I recently finished playing through The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
For a long time, whenever I was looking for an RPG game to play, Steam and many other sources kept pointing me to The Witcher.
At the time, I didn’t play many story-heavy games, I much preferred the soft story-telling of games like Dark Souls. But, I keep an open-mind and decided to play it. (With the intent of writing this blog at the end of it.)
This isn’t a review, but will instead be an analysis of what I’ve learnt playing it, primarily from a PX point of view, and how that might tie into tangible, production outlines.
Learning the Game
Starting out the game, it didn’t take long to get into the hang of playing it. I had tried in the past many times to start playing it, and begin a playthrough, but I always stopped quite quickly.
In all of those times, I think it’s safe to say I didn’t have the game figured out. Sure, I knew the controls, and the basic crafting systems, but I didn’t technically know when the game started. For example, playing through Nier: Automata, your first playthrough doesn’t even scratch what the game is. In The Witcher, you actually start playing what the game is immediately, but it takes some time to figure out what that experience actually is. And even more so, how it plays out for the rest of the game.
The crux of The Witcher, is that you need to prepare for the climax of each questline. This isn’t true for everything, but mostly true. Sometimes this will happen via story and character decisions, other times it will be about you preparing for a fight.
That above, sums up The Witcher. What it asks, is for you to love the world of the game, and to get personally biased into the characters. These systems get intertwined deeply, and many quests aren’t one or the other, but it is instead a vast multitude.
Gameplay
The game primarily hinges on making decisions during dialogue sequences. The outcome opens up in one or two directions, you either fight, or you change what the rest of the dialogue goes to. This is it. The moment you spot this, the game is mostly ruined until you rebuild the veil of illusion.
The game’s combat system is fine, it’s not the best, and not the worst, but it’s fine. And perhaps fine wasn’t always enough for me, as I’ve found myself dropping the game constantly throughout my playthrough. This is what actually confirms my initial distaste for the game. If the story falls through at any point, and it definitely does, the game will return to a combat game that isn’t really fun. I disliked almost all of my fighting sequences, and felt little wit was involved. All of that was used up before the fight, in making sure I had my oils and potions ready. Once the battle begins, the ‘B’ button is your ‘God’ button. Geralt will stop damn near everything to dodge on that button press.
This is perhaps a question all games must ask themselves. Is there a ‘God’ button or action, that the player can trivialize the experience? I know A Township Tale (0.0.17.0) currently has tons, and most games have buttons that do that. The Witcher 3 also has the Quen sign, which puts a shield around the user that will at least absorb one attack. Some games, however, are built nicely around it. Super Mario Odyssey, there is no real way to avoid your encounter, none that aren’t in the nature of the game. If you want to skip this giant section, than platform your way around it, which is inhibited by the level design. Dark Souls invincibility rolls, all take stamina, can be hard to control and doesn’t cancel attacks.
The story section of The Witcher, will be the main reason you play. For the characters you meet, you will attribute your perspective on what they mean to your game experience. Some of them, you will want them to like you, and others you will detest. I had personal disdain for anything Dandelion related, and enjoyed Djikstra and the Bloody Baron. But again, the prime issue is that it is difficult to visualize what having played this portion well means. This is because you can see what opportunities you’ve gained, but rarely what you’ve lost. This type of story contrivance makes talking about the game to others fun, but doesn’t push me to play more games like it.
Detroit: Become Human has a saving grace feature with its timeline visualization. This lets you see how your actions connect together, and thereby also showing what could have been, or that there could have been. Mass Effect and Fallout franchises also did this, with dialogue options locked. Obviously, it’s more difficult to do for a game where the variance is so tied into other character behaviors, and aren’t immediately exposed after the event has occurred. But it is perhaps also a good thing to think about. How does the value of a decision get measured?
Story
Now, the actual story of the game is fine. The dialogue is usually written decently, but I must say the accents get old on me quick. When are we going to stop having the accents of the UK be our go-to medieval accent. But I digress, the story is about Geralt following Ciri’s trail through the kingdoms. The urgency of the task falls through, and the Wild Hunt, is actually scarier before you ever fight it properly. This is perhaps, an area where the story and gameplay don’t mesh very well. The Wild Hunt are pegged as being terrifying forces of nature, yet they are no stronger than a troll. Why can’t we just get a couple of trolls and drop them near those portals the Wild Hunt come out of. All kidding aside, the game’s traditional scaling difficulty simply doesn’t help instigate fear.
The game’s story is mostly split into four acts. Velen, Novigrad, Skellige and then the stretch to the end. Many events unfold across the game, but it reaches its peak twice, thereby dulling what the game could have been. I feel like we should’ve been able to cut the entire segment defending Kaer Moerhen out of there. I know an important thing happens, but how come that’s not a constant problem after the battle? If they can teleport anywhere, why does the Wild Hunt ever need to chase someone down? I have a lot of problems with them, and maybe that’s where story falls. The more serious and elevated in intensity you build something out to be, how do you justify them not using their entire arsenal to accomplish their goal? For example, the biggest villain of any dungeon-crawler game, would be a character that breaks important keys. Or if a Sudowoodo decided to block a path before you got the Cut HM. Or that if any characters grappled rather than dueled in a fight, they would win. Maybe the thing to learn here is that stories can fall through if the rules aren’t clear. The enemy can read like a simple, mystical threat writing device, but truly good villains would operate with more clarity.
Super Mario Odyssey, for example, the story isn’t just about finding Bowser and rescuing Peach. Bowser’s actions continuously ruin the places he visits, and so Mario helps out. And he needs to steal fuel for his probably unlicensed vehicle. There is actually no real threat to the game beyond that. Bowser gets all of the pieces he needs, and what does him getting married to Peach really mean? In the world of Mario, we can believe that her getting married to Bowser is a terrible thing, even though it’s probably not binding. It’s built out of the youthful concept of marriage tying people together by some abstract force of law. This is coupled by an amazing end segment to the game. And the end of the Witcher 3 isn’t fantastic, primarily because it feels like the combat system doesn’t offer much for designers to play with. Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, has an amazing end segment with a castle that can use most of its mechanics.
All in all, the game is quite good if you invest yourself into the characters, and play a character as well. I wanted to see how much of a scrooge I could make Geralt, and perhaps there needs to be more flexibility there. Most video game characters are too heroic in my opinion, even the nastier things you can say are always dulled by the fact that the story MUST proceed. This is why I enjoyed games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim. You could lie, cheat and deceive people in so many ways because your character had no voice. Whether we will see this freedom in Cyberpunk 2077, probably not. But hey, there’s a new Elder Scrolls rolling out soon.