Hm. So I'd view the economy of Witcher 3 as mostly broken, exactly for the reasons that they claim to have solved here. The idea of an economy feels poor is not there at all, the player will be swimming in money 10 hours into a 100 hour game. It's almost impossible to run out of money unless you're insisting on buying out every single alchemy recipe from every vendor.
And the pricing of the rare items (e.g. the relics) makes them seem completely irrelevant. You'll get a cutscene before getting a quest reward talking about how you're getting an amazing sword that has been in the family for centuries etc. And then it's slightly worse than what you already have, and the only use is to sell this legendary weapon for a price that'll allow you to buy 10 loaves of bread.
Though getting the economy balance right is really hard due to different play styles, so it's understandable.
> And the pricing of the rare items (e.g. the relics) makes them seem completely irrelevant. You'll get a cutscene before getting a quest reward talking about how you're getting an amazing sword that has been in the family for centuries etc. And then it's slightly worse than what you already have, and the only use is to sell this legendary weapon for a price that'll allow you to buy 10 loaves of bread.
That's a serious story/gameplay disconnect. People often talk about "too good to use" issues, where they get amazing items but never want to use them. This seems like the reverse problem, where for story purposes they're priceless but for gameplay purposes they're useless.
I can think of a mechanic that would solve that problem, and I'm wondering if there's any obvious reason it wouldn't work:
1) "Legendary" equipment/artifacts mostly can't be sold (because there's no market for it). Avert the trope of the shopkeepers that will buy and sell anything, and instead assume the world isn't oriented around catering to adventurers. If you start out with some basic equipment, you can skip the idea of shops selling any equipment at all, and always make the acquisition of such items story-based.
2) Don't have fixed stats for every piece of equipment. Instead, have the stats for any given "legendary" reward always be slightly better than what you have, with strengths and weaknesses based on the nature of the item. So the more quests you do, the better equipment you have. (And as a bonus, you mess with all the people who would normally document the stats of every item in the game.) And no matter what, a quest reward always matters.
1) If shopkeepers buy and sell armor, for example, it makes no sense for them to refuse to buy legendary armor. Even if they're only willing to pay a price similar to their normal best equipment, that's way better than an armful of bread.
2) Scaling it to your current level/equipment is even more of a story/mechanics disconnect, and 90% of the time that should still be worth a big chunk of money, if equipment is one of the main cost centers of the game.
Giving good rewards while keeping the player poor is hard to do in a way that doesn't involve screwing them over.
1) That's a good reason to not have shopkeepers buy and sell equipment at all. But even if they do, I've seen classic games where the "selling price" of anything you can't buy in a shop is 1 gold (less than the cheapest consumable). I've also seen games where you can't sell to shops, period, which is even more justifiable.
2) It's only a story/mechanics disconnect if you expect continuity between multiple playthroughs, and "story" doesn't typically have any explanation for that to begin with. Otherwise, it's not hard to suspend disbelief and just say "OK, the sword handed down through this family is a bit more powerful than the previous sword I found in a volcano".
> If shopkeepers buy and sell armor, for example, it makes no sense for them to refuse to buy legendary armor.
The game does (to an extent) give shopkeepers a limited pool of money to "buy" from you with. You could address this by making 'normal' shopkeepers buy things up to what they can afford. The game could indicate this limit clearly.
"Special" (artisan/expert) shopkeepers in city (who may have more money) could buy things for 'more', but obviously those shopkeepers (in a world like The Witcher's) are few and far apart.
This means that you have the option of "quick, cheap reward now" or "slower, bigger reward" later when you need to sell things.
Obviously not a perfect solution (what is?).
I definitely felt way too "rich" early on and discarded a lot of artifact items that were useless. Dynamically scaling items would go a long way towards solving that problem too.
If you play on the default difficulty, money won't be a problem. But anything higher will have you buying herbs and consumables on a regular basis.
I play on the third difficulty level, and while my financial situation has gradually improved, I wouldn't exactly say that I'm swimming in money. I need to upgrade gear on a regular basis to stay on par with mob levels, and also craft gear. That stuff is pretty expensive.
Don't think that's it. I played on Blood & Broken Bones (2nd hardest) until level 12 or so, and then switched to Death March for the rest of the game since I was outleveling the main quests way too quickly. There's really no need to spend money on anything except repairs and Gwent cards. There's more than enough food / alcohest around even before you get infinite free healing through the use of Quen alternate.
But fair enough, just goes to show the point about the difficulty of balancing the economy.
You will out level the main quests if you do too many side quests. That's not related to difficulty or the economy.
Of course, they could have made the main quest scale in difficulty according to your level, but the last RPG that did that was Oblivion and it basically broke the game for most people.
Hm, I played on the highest difficulty, as an alchemy spec, but I never had an issue with money. Alcohol is expensive, but you can loot enough Dwarven Spirits on our adventures that you only need to buy it to craft new potions. I never had to buy loot, since the witcher gear is usually good enough. I guess if I spammed bombs, it might be different, but with potions I was fine.
Yeah, I've never been the type to obsessively loot every single container while adventuring, so I was always short on supplies. The economy is probably not optimized for the frugal packrat. :)
I'm in the same boat, mostly from weapon repairs. My income is pretty good, but I usually need to repair things after a quest, and the cost of repairing really puts a dent in my accumulated cash.
> You'll get a cutscene before getting a quest reward talking about how you're getting an amazing sword that has been in the family for centuries etc. And then it's slightly worse than what you already have, and the only use is to sell this legendary weapon for a price that'll allow you to buy 10 loaves of bread.
This disconnect seems to be prevalent, and someone even made a comic.
Wait you can buy stuff? I'm at level 10 and have not bought anything since I just steal from every chest or sack I find and no one seems to care that I'm taking their stuff 95% of the time.
One of the things I did to mod Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim was to make the acquisition of money a lot more difficult by limiting the price you could sell things for and significantly increasing the cost of things like weapons, armour, equipment and room renting.
I do not understand how the prices are set for buying food (at least in my games). some items can be 20 or 30 each, whilst others are 2 or 3 but are just as good. curiously, bread and water seem to be the most expensive food to buy and raspberry juice is dirt cheap.
It must be hard in these types of games to have an economy which for the player involves anything other than kill-loot-sell-repeat.
And the pricing of the rare items (e.g. the relics) makes them seem completely irrelevant. You'll get a cutscene before getting a quest reward talking about how you're getting an amazing sword that has been in the family for centuries etc. And then it's slightly worse than what you already have, and the only use is to sell this legendary weapon for a price that'll allow you to buy 10 loaves of bread.
Though getting the economy balance right is really hard due to different play styles, so it's understandable.