I know I remember seeing some people talk about how nice some of the environments in Hitman were, and that they’d just walk around as a tourist from time to time, treating it like a walking simulator/virtual tourism thing instead of the stealth assassination game it is. Curious about other things like that, where you play a game totally differently than it was meant to be played.
Perhaps.
But you’ve made a lot of assumptions in your comment, and you’re mistaken about most of them.
I played the side quests. Many came with a good backstory, but that is not gameplay. Nearly all were copy/paste instances from a small pool of tedious tasks. There were a few memorable exceptions, but very few.
I explored the world, as much as one can “explore” something that is fully labeled with point-of-interest markers. They lead the player to a repetitive handful of uninspired encounters, cloned over and over again.
It has plenty of other flaws as well. If you loved it, then I’m happy for you, but I found the gameplay boring.
The strengths I found in The Witcher 3 were its story, lore, characters, and Gwent. Not its gameplay.
Meanwhile, Gwent is a surprisingly well-designed strategy game. So much so that it ended up spun off into a stand-alone version (although I don’t know how good the spinoff is).
To each their own, I suppose.
Gwent is actually a slight hack of an existing board game called Condottiere, which is IMO the better game.
This one?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/112/condottiere
Yep. I played an earlier version but it’s the same game.
The key thing that made me notice was the scarecrow cards that allowed you to pick up your units, those make sense in Condottiere as it’s divided in rounds where you fight multiple battles, so it made sense to pick up your units if you had excess power and were winning anyway, save your strength for the next battle in the round, whereas it made a lot less sense in Gwent given its 1v1 nature and fixed amount of rounds.
Mind you Gwent evolved a lot afterwards, I don’t know much beyond the witcher 3 version, which I still enjoyed plenty.