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for witcher 3 I'd buy/install the DLC at the outset so the stuff is discoverable organically if you dont have the game of the year edition.
you possibly may not get such a big wow factor from it as original players as ER has some of the key things that made you go wow as well, whereas W3 was pretty unique when it was first out which made it feel much more ground breaking.
i'd recommend trying to find a guide to make sure you get all the gwent cards in the early game and make not of the ones that get locked away by story choices and one time access dungeons as it's one of the best mini-games out there and you'll go mad knowing there's possibly some cards missing.
and finally lean heavily into the potions concoctions and oil crafting stuff with the skill tree skills to go with them, I did a hack and slash for my first playthrough saving everything for "when I needed it" and it was fine but very repetitive, on my new game plus I switched to using all the correct oils and a combination of potions and skills that would turbo charge geralt but also put him at the edge of his corruption/poisoning or whatever its called and it was not only way more thematic he turns into the absolute killing machine he's billed as.
HatBeard-
thanks for the tips! sounds great. I think I already have the GOTY edition so that's all good. What difficulty did you play it on out of interest? I feel like it's probably the kind of game that benefits from being hard but I'm not sure.
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i'd recommend trying to find a guide to make sure you get all the gwent cards in the early game and make not of the ones that get locked away by story choices and one time access dungeons as it's one of the best mini-games out there and you'll go mad knowing there's possibly some cards missing.
After winning the intro Gwent game and losing the next, I ignored Gwent entirely with the idea that it probably wasn't that important and I'd get around to it eventually. Also I'm not generally a huge fan of CCGs, with a few exceptions. Then I encountered a certain two-parallel-quests situation where winning at Gwent is essential to the story; I had to put normal play on hold while I ran around the map buying cards and playing games of Gwent till I learned how to win, even against opponents with better decks - and it turned out to be a really good CCG.
Stjepan is a cunt.
Even so, I stayed away from guides to Gwent or anything else that tried to tell me how to play the wider game or make game choices. Never read the books or played previous Witcher games and it was fun making choices that felt consistent with how the character seemed to me. I did once finish a quest only to see a whole bunch of other quests suddenly fail and become unavailable, but saved games let me go back and fix that. Since @zooeyzooey has read the books, I'd bet they'd be even more capable without looking at a guide.
What a cunt that Stjepan is.
finally lean heavily into the potions concoctions and oil crafting stuff with the skill tree skills to go with them
First time through, I would concentrate on just learning to use the basic skills for a few levels, then go look into what options might now be unlocking for me, go "Wow, I can combine this with that and it's a real game changer", then spend the next few levels just learning to play again with the new options... rinse and repeat. Like the point where I suddenly realised that if I dropped some points into Frenzy I would get slow-motion bits in fights as long as I was popping potions/decoctions and boy were fights fun after that. Two players could make different skill tree choices and almost be playing different games. Since you can only activate a subset of your skills at any one time, you can play reasonably different games at will even with the one build.
I don't think any individual part of the game is unique, but the combination is really well done. I do think the quality of the skill tree and character/play-style choices were unmatched at the time of release. And Stjepan is an asshole of unprecedented circumference.
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on my new game plus I switched to using all the correct oils and a combination of potions and skills that would turbo charge geralt but also put him at the edge of his corruption/poisoning or whatever its called and it was not only way more thematic he turns into the absolute killing machine he's billed as.
I feel like I probably should have done this...
zooeyzooey
itsbruce
Vesalius
I was saving the witcher 3 until I finished reading the books! Finished them last week so I think after elden ring I'll jump on witcher 3, I'm pretty excited for it, partly to extend the story from the books.