After finally beating The Witcher 3 and both of its expansions, I can say that I’ve come around to it. Part of this is the result of me adapting to its quirks, and part is the ongoing improvement of the series itself. Like the best expansions, TW3 seems to identify its strengths and weaknesses, and improves on both fronts in its additions.
I can’t say that The Witcher is my favorite franchise; that crown is still held by Dragon Age. I CAN say that The Witcher 3 is the most beautiful video game I’ve played, and is tremendous fun in its own right. The level of craftsmanship on display is astonishing, and it can serve as a model for how open-world RPGs should work.
MEGA SPOILERS
One of the best parts of the latter half of the game is Ciri. She
isn't playable as often - maybe not even as often as she was in the
flashback sequences of the first half - but she's present for much of
the action, and adds a great energy and flavor to the story.
The
women in general finally get a chance to shine in the last act. Ciri and all of the
sorceresses are a big focus of the late game, and they're shown to be
extremely talented. They're not always sympathetic, which is also good - the Lodge of Sorceresses schemes and jockeys for power, not necessarily good or evil but always interesting and useful.
I find that I actually don’t have all that much to say about the conclusion of the main plot itself. It was good, but I think I missed out by not playing the earlier games and not being familiar with the source novels. It makes *sense*, and they do a good job at catching you up on previous plot elements and characters, but I think I just wasn’t as deeply invested in the Wild Hunt and the world in general as I would have been otherwise.
After chatting with my brother and poking around online, it looks like there are several elements of the ending that can vary. I’m mostly happy with how things turned out, with the major exception of having Radovid on the throne in the North. Apparently I missed the quest to depose him near the end of the game; as soon as I located Ciri, I became very focused on driving the story forward to its conclusion and so failed to revisit the various hubs that might have pointed me towards it.
Otherwise, though, things turned out basically as I would have hoped. Cerys is a wise and talented ruler in Skellige. Ciri survived her ordeal and returned, becoming a renowned witcher in her own right. Geralt and Yennefer relax and enjoy one another’s company. Not too bad!
I did kind of love how Ciri’s story is treated near the end. As she’s heading off to face the White Frost, she says something like “This isn’t your story.” And I really liked that. We’ve been mostly playing as Geralt, but the world doesn’t revolve around him, and it doesn’t revolve around us as the player. By forcing us to step back and not participate in the narrative climax, the game becomes much broader: it feels more like a world in its own right, and not just a powerfulness simulator. (At the same time, it also made me wish that we could have played as Ciri, who is so much more interesting to me than Geralt.)
Hearts of Stone was a good, nicely focused expansion. There’s a single shortish side-quest, but pretty much everything is part of a long and well-constructed main plot line. There are several very well-drawn characters, a nice romance option, quite a few fun new non-combat activities, and some really creative new environments.
I didn’t like Olgierd; he was a victim of Gaunter’s manipulations, but was already a bad guy prior to that, leading a band of raiders and practicing black magic. Still, when it came to the end, I decided that Gaunter was worse and fought to get Olgierd back his soul. This led to an incredibly well-designed and nail-bitingly-tense sequence where you have to explore a huge dreamlike area while fighting monsters and solving puzzles before time runs out. I’m still processing the design of that mission, and think that there are elements I can steal for future content.
Blood and Wine was very different from Hearts of Stone: where HoS is narrow and focused, B&W is ridiculously expansive. Toissant, the new zone, is GORGEOUS. I already thought that The Witcher 3 was the most beautiful video game I’ve seen, and Toissant just blew it out of the water. Everything from the design of the landscape to the architecture to the color scheme was astonishing, like a storybook fairy tale.
And that’s before you get to the literal storybook fairy tale, which somehow makes things EVEN MORE PRETTY and left me drooling on the floor. It feels almost unfair that the game is this well crafted.
The world is so great that I wanted to just spend time in it, and so, for the first time since White Orchard, I actually took the time to ride around to random quest markers, clearing out bandit camps and finding hidden treasures. Once again, I was really impressed by how well they create a story for every little thing. It’s never “just” a bandit camp: you can piece together the story of how they became bandits, and who they robbed, and what they planned to do, and what they did with their treasure. Stuff that is mechanically ephemeral becomes narratively intertwined with the larger themes of life in Toissant: the five Virtues, the power of the Duchy, the refugees from other lands.
I was initially mostly impressed by the world-building, but the main plot is also terrific. Duchess Anna Henrietta adds yet another entry to my list of awesome characters in this game: she has much of the determination of Cerys, but acts as one trained from birth to rule, with a supreme confidence in her actions.
And then there’s Regis. I was surprised by how much I liked him, to the point where I started idly wondering why they hadn’t made Regis the main character of these games instead of Geralt. He has some of the same understated quality as Geralt, but I found him far more likeable. His voice acting is wry and generally good-natured, while still remaining healthily skeptical.
I keep harping on Geralt, and I’ll never love him as a protagonist, but as before I found myself becoming more and more fond of him as the game went on. Part of this may be Stockholm syndrome, but I think it’s also due to getting to see him in new situations and seeing his humanizing quirks. He really does love Gwent and is obsessed with playing it. He tells a group of children that the world isn’t fair, but that it’s still important to be good. He develops a minor interest in non-Witcherly topics like viniculture. And, while he continues to get paid for all of the various deeds he does, there are more and more opportunities to express some other motivation for doing them: because they’re right, or because he feels sympathy, or out of curiosity.
END SPOILERS
All that being said: As far as I know, there hasn’t been any announcement yet for The Witcher 4. I’d be happy to see it, but I’ll be even more happy if it switches to a new protagonist. Geralt has ended up more likeable than he started, but if CDPR can somehow combine the quest and environment design of TW3 with a hero who I like (or, better yet, a group of them), then they’ll have a great shot at claiming the top tier of my affection.
Okay, photos! Here are all my albums. During the course of this playthrough, Google shut down Picasa, my favored means of hosting these albums. I’m currently using Google Plus Photos instead, which I kind of hate but is the path of least resistance for now. Part 1 (previously shared in my initial post) Part 2 (was linked to in my previous post but may not have been viewable at the time) Part 3 (end of the main campaign) Hearts of Stone expansion Blood & Wine expansion
All contain many spoilers! None contain nudity, but may have some NSFW images.
I'd planned to wait until finishing the campaign before writing another post on The Witcher, but the game is massive enough to merit an earlier check-in. I just reached a decent stopping point after a ridiculous amount of gameplay, and can tell that there's still a ways to go.
So, first of all, the good news: it's definitely growing on me! Some of the specific things that had initially irritated me have proven to be more palatable later on.
I've gotten used to the combat and it no longer bothers me. I'm definitely not an expert. I'm playing on the normal difficulty level, and have gotten by with just a single fighting technique: quick strikes and combat rolls. I never parry, dodge, or use heavy strikes. I do frequently use Yrden to slow my enemies, and will break out Igni against drowners or Aard against flying foes. Now that I've gotten the hang of it, fights are generally pretty short and enjoyable.
The bigger and nicer surprise, though, has been to realize that, in proportional terms, there's actually surprisingly little combat in The Witcher. This wasn't as apparent to me early on, since I was systematically clearing the map and fighting literally every monster I saw. Ever since reaching Novigrad, though, I have shifted to just doing main and secondary quests, and have been delighted to see how frequently you're able to clear quests without fighting. Quite often you'll be able to choose multiple approaches, or perhaps be able to break out Axii to stall a fight from the start. When there are fights, they're usually either very quick affairs, or interesting boss fights with enough good mechanics to feel worthwhile.
I should probably warn right here that this post will probably be filled with comparisons to Dragon Age, particularly Inquisition. DA is my favorite current franchise, and The Witcher is one of the only competitors to its AAA-fantasy-RPG throne. Anyways, after playing The Witcher 3, I think I finally understand what BioWare was trying to do with combat in Inquisition. I didn't particularly care for the fighting in that game, particularly as a melee fighter. It makes sense, though, if you think of it in terms of moving the DA franchise closer to TW, adding an element of action RPG fighting to its existing party-based, semi-tactical combat. At the same time, I kind of wish that BioWare would focus on improving its party-based combat, rather than adding new elements.
Back to The Witcher: Inventory has also become much less of a hassle. One big piece of this has just been getting more inventory space. This is done by getting bigger saddle bags, which is a great in-universe explanation (theoretically, you aren't ACTUALLY carrying around two dozen broadswords at all time, you're just having your horse carry them). It also helps enormously to have found quick travel points close to merchants, so I can easily sell off excess goods between quests.
Besides encumbrance, the other thing that was previously irritating was just sorting through equipment, figuring out what to keep and what to sell. For better and worse, there isn't a clear progression path. Do you keep a lower-level Relic or switch to a higher-level Magic item? Do you want more Glyph slots or more raw power? Take an item with Burning or one with Stun? Not to mention the trade-offs between light, medium, and heavy armor.
This got much more tolerable for me once I decided to just stick to Witcher gear. This is the best equipment in the game at any given level, and you can upgrade it at various points as you level up. It's kind of fun to acquire; there's a "scavenger hunt" element to finding the diagrams, and then you must gather the materials to craft it. It isn't too time consuming, either. Once you have it, it'll be better than anything else until you reach the level for the next tier of Witcher gear. (The only exception is that, at least at lower levels, it has fewer glyph slots; but even this is arguably an advantage, at least in terms of keeping it simple.)
So, on the one hand, that's great: I can now go through a half-dozen quests at a go, and then simply sell off every piece of armor and weaponry in my inventory without giving it a second thought. But, on the other hand, why?! What's the fun on mindlessly clicking on a ton of things to loot them, and then right-clicking a bunch more times to sell them? I increasingly feel like the Shadowrun games have spoiled me for RPGs. After experiencing a radical system where you get money for finishing quests, and then use that money to buy better gear... that seems like it should be the most common game design system for RPGs, and it's kind of stunning that it's such an outlier.
Er, that compliment kinda morphed into a criticism. Sorry. Bottom line: the inventory system was very annoying early on, and is hardly annoying at all now.
Other high points have continued to be good and get even better. The environments continue to be astonishingly beautiful, and grow ever more varied as you progress through more of the game. Reaching Skellige in particular opens up a whole new set of ecosystems, some of which are reminiscent of Skyrim but more gorgeous. Skellige also features my favorite ambient music thus far. It took me a while to notice, but it's great of the game to reflect different cultures in the different music you hear.
Another great thing: Gwent! I've become kind of obsessed with this card-game-within-a-video-game, and, if I'm being totally honest, my biggest single motivation for advancing the story and exploring new areas is so I can find new NPCs to play against and win cards from. I think that I now have what's more or less the ultimate deck. I play as Northern Realms, with the ruler who can clear weather effects. I have a lean deck: 22 units, including 4 spies, 9 heroes, 2 medics, and 3 groups of Bonded Pair cards. I usually just run with two Decoy cards, plus a Scorch and a Siege Horn (and Dandelion). I am kind of tempted to try out Nilfgaard, mostly for the leader's awesome ability (draw one card from your opponent's discard pile; unlike a Medic, you don't even need to immediately play it). I almost always win my matches now, but it's still fun as I set myself new challenges like running up high scores or shutting them out in the first round.
Now, onto the more mixed stuff...
Like I mentioned in my initial post, one thing that TW3 is particularly good at is varied character modeling. Once again, I'll invoke a comparison to Dragon Age. In most of those games, apart from a handful of iconic characters (your companions and a few major NPCs), most characters look very physically similar. There's a "human male" body type, a "human female" body type, an "elf male" body type, and so on. Different people get different hairstyles, skin tones, and so on, so you get the impression that they're all distinct, and I never really thought much about it. After playing The Witcher, though, I've been thoroughly impressed at how diverse their bodies are. Even random unnamed merchants and innkeepers are fat, or squat, or cockeyed, or unusually tall, or have huge jowls, or beer bellies, or goiters, or... well, you get the picture. That's all fantastic; but, on the flip side, most of the women you meet are attractive damsels with wide busts and narrow waists, and virtually all of the people you meet are white. It feels like CDPR did the harder part by representing unusual body shapes, but missed out on an easy opportunity to add more variety to their characters.
That said, it does feel like CDPR is moving in a great direction. I didn't make it all that far in The Witcher 1, but one thing that did feel kind of squicky was how you would unlock playing cards by sleeping with different women. This felt like an explicit conquest/trophy system which is troublesome in general, and particularly in a video game. There's none of that here: Geralt can still sleep around, but the game (generally!) pays more attention to the emotional situations of its characters. There's also a bit, in a very early quest, where you realize that your quest-giver is gay. The way it's delivered feels a bit clumsy and ham-handed, but the fact it's in there at all is great, and I think it shows that the developers are caring more about how they portray people in their games.
So, yeah. I feel a mixture of optimism and frustration in so much of the game's story. I don't think it needs to be a morality play, and there's probably a place for a "James Bond of Fantasy" somewhere in here. But the game seems to sometimes realize that it's capable of being more than "violence + sex = fun!!", and I wish it could lean more into that vein.
MINI SPOILERS
As noted before, the big problem with this is Geralt himself. Geralt is a fixed protagonist, and you have only limited control over how he expresses himself. He has kind of been growing on me, and I have a better understanding of his deal. It isn't like Talion from Shadow of Mordor, towards whom I felt almost pure frustration by the game's end. Geralt is part of a community, forms relationships, and has some capacity for introspection and growth.
For a lot of the game, you don't really get any significant choices at all: you can take a contract or not; you must say a certain line to advance in the plot. I miss the conversation systems of Dragon Age and Shadowrun and Pillars of Eternity and others where you would have a variety of options in how you respond to something: the game might make you go from point A to point B, but you can decide why your character agrees to do it and how they feel about it. Here, the answer is almost always the same: Geralt is doing it because he's getting paid, he feels annoyed by it.
There are some points where you can make a choice that affects the plot, and a couple of places where you can actually (gasp!) say how Geralt feels about something. I was delighted to find these, but in one of the earliest examples my delight was quickly replaced with horror. The Bloody Baron is an interesting character: a straight-up bad guy, a warlord who is responsible for suffering on both a macro political level and a micro personal level. During a long plot thread, you eventually piece together the story behind his missing wife and daughter: the years of separation, anger, resentment. At the end, you can pick between two options like "It was your fault" and "It wasn't your fault". I had some sympathy for the Baron, but I thought he was clearly in the wrong, so I chose the first option.
Then Geralt opened his dumb mouth. "It was your fault. This never would have happened if you hadn't left to go to war." NO! I didn't blame the Baron for doing his job. I blamed the Baron for beating his freakin' wife! At that point, I almost wished that the game didn't offer dialogue options. That way I wouldn't feel complicit in Geralt's assholery, just an observer of him being an asshole.
That said, that was the one scene I remember where I felt quite so blindsided by one of Geralt's statements. For the most part the game either shows Geralt reacting to stuff going on around him, or lets you tone his reactions up or down. So far they've avoided anything quite as disturbing as, say, scenes in Shadow of Mordor or GTA V where the player is forced to torture a prisoner in order to advance the plot.
Speaking of plot... I'll probably hold off on my overall reactions to characters/storylines until the end of the game. Just a quick check-in on where I am now:
I had a really hard time choosing between Triss and Yen, to the point where I put their plots on hold while I did everything else that I could. They both are fantastic, in very different ways. I love Yen's confidence and accent, and Triss's kind spirit and red hair. I ultimately decided to stay with Yen: partly because I see Geralt as a bit of a pragmatist, and think Yen's ties with Emhyr could prove most useful in both finding Ciri and potentially reshaping the world; and because some supplemental information in the world suggests that Ciri sees Yen as kind of a mother figure, and I like the idea of us being a pseudo-family together.
I almost immediately had cause to regret my choice. Right after making up my mind, I watched as Yen committed a horrifying act of necromancy, simultaneously mistreating a damned soul and defiling one of the world's most sacred sites. But I'm ride-or-die, so now I'm just backing Yen 100% no matter what and seeing where it takes us.
It will probably take us somewhere bad.
To be honest, if I had played the earlier games I probably would have chosen Triss. I just finished the segment at Kaer Morhen, and am starting to realize that Yen has little hesitation about treating people like disposable assets in pursuit of what she wants. That said, what she wants now is Ciri and, to a lesser extent, Geralt. If nothing else, I do appreciate the different dynamic of the relationship. I'm so used to video-game romances being gradual wooings, where the motivated player wins over a receptive NPC. Yen is (at least at this point in the story) the total alpha, though, and everyone knows it. It's a dynamic I haven't seen before, and there are elements of it that are really cool.
MEGA SPOILERS
In terms of main story beats, so far I have:
Aided Keira in her various efforts, but ultimately persuaded her to leave Velen and seek refuge in Kaer Morhen rather than attempt to barter the research for Radovid’s protection.
Reunited the Baron with his wife. He’s currently traveling with her in search of a hermit or someone who can help cure her mind.
Helped Lambert track down his prey, but then forced him to abandon his plans of revenge.
Supported Triss in rescuing the mages of Novigrad, except for two who we left behind.
Used deception to trick a hym into abandoning its parasitical hold on a lord of Skellige.
Helped Cerys uncover Birna’s plot to kill off the competitors and crown her son, and saw Cerys made ruler of Skellige. (I do really like how she’s the King rather than the Queen.) I am a fan of her “maybe we won’t kill ALL of our enemies” policies.
Put on a fantastic new play by Priscilla, starring Geralt as The Witcher. It was a financial and critical success!
There’s a TON more quests, of course, but those are the major choice-related ones that come to mind at the moment.
END SPOILERS
I assembled another album for this, and it’s frankly ridiculous. 704 pictures! That’s probably the most I’ve ever done for a game. (Checks.) Yes, it beats my previous record of 599 pictures for Part 4 of my second Dragon Age: Inquisition run. There are many spoilers in here, but mostly just in the captions. The pretty pictures are pretty to look at.
I’m not sure how much of the game I have left. I’m currently level 24, and I know that the DLC is targeted for around level 35. That said, I’ve been earning XP at a crawl lately because I’ve been clearing low-level quests (and not even touching Witcher Contracts or Treasure Hunts), so that probably isn’t the best gauge of progress. Anyways, I’ll have at least one more post, possibly more if I do the DLC separately.
Speaking of which - big thanks again to Andrew, who clued me in on the insanely vast array of free DLC available for the game. In Steam, it’s all accessible under the “DLC” link in the Library. There’s a huge amount of content available, from new character skins to new Gwent card art to new quests to new equipment and more. Really cool to see how much effort the developer put into expanding and enhancing the game after it was released (and another affirmation of my policy of generally waiting until at least a year after an RPG is released before I start playing it).
Thanks again to Andrew for yet another fantastic birthday present! I'm pretty sure a majority of my gaming hours over the course of a year are spent on the often-lengthy RPGs he gives me. The latest entry is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
I've been meaning to try The Witcher for a while, but my only serious attempt came to an early end when a quest-breaking bug soured me on the original entry in the series after about 6 hours of progress. I'd been meaning to go back and retry the series, but based on Andrew's guidance decided to press ahead and jump straight into the third entry. As is true for almost all franchises, they do a good job at catching players up on prior events, so I haven't felt too lost; I think I'm also benefiting from streamlined game systems, to say nothing of the vastly superior graphics.
I'm still very early in - I completed a total clear of the initial area, including all optional content, and have just recently gained access to the main open-world portion of the game. I can tell that this will be a very long game to complete, so I figured I'd write up some initial impressions. I imagine that many of these will shift or reverse by the end of the game.
THE GOOD
Environment design is amazing. It's been too long since I've played Inquisition, so I'm not sure how each compares to the other, but the terrain looks incredible, beautiful and varied. Environmental effects in particular are nice; I'll never get tired of looking at the incredible sunsets. Unlike Dragon Age, The Witcher also has a full day/night cycle, leading to interesting lighting that subtly shifts throughout the day. In an improvement over The Elder Scrolls, they also regularly shift the time of the day to set the right mood for cut scenes - for example, if you clear out a ghoul-infested village during a rainstorm at 3:30AM, then the time will jump forward to 9AM as you see all of the happy and relieved villagers arrive to take grateful possession of their abodes.
Character design is also fantastic. Geralt himself isn't customizable at all, but the NPCs you meet all look like realistic medieval peasant stock: missing teeth, squinting, hunched over, filled with blemishes, sometimes fat or muscular or sickly-looking. I love it!
The world is full of interesting things. It's hard to avoid the comparisons with Dragon Age Inquisition, with both featuring large zones of largely unstructured content. On the whole, I think DAI's high-end content is better, but TW3's low-end content is better: no collecting shards or ocularums, instead each point of interest on the map has its own unique, small-but-sufficient, self-contained objectives.
Along the same lines, Witcher Senses are a cool and inventive game mode. I enjoy these segments because they help me think of Geralt as not just a killer, but a talented hunter, almost a detective.
THE MIXED
Crafting. I haven't done a whole lot yet. I do really appreciate that, after you craft consumables for the first time, you can automatically replenish them whenever you rest; that gives a much better incentive to invest in crafting instead of hoarding supplies. But, as with much in the game, the range of options feels a little overwhelming, with literally dozens and dozens of recipes to choose from.
Solo travel. I miss parties.
Character builds. I like the flexibility of being able to slot different abilities and having multiple ways of earning skill points. But I'm not a fan of the Elder Scrolls-esque übermensch approach that encourages you to be a generalist (melee fighter AND ranged fighter AND caster). Again, I miss parties.
THE NOT-SO-GOOD
Inventory management. My patience for encumbrances and sorting through pages of indistinguishable gear grows rapidly thinner. TW3 isn't much worse than its contemporaries in this area, but I will wholeheartedly embrace any franchise that lets me focus on playing a game instead of sorting through trash.
Dialogue options. Andrew helped me put this in perspective: Geralt is an asshole, and you're mostly just choosing between varying tones of assholery. After coming off such a solid run of narrative-heavy games, though, it's a little dispiriting to be in a role-playing game that gives few choices for playing a role.
Combat. It isn't bad, I'm just not very good at it (though much better than when I first started). I've never been a huge fan of action-RPGs. TW3 does have better combat than, say, The Elder Scrolls, in that it requires actual strategy instead of gear and button-mashing. Unfortunately, it also requires quick reflexes, which I'm not so good at.
Overall, I've been enjoying TW3 a lot, while also feeling nostalgic for Inquisition. I suspect that I might finally make my third, possibly canonical run through of that game once I wrap up Wild Hunt (possibly sometime in 2018).
Not too much to show so far in the way of screenshots, but I did collect a few photos into a small album covering the start of the game. I don't think there's anything too spoilery in there.
