Adventure Gamers - Forums

Roman5 - 30 January 2016 09:15 AM

Hey guys, I’m struggling to get this game to play on anything higher than the lowest graphic/user default setting. On medium graphics the frame rate is incredibly slow almost a slide show, and on high setting it is a slide show. My laptop spec is i5 2410M 2.3Ghz, and there’s switchable graphics between Intel 3000 and AMD HD 6630M. OS is Win 7 Pro 64. I’m using the AMD dedicated card. I don’t have any problem playing Amnesia for example, and the graphics in Witness are more basic looking.  Anyone else here having problems with running it?

Sounds like your processor is fine, but the minimum listed for graphics is Intel HD 4000. No idea how that compares to your AMD HD 6630M, but I suspect that’s the issue.

with that radeon card youre barely at min requirements (and the 3000 is below), so would make sense you can run it on low.

“It’s also not as narrative-free as I’m making it sound. I think of narrative, of storytelling, as a progression from ignorance to wisdom. In the beginning, I don’t know who these characters are or what they’re doing or what’s going to happen to them because of the choices they make, or whether it will have any resonance with my life. By the time it’s over, I do. A story is the act of learning these things. The Witness is the act of learning rules. Or, more accurately, of being taught rules. Because The Witness is a teaching method minus any content. It is — forgive the use of this word, because I usually wince when I read it, but it belongs on the other side of a colon at the end of The Witness’ title — pure heuristics, entirely and only about how you learn something with no regard for what you learn because it’s useless for anything other than getting to what you’re going to learn next, which is again useless for anything other than getting to what you’re going to learn next, which will in turn be useless for anything other than what you’re going to learn next. Pure and empty. Puzzles that teach you how to solve other puzzles. Most puzzle games do this. I don’t know of any puzzle games that do only this. The Witness eventually folds in on itself in a dizzying self-referential and self-reverential masterclass that collapses into a black hole of puzzle solving from which no story can escape.”

...

“I might have preferred The Witness as a long-term proposition, taking time off to let my head clear, to occasionally ponder it, to spend time elsewhere for a while. This many puzzles, this much time spent staring at this many grids, this much trial and error is a bit much to take in the space of a week or so. But there’s no other way to play The Witness. As with any language, your Witness skills will atrophy if you don’t use them. When you come back after a few days, after a week, god forbid, after a month, you will have to back up and relearn everything. This is not a game about intuition or logic. It is a game about learning the made-up language created by the developers, who painstakingly teach you what a dot means, what a star means, what a star with a dot means, what a color means, what a shape means, what a shape and color mean, what a shape and a color and a star mean, combining, interacting, conjugating like verbs, hyphenating, neverending neologisms. Did I mention everything will be on the final exam? The various drawn-out finales merge all the rules into a tangled clotted polyglot of rules for rules’ sake. Just when you thought everything has come together in a fiendishly clever intersection, you still have a mountain more of puzzles. Imagine opening a hatch expecting to find a trove and instead discovering a deep pit. If you think there’s a trove down there, you’re in the wrong game.”

Damnn

I completed the game (not 100%‘ed it though) at 21h mark; I’m actually impressed how good it looks when you are ingame compared by just looking at it from the postcard screenshots that were abound during the production. Some terrain structure is made specifically to highlight interesting spots and I enjoyed how the game never takes the control of the camera from the player. Technical level is also top notch; probably the best of any Myst-type game I tried.

Anyway, I come out of it pretty disappointed; it had the sheer potential of being a super consistent super-high quality brain-teaser, since there are moments of brilliance every given hour, eg most of the ones right before a laser activation, but it’s too watered down by overlong series of tutorial-ish panels, that killed the pacing for me.
I’d estimate the necessary cuts to be down to 1/3 of its length (and dropping the price accordingly), since I had many occasions when I had a precise understanding of what I had to do, but just had to try some random combination to be sure it satisfied the given conditions.
I’m a bit oblivious to what people refer to when they declare “not just a puzzle game”. It’s honestly a puzzle game through and through, a very polished one at that and I’m lucky that’s one of my favourite genres, but that’s what it is.

I enjoyed some puzzle who had two possible solutions and it exploited it to make some close machinery act in 2 different ways. In some other instance, the environment provides specific clues outside the panel itself. Nice touch! It basically gets good every time a player in front of the panel needs to look away from them, but the panels themselves sadly make for a HUGE part of the game.

I didn’t like the other kind of line tracing environmental puzzle instead, which takes way too much time to accomplish once you notice it; also it seems to reward exploration instead of actual brain power, except some rare occasion (only one comes on top of my head) when this idea was implemented in a stronger way.

Some puzzle mechanic was poorer, especially musical puzzles, but overall I can’t complain on the puzzle’s fundamental ideas themselves. In general, understanding how a mechanic worked felt extremely more satisfying than putting it in action, even if I can see a lot of love was poured in each contraction.

I hated how the narrative was conveyed; I wasn’t a big fan of how it was in Talos Principle either and while this game didn’t give me the “phylosophy textbook” feel of the latter, it still felt too sparse, too rare and too random to be able to transmit a coherent message; I’m pretty sure there will be some late revisit on some secret message hidden within text, so I may end up eating my words, but on my first playthrough I wasn’t able to get it. Also, in my opinion randomly shattered documents as a way to introduce plot are pretty lazy and frankly getting stale.

I also didn’t think the island was completely able to overcome the feeling of “game hub”, since all sections still feel pretty distinct once you have explored the place for such a long time; by the way, running without constant keypress should have been the default. The ending section had some extra nice idea for puzzles, but overall I can’t say I was impressed by a certain clichè-y predictability.
I’d say it reaches its peak around halfway in, once you start getting rid of the repetitive feeling and you get pretty used to the game world; by the end you have already started to notice most mechanisms of obfuscation of its basic puzzle structure, so its novelty starts to grow thinner.

Roman5 -

r date=“1454163359”]Hey guys, I’m struggling to get this game to play on anything higher than the lowest graphic/user default setting. On medium graphics the frame rate is incredibly slow almost a slide show, and on high setting it is a slide show. My laptop spec is i5 2410M 2.3Ghz, and there’s switchable graphics between Intel 3000 and AMD HD 6630M. OS is Win 7 Pro 64. I’m using the AMD dedicated card. I don’t have any problem playing Amnesia for example, and the graphics in Witness are more basic looking.  Anyone else here having problems with running it?

Turn Vertical Sync Off, ( uncheck the little square in the opening grapics box ) if you haven’t done that already, should improve performance substantially.

     

Karlok - 01 February 2016 10:25 AM

I’ve now completed 199 puzzles and I’m amazed I’ve come that far. I have mixed feelings about the game. It’s very clever, solving panels is rewarding, it’s great that the environment plays such an important part in the puzzles, but drawing lines (and positioning yourself correctly) is all you ever do and I’m beginning to find that tedious. Different kinds of mazes in endless variations, with new symbols and new rules added, but in the end it’s still only one type of puzzle and the number of panels is staggering. For instance, one area (the white building in the sand) had over two dozen puzzles based on the same principle. You solve one layer, you get access to a new layer with minor variations, and another layer, and another, and one more to top it off. After the first two rooms, solving them was not much fun.

Another aspect I don’t like is [spoiler]the hidden objects drawing lines in the environment. Again, very clever design, but running around the island in search of possible lines, changing gear in the boat and going backwards, forwards two, three times to get it right… sigh. [/spoiler]

I may get back to The Witness in a few days, weeks, or months. Right now, it’s the end of the line for me.

Yeah overabundance can kill experience esp omitting them can achieve same result.
I am waiting on pricedrop and saving $ for Firewatch, for now.

So I’m thinking about getting this game. I have an older PC - Win 7 with an NVidia card. If I get it for PC, do I have to buy it from Steam? What are the controls like? (mouse only?)
We also have a PS4 which I have never used. I don’t know how to work the controller, but I imagine I can learn. Any suggestions on which way to go?

colpet - 01 February 2016 03:58 PM

So I’m thinking about getting this game. I have an older PC - Win 7 with an NVidia card. If I get it for PC, do I have to buy it from Steam? What are the controls like? (mouse only?)
We also have a PS4 which I have never used. I don’t know how to work the controller, but I imagine I can learn. Any suggestions on which way to go?

You can get it on the Humble Store (either as a DRM-free download, *or* as a Steam key), or on Steam directly.

It has the basic keyboard WASD movement and mouse look on PC just like a first person shooter, but you can also use a controller (both will need some getting used to if you’re not familiar with them)—however, there’s an iOS version in the works which will have support for touch screens, which might get ported back to PC as mouse-only controls.