..
At least you have some variety in the Witcher. Oh, it helps that the Witcher also has some of the best side quests of all time while the ones in BotW are just.... fetch quests with no real meaning.

More points of interest the better! Whereas BoTW had nothing of interest in 90% of the map.

Still need to do more sWitcher since I was at like 30 hours in and moved on for some reason even though I was still loving it. Maybe I'll hold off until the next season of Witcher starts up on Nutflicks though.

Edit: @Mauzuri Hah nearly identical comments about how bland and boring BoTW world was. Glad I'm not the only one not blinded by fanboyism on it.

Sometimes it's less about reaching a goal, and more about the joy or challenge of traveling. So some people will like some games more or less than others. Running around in BotW is fun in itself, and spotting something "out of place" in the distance while moving to a set point, sidetracking you for a fun little discovery, is perfect for some, boring for others apparently.

Other games where the movement/traveling was the fun or challenge for me, that I greatly enjoyed, include Snake Pass, Snowrunner, some good metroidvania's,... The goal was just an excuse to take that challenge. Witcher 3 is not a game in which traveling is so smooth or versatile that it is part of the fun, so it could do with less of it. But the world is kind of beautiful, and it would feel weird to have all the villages right next to each other or every field and forest removed or filled with points of interest other than look, a beautiful tree. A deer in the distance. A pack of wild wolves to humbly avoid, not charge and brutally murder for some loot and experience. A nice puddle of water to rest your tired feet for a few minutes. An open spot to put up camp for the night. A zombie with a treasure chest for some weird reason. A bunch of berries you can eat. You know, like a real 3 day walk through nothing but forest to reach the next village, in a time and place where that's still not an asphalt road with rows of houses on both sides... And your map isn't automatically updated, your direction not shown on some floating information around you for the ease of some entity watching and controling your every move.

I guess my point is, we'll never find the perfect balance between immersion in "empty" space and stimulation for the gamer, because it doesn't exist.

@Specters

General combat is better in Botw too. Esp. as you can freely mix things up with using the environment within combat. In a game like Witcher 3, every non-boss fight is the same and you can't even sneak. Makes me just run away from most encounters as the 10-30 sec of dealing with enemies in Witcher 3 is so damn repetitively.

@moodycat Not in this case as they were all the same thing pretty much

I honestly don't understand how BotW was "empty" for some people.
I couldn't take two steps without finding 5 points of interest in the distance that I wanted to explore and find some cool stuff along the way.
I NEVER had the feeling of just running around for minutes without doing anything, even if I ran through a place I had already seen, there was always something new.
In fact, I didn't even ride horses all that often because I usually don't need to run that far to reach some kind of destination.
Even if it's just a Korok, there is always something everywhere.

On the contrary, I really dislike the typical modern open world were you just have markers on your map.
I want to explore the game organically, which I find way more immersive. And no, turning off markers, if possible, usually is not a solution, because those worlds tend to be designed around having those. Stuff doesn't look that interesting, so without the markers you will miss way too much.
Many devs seem to have no idea how to make stuff look interesting without slapping a marker on it.

I prefer BotW and Skyrim over Witcher3. Having too many points of interest on a map takes away from the joy of exploring and discovery. Assassins Creed is guilty of this too.
I dunno, I just found BotW amazing to explore. Half the fun was just figuring out how to get around. How do I get to that shrine? Can I climb there? What about the rain? Can I glide from that ledge. What if I make steps by freezing this waterfall, etc? Yeah you just can't find that level of creativity in a lot of other open world games.

@moodycat I completely disagree, the density of Breath of the Wild isn't bad at all. On the other hand, Witcher 3 did the cardinal sin of open world design which is to just look at the map constantly instead of the game, because the UI is overloaded with info while the game viewport isn't.

Skellige did have way too many in comparison to the rest of the world but i still had such a great time going through it especially the quests which is what Witcher 3 is obviously known for excelling in

As for botw, its definitely more empty with a lot less meaningful stuff to do. And the people going botw has you finding things more organically, lol. You'd have to be entranced by the completely redundant and often useless mechanics like "oh you can make winds by burning grass!" "holding a flame sword in the cold makes your temp go down", to not see that exploring by spotting obvious out of the ordinary things like a group of trees in between masses of empty lands, a rock on top of a hill, etc. becomes extremely repetitive itself no different than going through a checklist. Especially when the reward for even doing any of that is utterly meaningless which is one of botw's biggest problems. BotW is literally "See that mountain of there? You can climb it, but there's absolutely nothing there." The "journey" itself wasn't anything rewarding that's for sure and definitely gets repetitive but the reward itself wastes my time too? Geez... But maybe this isn't the place to ramble about how massively overrated botw is lol

Between the survival mechanics, environmental interactions, complex geographical layout designed to provoke player curiosity and invisibly guide them across the landscape, and use of empty space that often rewarded the player with little more than a pretty view, BotW felt very immersive to me. A beautiful natural landscape to actually explore instead of a non-linear skinner box with content randomly puked out across the map. With that said, I never went too long without stumbling into situations that made the exploration feel meaningful in terms of game progression as well.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made of BotW, but I will never agree with people who push back against its unique approach to open world game design. Exploring Hyrule was an unforgettable experience. I liked TW3 quite a bit, but I'll never feel the same way about its regions, since the "exploration" is largely just riding a horse between points of interest on the map with nothing to do in-between.

I enjoyed the game but quit playing because of too many points. It became overwhelming and I forgot where I was in the story. With the landscape so dour I found it becoming oppressive for a game. So I quit.

Great game but I'm not into the atmosphere as much now that I'm older.

Personally I found it better how Red Dead Redemption 2 manage the extra stuff.
All the extras are there but there is no map mark for those, you have to find them by listening the NPC in towns or around the world, sometimes you'll start a quest some other times you won't; but you'll know there's something out there somewhere and if you actually happen to be around that place you may find what people are talking about but is not necessary.

Witcher 3 is the first open world game I played by simply walking and slow riding and not running around. This made the experience more natural and immersive.

But when it comes to great open worlds, no game I played comes even close to Red Dead Redemption 2. Just playing it slow makes it so immersive and alive.

Sadly Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption2 are too violent and dark for my tastes nowadays, so waiting for a childfriendly open world, that has such a lively and detailed map could take a while.

Ma-an, the people spurning BotW as being too empty would absolutely die if they tried to play Wind Waker, especially the original Gamecube version. Poor souls.

@moodycat Oh no, nooooo nononono. BOTW paces out it’s points of interest without ever actually feeling empty. There’s always stuff to do but it still lets you take a moment to orient yourself. Witcher 3 felt claustrophobic to me: the character you control feels too big and unwieldy for a map that feels rather overcrowded.

Love all the comments… this time around everyone is right. Everybody has a point. What if we leave this open world sh*t away from Zelda and we go back to tight game design?

@YoshiF2 Yeah, it is kind of annoying everything is open world now.. Im afraid it stays that way if games like that continue to sell. I want the linearity back. I dont care if I cant go left or right I just want to follow the goal & not waste time.

@SteamEngenius Fanboyism? Really? For thinking BotW is better than Withcher 3. Have you read the reviews from critics and gamers. Have you seen the scores on metacritic?

I‘ve recently been playing Witcher 3 again and was once again really annoyed with all the question marks on the map. They take away ALL the exploration and discovery feeling for me since I know I will (for the vast part) NOT find anything in the work if there isn’t a question mark on the map. Ruins the surprise completely for me and kinda not tolerable anymore after BotW showed and wowed us with how to do it the right way.

Horizon series in a nutshell. Not that I didn't enjoy them but this guy started the fire. Or did Skyrim beat him to it?

@Slain Ah yes because people usually paid to give high scores to games are truly who I should listen to!

@BartoxTharglod It's a song title, don't read into the name too much buddy lmao

@tseliot Skyrim only had zone markers, quite a lot of staff did not had them.

@SteamEngenius the irony when you are displaying blatant blind fanboyism [by your own definition] with Witcher 3.lol

I like The Witcher 3's storytelling and the fact that every sidequest seems like its own short story. It's deep and fulfilling, narratively-speaking. My problem with the game has always been that nothing you do is actually fun to perform. Battles aren't fun, riding your horse isn't fun, walking around town isn't fun. The game itself remains interesting because the story and worldbuilding are interesting. It remains interesting because riding into town at sunset with sorrowful music playing in the background is an emotional trip. But the fundamental game feel is unsatisfying. Every action is clumsy and clunky in an uninteresting way. (Clunkiness can be interesting, if it's part of the learning curve and requires skill: see classic Castlevania.) The Witcher 3 doesn't require you to perform any precise inputs, but you're still constantly moving and fighting, and the movement system is fundamentally dull. This is common in Western RPGs, going back to the 90s and 80s. That's why the comparison to Breath of the Wild is odd, because in a way it's the inverse of Witcher 3: exquisite game feel, uninspiring storytelling. But having exquisite game feel when the game is all about moving through a wide open world is important to me, so Breath of the Wild wins out. The Witcher 3 reminds me of late 90s RPGs like Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment, with deep storytelling but janky game feel and battle mechanics. Yet these 90s games just let you click and run to where you needed to go and focused on chitchat with NPCs. (You don't need to ever fight in Fallout 2.) Their lackluster movement systems got out of your way if you wanted them to. The Witcher 3, by contrast, is always asking you to do battle in every dungeon and sidequest. It's serviceable, but you're still pining to get back to the enthralling chitchat.

@andykara2003 exactly

@SteamEngenius “Points of interest” is just the game design term for them. The points this article is talking about aren’t interesting, as acknowledged by the developer who put them there. BOTW’s points of interest are actually interesting.

@andisart i’ve heard that some people play and deliberately never use the map. They say it makes the game feel totally different. Not sure how doable it actually is though: sometimes the game design relies on the map.

@DiamondJim Depends on who you are asking, but you cannot blame Nintendo for trying something different with Zelda, they are not well versed in open world design like say, Rockstar or Ubisoft.
It's not the greatest open world game nor the greatest Zelda game but it is still a damn good game in many regards even though I hate a lot about it too.
Far from perfect bit still a great game.

@nimnio I prefer playing Far cry games with the radar pointing everything out, track enemies etc. It makes the game a lot more fun to play because you don't play the radar.
Same goes for Metal Gear Solid, without radar you have to be more patient, observe the patters and learn what the general cone of vision is.
Some games have hint vision modes like Tomb raider, it's easy to ignore that or the option to turn off item highlights, some options make the game a bit more immersive if you are not guided every step of the way.

Can't you filter out map icons? Or am I thinking of some Ubisoft game?

TL;DR: I loved BOTW - still do - but after playing Witcher 3 and Skyrim for hundreds of hours and coming back for a fresh playthrough of BOTW, I found its world to be surprisingly empty and shallow by comparison.

So, yeah, after beating BOTW in 2017, which I greatly enjoyed doing, it was shelved for awhile. In the interim, I sank countless hours into games like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, but finally decided recently to give BOTW another go. And wow - I won't lie - after having played those two games, Hyrule just seemed so unbelievable shallow and empty by comparison.

To combat this unexpected feeling of being under, I decided to purchase the DLC. While interesting, all this did, ultimately, was improve the time I spent on The Great Plateau. But, honestly, the way in which the DLC changed the game into something resembling stealthy survival horror was absolutely brilliant. It places you in a truly inhospitable and unforgiving place, wherein even the most mundane monster can basically one-hit kill Link with little more than a twig, thereby forcing the player to actually prioritize clever movement and resource management strategies just to survive. I loved it. In fact, I loved it so much that I wish that the entire rest of the game scaled in that way. It doesn't. By the time you're a few hours into the game post-Plateau, you're basically on par with the enemies throughout the rest of the game.

The DLC provided me with what I had originally believed BOTW was going to be: a test of survival in a lonely, ruined world, where death lurks around every corner, and where the mysterious places that might stumble upon would be worthy of finding their deeper connotations (such as with the ruined Temple of Time).

The DLC basically gave me a taste of the true promise of BOTW, but even there, it still lacked any depth in terms of its story and world building.

And therein lies my biggest criticism of the game: The world is largely one that can be defined by a few scattered points of interest with virtually nothing in between. Literally 85% of the time, the only reward that one can reasonably expect to find for their efforts in exploration is a predictable Korok seed "puzzle". You might also find yet another nameless enemy encampment with the same monsters doing the same things. Should you for some reason feel compelled to slaughter them, your "reward" in this case is usually rupees, or maybe a weapon that, regardless of its quality, will break after 10 mins.

The shrines are admittedly fun, but they serve only to demonstrate just how little there is to do in the outside world with the Shieka Slate. Yes, I know there are creative applications for the various runes if one would wish to go through the effort to, but they're usually either impractical, or serve only a form of alternative utility.

There ARE some interesting places that one can stumble on, but there are very few such places and virtually none of them are explained. Why even bother telling me the name of a deserted village / fortress / lake / mountain on the map when none of these names or places are ever talked about by anyone? There are no books with the world's lore to stumble upon and the shallow NPCs you come across on your journey appear to have little if any intellectual curiosity about the world in which they live. Hyrule is impressively large in an awe-inspiring way, but honestly - if cutting back on the size of the world would have led to more richly detailed geographical lore to go along with the exploration, I think I would have preferred a smaller world.

Oh, and even though they're smaller in expanse than BOTW's, Witcher 3 and Skyrim both have their own relatively large worlds to explore, but unlike BOTW, their maps are brimming with loads of interesting people and places, each with a breadth of geographical, political and historical lore to discover about them if one would ever want to dig deeper. Are there too many "?" locations sometimes? Maybe. But I would rather have a lot of only-marginally-meaningful things to do than to climb yet another barren, empty hill, just to get a fresh view of the same largely-nothing in between.

Going back to lore: Skyrim and The Witcher each have tons of in-game books to find which do a great job of conveying the flavors of their world's cultures, religions and histories, sometimes down to the mundane. Yet, aside from a stray diary or two, Hyrule is devoid of such books and the NPCs who walk around usually have nothing to say of depth or interest. Adding insult to injury is that the relatively few side quests that you might be able to glean from NPCs are typically pretty ho hum and almost never give a reward that justifies the effort - and rarely does any such quest provide any deeper insight into the world itself. This problem is only compounded by the fact that the game lacks a strong overarching main story narrative to compensate for these omissions and deficiencies in detail.

BOTW's Hyrule is undoubtedly impressive in scope and large beyond belief, but - after sinking a lot of time into Skyrim and Witcher - it now just feels like its large just for the sake of being large. And while BOTW's gameplay, controls and physics are just lightyears ahead of both of those games (whose characters feel overwhelmingly stiff and janky to control), I'm no longer sure if that alone is enough to overcome the sense of emptiness that pervades nearly every aspect of its premise.

Games don’t have to always be bigger and bigger and stuffed full of more and more things. When your older and have less time to play games it becomes a turn off to actually start some of these games and does put me off. I don’t have a spare 100 hours to do all these extra side quests. I’d sooner spend my money on a game that will keep me entertained with enough to do for 30 to 40 hours max, with a manageable map, then a game that is 100 hours plus with a map the size of a country. I do actually hope that more single player games that funnels you on a set path come out. Done right they can be good and are perfect when you don’t have tons of gaming time available.

@SteamEngenius So whats your point? Reviewers are all lying and BotW is really a crap game and everyone who likes it is a blind fanboy?

Witcher 3 and Skyrim are lifeless and clunky compared to BotW. It's easy to see the world of Zelda is handcrafted while the aforementioned train wrecks trust in copy paste and flatness.

As someone already stated, basic things such as walking, horse riding etc. are just not fun in Skytcher. Meanwhile in BotW you have stuff like paragliding, shield surfing, sand seal riding and hell even walking around and climbing feels fun because everything is so well executed. It's the minor things such as sfx and pitch perfect controls.

Who cares about 1000 sidequests. In BotW the simple "get from point a to point b" is often a puzzle and the content itself. It's not too intelligent to say the game is empty if you fail to understand this.

And for those who say Witcher 3 has a good story? Come on. It's just macho bs for insecure men. Every other male but Geralt is ugly and all women are basically b*****s. As for Skyrim, all adults are the same height and there are no personalities. All npcs feel like wax models with no soul.

It's no wonder BotW is a higher rated game.