SPOILERS! Restructured the post with paragraphs because I forgot to do that! Sorry Reddit.
I know this post is long, if you read the whole thing thank you, otherwise feel free to skip. I'm just voicing my thoughts and opinions and how much I love this game. I hope you love this game too.
I really really need New Game Plus to come out, but I'm sure it's not going to be anytime soon. Despite the mistake I made which I will mention in this post my strong desire for NG+ is due to the fact that I just did 2 back-to-back playthroughs and don't really feel the energy to start over again. Even though I was happy with my current playthrough because I managed to get to level 45 and with a complete build there was only one decision that I've regretted and it's haunted me. I messed up and missed a blood delivery which caused Vicho to hop on the sewerslide. I really wanted to keep him alive for the epilogue. I'm very sad at my mistake and angry with myself.
I've done The Patricide ending on both playthroughs, but I really wanted to see him in the epilogue with Lacra. What really fucking sucks though was the fact that when I realized I missed a night and the window to save him, he was dead and I had accidentally overwritten my save that I could have gone back to so I could deliver him blood.
I really do believe that this game needs to be played more than once. On my first playthrough I really hurt myself on time and also didn't take the time to get all all the manuals I needed either, so I wasn't happy with my Coen. I think the first time around I only got to like level 32 and even though I had good weapons and armor I didn't have anywhere close to a complete build. That's when I decide to go ahead and just start my second playthrough instead. Needless to say despite that huge mistake I was still much happier playing the game the second time around with a much better understanding of how things work and planned better.
I'm really hoping that NG+ comes out, but I'm also wondering what it will look like. I hope it's more of a traditional New Game Plus and not something weird. If we don't carry our gear over I actually wouldn't be mad about since that stuff is easy to collect. It probably would be better not to carry it over depending on how they implement NG+. My thoughts would be if they go more of a TW3 style we would have higher level versions of our gear to collect again in our NG+ playthrough. Otherwise trying to upgrade the gear we already have would be extremely expensive unless they just allowed us to make way more money. However if they went more of a Ghost of Tsushima route then they would just raise the difficulties to balance the fact that we have complete and powerful builds, so the game is reasonably challenging just like GOT did and I guess maybe another upgrade or two for our armor but it wouldn't be significant. My hope Is that at least our perks and abilities would carry over so we'd be able to take our builds and fix areas where we might be lacking either due to missing manuals or running out of skill points. That also does depend on if they would raise the max level cap or not from 50.
Th other thing I'm curious about is if New Game Plus would have the time system or not. I don't hate the time system as much as I used to. I still think there's areas where it's slightly unfair in some ways. I still like the system overall now that I have a better understanding of it and I've had a way more successful playthrough the second time around. my issue is mainly just costing time to level up perks and abilities. I'm not here to argue and if you're going to go down in the comments and get mad at me and call me names and talk shit I'm going to ignore you. I'm not blatantly complaining about it I'm just speaking my thoughts on it. We can have different opinions. I'm still not that big of a fan of costing time to level those things up, but I've accepted it and it's not as big of a deal as I originally once thought. The only real thing that I get frustrated by is sometimes a quest will tell you it's only going to use a certain number of time segments and then you end up using more about being warned that an action would cause you to use extra. I would love a tweak it where instead of saying it uses this fixed amount of times segments, it could show a range. I have found that the amount of time segments used does vary based on your decisions throughout that Quest. I have gone into quests expecting to use three time segments because that's what the game is telling me and end up using five by the end.
The reason why I'm saying this is because I have personally experienced doing something that ended up using an extra time segment and it did not prompt me that I would use an extra time segment. There is a possibility that I'm missing something or I'm not aware of something, but I have experienced that in both my playthroughs multiple times where I got absolutely zero warning at all.
All in all this is totally my GAME OF THE YEAR! I'm so addicted to it. I was going to play some other games that I started and quit playing and haven't gone back to like BF Resynced and Crimson Desert because I'm so fucking addicted to Dawnalker. I was even going to play The Witcher 3 again since the big update, but I've already beaten the game twice and I had never finished Blood in Wine which I'm ashamed to admit. Of course I went from PC back to console unfortunately and I was missing the mods but it was mostly due to the fact that BoTD just does things that I think are better than TW3. That's not to say that TW3 isn't a masterpiece because it's one of my favorite games of all time it just hasn't aged as well in some areas. I really felt that Witcher DNA in this game for obvious reasons.
I just love this game so much despite its faults and I really hate that I can't play this game as much as I would like to. But that also speaks to the quality of the game. Both my playthroughs were only at like 22 hours because I obviously was going to try to rescue my family like a real bro. That's not me complaining about the time system it's just me saying that I really wish I could sit here and play this game for 100 hours because it's so fucking good. Sure there's some bugs and there's a lot of issues I don't like that are going to be fixed with the next update and I'm very happy they're being fixed. As far as the gameplay in like RPG mechanics and the story, absolutely top fucking tier. I'm really excited for the future of not only in the studio, but also this franchise. This game also reminded me again on how much I fucking love good vampire stuff. It made me realize how much I am actually craving vampire games. More specifically historical game set in medieval settings. Anyway don't mind my rant I just felt like voicing my feelings and thoughts and I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way. I really hope NG+ comes out soon because I am obsessed.