Why The Witcher 3 is a Near-Flawless, Stone-Cold Classic

[@nestwr]

Sorry about the reupload, Resolve (or something in my audio pipeline) shat the bed. Audio cut out three quarters into the video for no apparent reason. Fixed by changing nothing and re-rendering. Original pinned comment follows. Some notes that I couldn't get into this overbloated 7.5k word script: I don't love NG+. If it's been long enough since my last playthrough, I don't remember what brain-dead decisions I made wrt upgrades and gear, and I consider accruing both gear and upgrades to be part of the fun of the game. Meanwhile, the Blood and Wine upgrade systems and Hearts of Stone weapon enchanting seem specifically geared towards NG+ players. I sort of imply it, but the mastercrafted gear was a very arduous process. You have to luck into the maps to the diagrams in the first place. Then, building the gear at the mastercrafter guy's shop is downright menial. It's a massive tree of "to make A I need B and C, B and C have their own recipes, which have items with their own recipes", etc etc. The menus also try and bait you into brute forcing recipes by buying components with coin, rather than telling you to craft the components, which is a lot cheaper, but very tiring in the slightly janky menus. I didn't fall into this trap, but I can imagine a lot of people might, especially during their first playthrough. I spent ~12k in coin in total for the feline set, and that was just crafting from the bottom up and dismantling for base components. I got the coin by selling all my low level relics and lesser stones, which would doom an NG+ playthrough (and this is exactly why I don't do NG+). For this amount of effort, I would've liked both the specific benefits *and* the best numbers available for the gear's weight class.