If I am going to be completely honest, part of their outsourcing is why I waited until a few days ago to start the game.
Not because I knew, but because the initial screenshots and clips showed a very generic unreal engine level of graphics. With chromatic abberation everywhere, the exact same hair you see in every recent UE game, the same facial style that makes it easier to match mouth movements, and so on. Once I heard it actually had a good story I ended up putting in about ten hours in a day after I started. But they did suffer from outsourcing parts of the game.
It also becomes pretty obvious when you meet certain characters that obviously has weeks(probably months) of work put into just their “hair” moving. Specially when they’re standing next to a model who could have been made by someone who just finished a couple of Blender tutorials.
I know it’s popular to go “developer good, publisher bad”, but in Bioware’s case, from what I’ve read, they were mostly just given the rope to hang themselves.
Ever since ME Andromeda they’ve been outsourcing a lot of the work, and/or using smaller and inexperienced studios while promoting and launching them as if made by the main studio.
I’ve said for years that one or more of the main characters should be prominent, but you play most of the game as a custom character and you get to choose your witcher school. So I’m sort of hoping that she’s the protagonist and main character in a similar way to how she is TW3.
The basic fishing rod is basically a scam, in that it’s almost impossible to catch anything but the most basic fish. The “natural rod” you can buy from vendor takes 2 out of the 3 stats on the basic from 2->4 for almost nothing. And some fishing spots have an upgraded rod already.
As for how it works: It’s basically like fishing with a spinner. You throw it out and slowly reel it in as they swim towards lure/bait, and you pull/click as they bite. Then you pull the rod opposite the direction it’s swimming and try to reel in a bit at the same time(if it’s swimming towards you, just reel). As the line turns from green to red, you stop moving and reeling in to let the line “cool down” before doing it again until it’s at the shore(I often recommend standing a little bit into the water if it’s shallow, since standing too far back will prevent catches)…
There’s also different bait depending on wherer you are fishing; Mountain lake bait wont always in a river.
And once you have a hang of the basics, there are two quest chains that give you high level fishing rods.
Then you come across a game like Far Cry 5, which is mainly about gunning down fanatics, like most Far Cry games. But it has surprsingly good fishing. Although it’s mainly down to the enviroment, the actual fishing mechanic isn’t amazing.
It captured that feeling of standing on the bank of a lazy river, seeing a deer through the foggy reeds in morning, as fish catch insects on the surface. Or watching over a mountain lake as the sun sets in the distant mountains and a bird circles overhead.
If you think that’s “abstract enough”, I’m guessing you’re either a plagiarist or an “AI artist”. Or do you want to admit that you didn’t really look at the comparison images?
Wait, it doesn’t appear to be the same within the EU.
Both the French and German EULA seems to say that if you alter a digital product, the digital product might be rendered unusable. Although my French and German is bad, so someone please double check.