Delraich wrote:On PC the Gwent deck can be opened with the H-key, I believe. Even though it is clearly pay-to-win, I find the Gwent thing quite addictive.
Gwent would be a deeply flawed game in the real world (it's almost impossible to defeat someone with better cards than you, no matter how well you use the basic cards you have), but as part of a single-player game like The Witcher 3, it provides an additional thing for you to get better at and keep improving. As long as you keep confronting increasingly tough opponents (ie. opponents with better cards), the game remains balanced. Just don't consider how your opponent may look at the situation. Anyone attempting to replicate this game in real life would probably be sorely disappointed with the results.
Delraich wrote:Haha. Yeah, the dice game from the previous Witcher editions was better suited for the setting. But then, that got boring quite quickly...
Dice Poker wasn't just flawed; it was broken. The game itself worked fine as long as you realize that skill has absolutely no impact (and I don't mean that as hyperbole. There is literally no impact from skill in that game. There's
always an obvious best move, and you have no control over its effects), but the biggest mistake the designers made was to give Dice Poker a role in their world where certain players were renowned for being amazing at the game, and that you could somehow beat them fair and square. Bullshit. The game was about nothing but luck, and I'm sure even the designers realized that once they tried to implement these so-called "expert opponents" and discovered that the only way to do so was to have them cheat since skill, and thus also AI, was nonexistent. They should have abandoned that game in its design phase, perhaps to be replaced by something else, but they didn't. Dice Poker is the single worst thing to destroy my suspension of disbelief in The Witcher 2, as I simply do not buy that the people in that world would treat the game the way they do.