GameSpot's The Lobby -- How good is Witcher 3: Blood and Wine?

[SOUND] Let's talk about a video game that isn't Overwatch. Let's talk about the last expansion pack for our game of the year, 2015. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Blood and Wine. Jake, we had you on a little while ago to talk about it. Now was that last week or the week before? Two weeks ago? I don't know- Yeah. After our preview event that Bob and I both played. Yeah this game found a weird embargo game where we got you in to talk about it early. We couldn't really talk about it. And it's out today I guess. Yep you can get in on PSN, XBox, whatever, for $20. Cool, all right, so let's chew into it I guess. You've completed it. I'm guessing you're going through it a second time already. Yeah no I finished it. Last week and now that I have it on Playstation 4 I have my actual save so I can kind of see what the differences are with a save that I played through. Cool. Awesome. Rob, you played a bit of it as well? Yeah, well we have a preview version so I got the first, what was it, two hours we played? Yeah, I think it was about two to three hours. So, I 've gotten a nice taste of it. But all weekend I've been trying to. Play catchup with hearts of stone. Right. [UNKNOWN] familiar. Well what was cool was that Friday, the build we saw had this update that was implemented last Friday. With all the UI stuff? Yeah, so I got to mess around with that and that was really helpful to kinda come back into the. To the game with. But yeah-- Now let's talk about that a little bit first, actually. What is in that update? What's, Rob, what's in it? LIke, UI stuff, like the map apparently zooms out way better and stuff. Yeah, the map is much more responsive I think there's always like a second delay with a lot of that UI but regardless, yeah the map is really cool. Actually what I think I love the most is So often your going back and forth into the map, but now you have three different types of weigh points you can set. So you can set a boss, say you run across a really high level boss and it's out in the open, you can mark that specific spot with a red skull, and be like ok, now I know what's there. I'll come back there in three levels or whatever. Exactly, and so there's different types of that. So I was having a blast like setting different way points. Trying to catch up on all these quests. But the UI in general, it's probably the best update I've seen to that as far as UI goes. Yeah like they've split up your armor and weapons nicely so you can now basically differentiate. An armor repair kit and a weapon repair kit. Right. Because those are so similar. Yeah. I mean, that whole UI was a bit of a, like they eventually got there. With so much of this game, they eventually got there. Yeah. And, that's kind of cool, they made good on adding in this extra control stuff and all that, and I guess we are coming up on a year now almost. Yeah. [UNKNOWN] Great that we have a second expansion pack. Rob was talking about Hearts of Stone. First question actually, with Blood and Wine, do you sort of need to have Hearts of Stone completed? Do you need to have the game completed? What do you think is the perfect time to come in to play Blood and Wine? So you don't need to complete Hearts of Stone. I recommend it just because if you're playing Of your sort of main save, it'll kind of level you up to that point- Got it. so you're ready for it. But I mean you don't really have to, I think 34 is about where you wanna start on that. And then in terms of story wise, you can pretty much jump in whenever, although I recommend Doing it later rather than earlier. Because of some of the end game stuff it's probably better just to wait. But you don't necessarily to have like what you're three like finished, finished. No you do not need to have it finished. I like forget the exact point where you can kind of jump into it but I think it's Probably the beginning of, I don't want to spoil it too much but after- Like after the fake fight- After a big fight. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. One of the first big fights. Yeah, mm-hm. The big fight that feels like the end of the game but then- [LAUGH] Not done. Yeah. I actually say the same for Hearts of Stone, because there's a couple of little spoilers that happen sort of in that area as well, around there. So, let's dive into it. I guess the first really boring question I'm gonna ask is how long is this? How big an expansion pack is it? It sounded like they were trying to make sort of like a small little addendum to the Witcher, and. After talking to some of the CD project red folks a couple of months back it sounded like this expansion pack had actually got in the way for them and was quite big. Does it feel big? Does it take a long time to complete? So if you just want to play through the story it'll probably take about ten hours, the story is not super long but the area is massive. There are a ton of new quests, there's a ton of new stuff to collect, you could easily spend. 40 to 50 hours, I think Kevin VanOrd in a review said he spent 40 hours and I think I went about 30 maybe. But I'm already starting my second run through now so by the time I'm done I could, I don't know, easily sink 50 hours into this. Awesome. Kevin gave it an eight out of ten on Game Spot. Rob, you've only played two hours, but you're a massive fan of the Witchers. Any questions you have for Jake about this? Like what are the sort of things that you Want to know about that. Yeah. Well, I know a lot of people were on the same boat of, will you be seeing a lot of familiar characters from the main game? Alright. [LAUGH] Well you dont have to spoil it. I'm not going to say too much about this, but there are some very good new characters that they add and there are some characters Who will return, but their role isn't as big as I hoped. Mm-hm. But then, part of it too is because the save that I played, like I said, was part of the advanced copy. I wasn't able to use my save, and I think, if I was playing on my save, when I've tied up more loose ends it might be kind of different. I might see different characters, I'm trying to be as vague as possible. Yeah, you're doing good. I don't wanna spoil this. [LAUGH] But yeah there are definitely some surprises, but you'll be spending most of your time with Anna Henry at the Duchess of [UNKNOWN] who I think is an excellent character. There's another character who I also won't spoil but he's from the books. I know a lot of people when I said I wasn't going to spoil it. Like everyone in the comics figured out who it was. But it's pretty easy to figure out if you have read the books. How many of these people can you have the sex with? One Okay, right. Well [LAUGH] He, Jake here. [LAUGH] We all [INAUDIBLE]. He was editing a gameplay clip of something, and I will just say it was a joy to watch. It was definitely the most ridiculous sex scene they've had. Really? My God, yeah. I mean it wasn't like Like they're still- No, no, no, feel free to describe it in excruciating detail, if you were a video game journalist, Jake. So it's basically zero gravity sex. [LAUGH] All right. All right. Yeah, I mean That's it. That's all you get. We did it. We did it. [LAUGH] [LAUGH] [CROSSTALK] We can go home. Yes, 2016. It happens, May 31st. Beautiful, it got there. Yeah, it's here. Yeah, that's the big sex scene of the game. There might be more, I haven't come across any other sex scenes. You know it. Doesn't come across any. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey. So what else is in this update? [LAUGH] That's actually it, There's so, so you, what I'm really excited is the main drive for me is there is this whole new skill tree for mutagens. Yeah. That, and when we saw the preview, Bill, you basically can upgrade your R sign to throw down a freezing AOE type of move. Have you tried out any other ones? I know there's 12. Right, so I've tried out a few. One of the big things with that Is that you need greater mutagens. If you don't know what that is, basically you just need to form mutagens in order to get these. Right. And then you need lots of skill points. So fortunately with With the PC build that I was playing I didn't get to use a lot. But I did use some, and the ones I did get to use were really cool. They were slightly overpowered. But I think that's the point, right? This is their final outing, you just have fun. One in particular I really liked was every time you counter someone who's health is below 25% You get an instant finisher in the finish- It's really cool, so it's like- You counter it and Daryl like dodges and cuts the guys head off and all sorts of gory things like that. Which is a lot of fun. [LAUGH] Sorry, go ahead. There's also, sorry go ahead. So there's like different new finishers or would you say that there the ones you've seen before? They're ones you've seen before but the thing is that normally It was kind of random when those would happen. I think there was a certain percentage to dismember and in this it happens no matter what. So does all this stuff we were talking about, does this pull back into the main game like if you had unfinished quests? I have a bunch of unfinished quests in the main game. Would all that mutagen stuff Pulled back into the main game as well, or is it sort of isolated? So if you have blood and wine, then yes. Right. If you don't have blood and wine, you'll still get the UI, but you wont get the new mutagens. Ok. So yeah, if you completed the quest to get those mutagens then you can go back to Skellaga, or whatever, and you'll still have all these sort of OP mutagens at your disposal. Sweet. I guess the last question on this, as somebody who is a big fan of this series Like you have completed the Witcher Three. How many times have you completed Wild Hunt at this stage? Three. [LAUGH] Okay, three times. That's quite a lot. It took me like 200 errors to complete it once. You have no life. That's fine. Don't worry about it. [LAUGH] As somebody who's a big fan of the series, did this feel like a good sort of last farewell? Are you satisfied with what it ended up being? Because we waited almost a year for this expansion. Yeah, what did you think about Magic? So yeah I was very satisfied with it, I, kind of like what I said before, like, I think I need to replay it with my save because some of the loose ends that I Right That may have not been tied up in that save or definitely tied up in my save so I kind of like to see how the ending differs with that, but in terms of like Gerald's story, I think it's a great finish to Gerald's story And I think, just sort of, they take a lot of sort of liberties with this, with their final one. Right. They play a lot of jokes. I mean because it's, at the end of Wal Zon's story for you know, whatever way, it's kind of wrapped up anyway, right? Yeah, yeah. So is this sort of like a fun little John's off to the side. Exactly it kinda doesn't take itself nearly as seriously as the main game even though it is still very dark. But like. Like [INAUDIBLE] summer break. It sort of does kind of feel like that. But I was showing Rob one place in particular that you get to later in the game which Looks like it's taken straight out of a beautiful fantasy book. Definitely gorgeous. That's what's super cool about this expansion, I would say, is how much different it looks stylized wise, it's like it's a very bright, just having played almost all weekend God, it's like overcast raining the whole time, you know? It's like, it's a very gloomy area for the most part. Like no man's land and all that sort of stuff? Right, but this is the exact flip of the totem pole, it seems like a very cool Refreshing area to explore. [CROSSTALK] Excellent. Look forward to it. Twenty bucks you said [UNKNOWN]. Twenty five. Twenty five you have the season pass. Got it. And you get it for free if you have the season pass. Or it's 20 if you don't have it. But you might as well get the season pass you get Hearts of Stone as well. Hearts of Stone was pretty good. Smarter, but definitely worth playing. Alright, there you go, eight out of ten on gamestop.com. You can check it out yourself, folks, let us know if you are going to be interested in picking up The Witcher Three and whether or not you're happy with how that whole series ended. Let us know in the comment box below.