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Towards the end of Blood and Wine, I was really disappointed that the big secret vampire bossman was just some naked jerk in a magic cave. How was I supposed to know that the other side of the quest fork was so much more produced.
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Jan 19, 2021 03:34
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I wound up keeping so many swords in my chest for sentimental reasons but never actually using them. It was nice to finally get like a display area for swords in the final DLC so I could feel less disappointed about the cheese sword.
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Mar 22, 2021 15:16
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I liked the bear gear because I liked the trench coat look, but also it looks nice and warm for going around the viking lands. I tried to keep mixing things up though. Wolf armor was okay, but there was some issue in my game where one of the versions wasn't quite modeled right so it didn't quite line up with some of my pants so Geralt just had a little midriff of absolute void between his torso and legs. Griffin armor was okay, but it had a bad color and I didn't wanna spend time fooling around with dyes. Manticore gear looked like something I'd genuinely expect somebody in the 19th century to wear, like a vampire hunter with a shotgun. It's interesting how the armor split things between fairly realistic bulky and comfy armors like that red gambeson with armpit plates so you can look like Santa and less realistic spandex-chainmail armors that hug Geralt's figure impossibly tightly as if the material had zero thickness and was infinitely flexible. I also liked wearing mitten-like glove armor.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:30
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Olgierd is so relentlessly bad every time you meet him and apparently made his living beforehand doing even worse things that I'm not really sure the world is worse without him in it.FilthyImp posted:In the demo, Geralt was tasked with hunting down a Lesshen. The village it had been terrorizing formerly worshiped it, but had renounced the Old Ways. You could either side with the Younger citizens and kill the animal, or side with the elders and spare it/perform rites to appease it. I think that was moved to Skellige in the main game. With so much of that area I just kept coming back to the conclusion that vikings are scum and their society deserves to crumble. Unlike the misery of the peasants of Velen who are so often subject to greater powers stepping all over them, the Skelligers are made miserable more by their own pride in their ways. Although often things get a lot more complex, like the Velen peasants are miserable and get pushed around by other powers far beyond them, but even they got the chance to rise up one time and murder their old lord even if it didn't make anything better.
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Mar 30, 2021 16:36
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Dijsktra is such a fun character, and I love all of the dialogue between him and Geralt. It's a shame that his grand master plan in his final quest involves killing a bunch of Geralt's other friends. He probably could've flourished in trying to dominate Redania beneath Nilfgaardian dominion.moxieman posted:Do not kill trolls. But...but...I need their organs!
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Apr 17, 2021 18:46
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I think it's worth noting that the real reason moral ambiguity like that tends to be rare is that it's very hard to write genuine ambiguity and maintaining that tone as opposed to just being absurdly dark and edgy. It's really impressive to be able to maintain those notes of melancholy and resignation without being overwhelmed by everything.
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Apr 17, 2021 20:29
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Whoreson might be the worst character in the entire game.
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Apr 19, 2021 15:55
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There's a lot of monsters that supernaturally influence emotions that witchers are immune to that I think implies some real truth to the muted emotions. There's also a number of lore things that hinge on it. What were they doing with that bad batch of cat witchers if it's just the training and experience that does it? With all the crazy mutations witchers are supposed to have under the hood, I don't think it's a stretch for them to have something weird with their brain chemistry. Fritz the Horse posted:Gaetan Huh, I thought I was pretty thorough going through the game, but I never met that guy.
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Apr 20, 2021 03:27
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The issue with Novigrad is that there's so much stuff to go through, it's basically impossible to do all of it in one go, except there's just so much of it that comes at you and some feels more urgent than things happening in Velen or Skellige, so it feels weird to wander off once you've had your fill for the time being. And then whenever you come back, you have to wade through all the misery of the inquisition, and it really brings you down. It hits harder than the misery of mudfarming peasants out in Velen sometimes, but it can be pretty close-going.
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May 14, 2021 01:49
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At pretty much every phase of going through Skellige, I was left with the conclusion that viking culture is horrible and disgusting. Although I think the game is siginificantly less self-aware about that then than it is about the plight of Velen dirt farmers or the suffering in Novigrad. I think what stood out to me most about that moment wasn't the distraught woman sacrificing herself, but the fact that the other people at the funeral complain about the guy's older wife not being the one killing herself, as is apparently the custom. Casting her as such a horrid shrew of a woman for daring to live after her husband's gone instead of killing herself like a good girl. Ugh.
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May 19, 2021 21:11
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The Triss scene is pretty obviously meant to be manipulating the player's emotions and get you to break, which it does its job in that respect, but it's definitely not doing any favors for the character. The gross moments do also kinda put you more into Geralt's shoes as a constant outsider who doesn't really share the values of the locals, but they're not fun. Especially the more mundanely terrible things. It's one thing to be at a big party in Velen towards the end hearing how the peasants worship the abominable three witches and rely on them to fertilize the land, and take part in a...suspicious soup at the end of the party, but when it's just people on the street calling all women whores or commenting on how many times to beat their wives, there's nothing interesting about that, and it veers a little into cartoonish. The most cartoonishly awful is probably Whoreson Jr., which was just ridiculous and sick. There's just no point to that.
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May 20, 2021 00:52
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Cobalt-60 posted:All NPCs helpfully leave their Gwent card if they die/flee/are polymorphed. The only cards you can't get afterwards are the ones at the masquerade ball and the Gwent tournament. I think the tavernkeeper in White Orchard kinda just disappeared. When I read a guide that said to go back and buy a card from there. Might be a bug or might be a consequence of having gotten to the quest where whether you defend the tavern or not gets brought up again. Tender Bender posted:It has a ton of fun writing, whether it's individual lines in a serious situation or funny side quests like the one you mentioned. I kind of took it for granted after spending 100+ hours in the main quest. When I started Assassin's Creed Valhalla, I hit a number of Wacky Sidequests where it was clear they were trying to do a similar thing, but the writing wasn't quite there, to the point where it made me just miss the Witcher so I played both DLC. I felt Assassin's Creed Origins was trying harder to copy the Witcher with its crime scene investigation missions. When I played through Witcher 3, it really felt like finding finding the missing ingredient as to what shaped so many other games that came afterwards. Most games didn't really get most of what they were copying, but I'd like to see more try.
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Jun 20, 2021 20:47
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Wouldn't Anarietta have Dandelion arrested if he showed up? I remember there was some kinda tension about that.
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Jun 30, 2021 01:45
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Wear every armor at least for a little while, but I think Bear armor was one of my favorites. One of the more unique things about the game's aesthetic anyways is that gambesons are included in armor options. Early in the game, there's a nice red gambeson that you can pair with some of those heavy armor gloves that look like mittens and when Geralt's beard starts growing out, he looks like Santa Claus. Wolf armor, I think one of the later iterations was bugged a bit in that if you don't wear the designated pants, Geralt's torso doesn't meet up with his legs right so there's a little void midrift. Griffin armor is a bad color and the color change options come way too late in the game. And it doesn't feel right having short-sleeved armor in the lategame when things are getting cold.
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Jul 2, 2021 02:01
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It's real hard to actually dump Yennifer in the moment, after she goes to great lengths to see if your love is real, while dumping Triss means telling her to finally get out of the city where she will be brutally murdered like any of the hundreds of bodies you pass in the street. I know that the real world had similar brutal murders of large amounts of people powered by similarly cynical politics or wanting to loot the dead, but god drat it seems a bit much. And it's also confusing how if Novigrad is supposedly independent, how did they manage to get pushed so far into following Radovid's anti-magic crusade?
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Jul 4, 2021 04:18
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Act 3 felt rushed to me because I had already spent the first parts of the game wandering off to do every quest in front of me, so after that there wasn't as much for me to wander off and do. I guess I did also have to finish off Hearts of Stone because I didn't want to have a big dumb tattoo in the end, and that I didn't really enjoy. There's also kind of a danger with these big games to get ground down by the sidequests so that maybe you run out of steam before returning to the main quest to finish things off, but I managed to do it. And then going onto Blood & Wine, I fully expected to run out of steam there, but it's just so drat pleasant and enjoyable and fresh and a joy to be in that I went all completionist there as well.
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Jul 15, 2021 01:53
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Arcsquad12 posted:That whole scene felt like it needed another pass. The sound is off, the animations clearly weren't there so they used quick cuts and bad camera angles to hide the awkward movements, and even the blood splatter on the corpses seemed off with broken textures. Yeah, for the most part the Witcher seems a lot more measured and ambiguous about morality about any situation, but you can't just throw in that amount of cartoonishly grotesque cruelty, maybe the worst in the game, and leave it at that. I guess maybe they wanted to spook the player into thinking Ciri could be dead? And then Dudu is just fine about taking on his form after complaining about how bad it was taking on the form of Menge, because that serial killer's flaws are more important to the overall narrative than the guy slaughtering prostitutes. Like somehow those predilections don't bother him at all.
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Jul 20, 2021 20:26
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You get the option to let him live too, since he's just a bad man maiming prostitutes and not the guy doing the serial killings. Most of the game is a lot better about that, but there's just a few times when they just have bad things happening to women for shock value more than anything else.
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Jul 20, 2021 22:21
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BiggerBoat posted:To be fair though, doesn't a ton of horrible poo poo happen to pretty much everyone in this game? I never finished it but don't recall finding anything particularly egregious or problematic that I could divide along gender or race lines or anything. Honestly, it's not the specifically gendered violence that bothers me, (although it sure doesn't help). It's how it's kind of just...vapid? And done for the shock value to manipulate the player. Usually most things in the Witcher 3 have a whole depth to them. Dead people have family that are still looking for them, if not to bring them home alive, to at least be able to bury them. Random bandits in the forest often have a letter lying around detailing how they got to the point where they're trying to get by on mugging people. Everything ends up complicated. Even with one of the greatest atrocities in the game, where the three witches were raising a bunch of children to eat and/or feed to the local villagers who worship them, you get the context for where these children come from. How their families have a practice of just abandoning children in the forest, and you can find out all about how the witches have brought the villagers under their control, into their cult. When it's just "here are all these dead prostitutes that were murdered from an infinite pool of cheap prostitutes" and the lead-in to that part of the game hasn't even been really building tension for the horror it has in store for you, it just feels cheap and unearned on top of being ridiculously disgusting. There were some points in Velen where the peasant suffering was almost too much for me, but the depth even when they were suffering that could show you a little light gleaning through is what saves it. Without that depth, it's just gross and depressing.
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Jul 21, 2021 04:21
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Hearts of Stone seems like just another Witcher contract with a bit more elaborate of a setup, until you kill the monster and get shanghai'd and tattooed. The occasional ominous singing children popping up is also a neat touch.
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Jul 25, 2021 23:08
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I thought Emhyr was being forced to step down, not that he was going to some elaborate manipulation routine on her as a figurehead. Either way, if you want to have some influence on the overall political structure of the world so maybe there wouldn't be another giant war in 5 years, that's pretty much your only option. And maybe an organized state could reduce monster attacks more than a single person could.
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Sep 1, 2021 17:25
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I've only just played the third game, so I don't really know much about Nilfgaard's administrating policies, but I don't particularly care for any of the monarchic states over another. Temeria's already practically fallen already, so its only real options are pseudo-autonomy under Nilfgaard while it gets back on its feet or annexation by Redania which is currently led by a clear psychopath or Djikstra does his takeover plan, however that works, but I didn't want him to kill Geralt's other buddies, so... Going through the game options naturally, it only makes sense to at least let Ciri know that option's there for her.
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Sep 1, 2021 18:59
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I don't remember actually seeing slavery ingame, so are you talking like the figurative slavery of being subjugated under another country's dominion? Because there sure are all those public executions that Radovid manages to extend beyond his nominal control. If Geralt doesn't kill him, it's just gonna keep spreading.
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Sep 1, 2021 21:14
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Going by medieval standards, I think pretty much every state is open and accepting of slavery, and the only reason they might not be invested into it is being relatively poor or not having access to a good source of slaves. Not some kind of ideological repulsion to the concept. Often, many peasants could be subject to some kind of feudal contracts which may seem similar to slavery aside from a nebulous concept of reciprocity that they may even take pride in over free and unprotected by law wanderers like Witchers. At the very least, Nilfgaard doesn't seem to be trying to actively enslave northerners, which is about the best you can hope for. Skellige actually is actively enslaving the people of the North, that's what they're talking about when they keep mentioning raiding, and you do see them parading their slaves around.
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Sep 1, 2021 23:28
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I actually reloaded to make sure that Olgierd got got, because gently caress that guy. He's not the guy in the DLC with a cool theme song.
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Sep 13, 2021 18:45
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It definitely seems more Witcher-y for the Elves to have their own complicated, past with its own sins before they themselves ended up getting conquered. Ending up on the victim side of oppression doesn't make your past beforehand any more innocent. Separate sentient fantasy species as a metaphor for various real-world peoples has always been weird thing in relation to real-world history. Conquest doesn't often involve the total geneological replacement of conquered peoples, aside from targeted genocides and in the case of much of the New World, the mass deaths from Old-World diseases. I guess it can be a metaphor for things like diasporas, religious sects, old cultures surviving in their own way after being conquered, but those have an opportunity of assimilation that being a literal separate species wouldn't involve, and The Witcher already has its own non-metaphorical diasporas, religious sects, and old cultures within humanity, so it's superfluous as a metaphor. I think elves in The Witcher are just their own weird thing much like how all the various monsters are their own weird things that Geralt has to deal with the peculiarities of like an IT specialist.
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Oct 3, 2021 02:21
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I guess maybe the other games talked about it more, but I kinda got the impression that Avallach just saw the infinite amount of dead worlds throughout the infinite dimensions (as any fraction of infinity will also be infinite), and that's what makes him panic about the possibly inevitable demise of his own world, no matter how near or far it may be. Like panicking about global warming, or panicking about another ice age, or panicking about the theoretical eventual heat-death of the universe. Maybe a scary thing, but not an imminent threat. For what it's worth, there was that whole bit where he doesn't have the full support of the Aene Elle and with a little evidence him and his merry band could be cut loose.
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Oct 3, 2021 04:52
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It's also interesting seeing this chosen one that the world revolves around from the perspective of somebody who's just a friend or loose relation to the chosen one. It's a weird and alienating system, and Gerault doesn't really know or understand what's going on with that mythic destiny, and can only barely give her any advice on who she can even take advice from. It's a real example of a disempowerment fantasy, which makes things really interesting.
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Nov 11, 2021 00:33
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I'm not really into choose-your-own romances or dating sims, but I can really see how much it intensifies fan engagement to add it into the game.
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Jan 8, 2022 20:39
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BiggerBoat posted:I think this game could be improved a lot by kind of "Arkham-izing" or even adding some Dark Souls into the combat system a little bit. Where the buffs, skills and items become obvious but are also super contextualized, still dependent on player input/timing and work differently against different monsters that make you shake up your strategy a tad more for each fight. I mean, kind of lean more into making the combat a mini game. I think the depth of Witcher 3's combat is supposed to come from preparing for combat and learning about your enemies, but after you know most of it, there's not much left. The combat doesn't feel too great, and it becomes super perfunctory after a point. And then there's fighting humans, which you do a whole lot and there's not actually much to learn at all, you just figure out how to manage when there's shields.
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Jan 11, 2022 07:21
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Velen can be a bit of a peasant misery simulator at times. Skellige is also a peasant misery simulator, but the Skelligers aren't the peasants, so it's a bit less depressing.
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Jan 24, 2022 19:22
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I think most of Velen has been depopulated by war and plague, but there is a little corner that is proud of its traditions of sending children off to the hags in return for some nebulous "protection", magic acorns that help the crops, and some helpings of mysterious stew at the end of the year party. Which I guess is on par with Skellige tradition. I'm glad that their viking society is dying out.
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Jan 25, 2022 06:39
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The only time sidequests bothered me for being "formulaic" were the ones with big dark twists that I could see from a mile away. Like the quest where you hear about a missing person and go to a empty town with nobody there but a weird old couple, and I complained out loud the whole way through about how I was sick of this quest because I had seen it in so many games already. Maybe I have an extra aversion against cannibalism as well. I'll give them that at least they tried adding some extra nuance and justification to it, but then there were also at least two other cannibalism twists in Witcher 3 that were alternately more crazy and respected you enough to connect the dots on your own. I feel like a lot of games have tried to directly take the way that Witcher 3 did detective sidequests but never manage to seem anywhere near as nuanced or dynamic; they just lead you by the nose instead of letting you feel like you're close to the detective work.
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Aug 19, 2022 15:36
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I don't think it was "too wicked" for the crones, they just had their own disputes with it for their own supernatural reasons. I kinda even got the impression that it got worse from the eons of confinement, but even then it's attacking a village that worships the crones so this is more reopening the original dispute. It's still cruel the villagers, but it's a bit easier to deal with when you look at it as the result of them building a symbiosis with child-eating monsters. It's up for grabs whether one more powerful crone-like entity running around Velen is going to be better or worse in the long run, maybe they'll continue to fight and mess things up, but Velen is pretty hosed either way in the long run because by the end of the game two of the three crones are dead and the whole magic system the area relied on for its agriculture is gone. Maybe harvests could become sustainable without them, I don't know how magic works, but either way the old ways of the area are dead. Witcher definitely has a penchant for adding negative twists to missions, which is pretty common for a lot of games, but the difference is that Witcher packs the missions with a lot of nuance so that even if there's no clearly "good" option, there's plenty of information for you to think and figure out what you think. It's not trying to be edgy for its own sake, it's not saying "hey you can be a hero or you can just be a totally awful monster for no reason", it's just giving you a complicated situation for you to figure out on your own.
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Sep 2, 2022 17:34
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I felt the need to crosspost.WhiskeyWhiskers posted:Very late in the game Avallach contradicts Geralt's doubts in the Whispering Hillock and mentions there was a druid's circle in Velen at one point, so the spirit was probably telling the truth. I'm not really aware of what you're talking about here, about what the Hillock tells you that Avallach possibly confirms, could you clarify?
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Sep 2, 2022 22:36
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Skippy McPants posted:As last bit of post-Witcher 3 context, the Gwent card for She Who Knows paints a pretty clear picture of a non-friendly entity. I feel like that may just be part of being some kind of primordial eldritch entity beyond mortal men. It ain't sunshine and roses, but it's already a given in the Witcher world that you can have a nasty past but still manage to have a positive effect on the future. I think especially before Ciri shows that she can kill some of the Crones, it certainly seems like unleashing the Mother to fight her children is the best shot at getting rid of them. Something that's neat to me about the background of the Witcher is how deep things go. You've got your ordinary human politics that going back there's a whole history of kingdoms rising and falling, and if you go back far enough there's human migrations populating the world and before that there's Elves and their former empire and migrations, and constantly underpinning that are the various supernatural elements that often Gerault is specialized in stabbing to death with a sword, but there's a number of times when just it's too tough and too old and too powerful for Gerault to even try taking on, and those are just something he would do best to try avoiding when he can. And going back before and underpinning all of that is the weird transdimensional element where at various points in the world's history and prehistory the infinite multiverse just opened up and pooped out a bunch of stuff onto the world. Sometimes it's monsters and magic, going back far enough it was humans at some point, vampires, and presumably most of the weirder creatures, but you can only really guess at what got pooped out long ago and what could've possibly been there before everything else. The Crones are an active mythology that Gerault wanders up to and interacts with, but not an unchanging immortal force. Maybe they're just a particularly powerful unknown kind of creature, maybe they're something more, but Gerault's not being paid to figure it out, and knows better than to investigate too closely on his own.
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Sep 3, 2022 08:12
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Ainsley McTree posted:The game also makes no attempt to be subtle with its hints that certain powerful characters are vampires, to the extent that it's literally a joke at one point Who exactly? Because aside from the explicit vampires, I didn't really pick up on any hints. I guess it'd make sense from the ancient vampire lore texts you find, I just didn't see anything that would directly imply much. And to be honest, while I really love Blood and Wine, I'm not very into The Witcher's version of higher vampires who are just fundamentally immortal and just beyond humans in every way. Doesn't seem like it gels with The Witcher's normal approach to the supernatural. At the end of the DLC, I was disappointed with the choice fork where you can choose to go see the Elder vampire to summon Detlaff, because I expected like some kind of mob boss head honcho guy with actual social influence, but then it turns out that he's just a slightly weirder kind of vampire with just another weird vampire ability. Just an inhuman hermit in a cave wishing for some glimpse of the old world vampire dimension. Kinda lame. Especially disappointing since the other side of the fork is such a detailed area with multiple subquests. The vampire cave tries to mix it up with some weird geometry, but it's just nowhere close.
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Sep 15, 2022 22:59
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I think an implication of Witcher 3 is that even though the original witcher secrets are mostly dead, there's a lot that the remaining Wolf witchers do know, but they're just not willing to try starting a new generation of proper witchers because it involves a lot of abuse, and there's not that much urgent need and definitely no funding. Also with all the other witcher schools, there's got to be some sources of the knowledge somewhere. I haven't gotten around to playing the first two games, but I know one of them involves a guy who was trying to make a witcher army, so I assume he had an angle.
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Sep 19, 2022 04:41
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Peasants are generally distrustful of strangers, and there's also some thing about how Cat Witchers made the reputation worse by going psycho. At Novigrad, I imagine they would be more open if they weren't in the thrall of genocidal extremists. I think that's also one of the aspects where Witcher leans into subverting fairytales, because a lot of classic stories are about heroes just doing the right thing for its own sake, and that's what a lot of people want from their heroes, but rule #1 of being a Witcher is get money get paid and never work for exposure. A lot of people end up hating contractors.
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Oct 11, 2022 00:13
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Gerault kills monsters, and even then, usually only when he's getting paid.Arc Hammer posted:Succubi are harmless but their reputation precedes them There's one who's a little suspect, but not really any proof either way. Halloween Jack posted:The Witcher is such a painfully straight franchise. We never meet an incubus, or a woman who isn't built like a lingerie model.  More seriously-  I guess also of the female characters, so many are somehow intended as love interests or otherwise embroiled in something saucy.
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Oct 14, 2022 18:55
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