Post by WickedCrustacean on Jun 8, 2017 11:19:12 GMT -5
Back in 2007, a small, unknown Polish company named CD Projekt released an RPG called The Witcher, based on Andrzej Sapkowski's fantasy novels about the titular character. The game garnered a lot of positive feedback and allowed CD Projekt to develop a higher budget sequel, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Following Skyrim's massive commercial success, CD Projekt joined the growing ranks of RPG developers creating open world games, and in 2015, released the closing chapter of The Witcher trilogy, a gargantuan open world RPG with the name The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
The games take place in a fantasy setting that is a mixture of medieval Europe and Tolkien, and are much darker than your typical fantasy fare. The elves and dwarves are still here, but they typically live in ghettos, as second-rate citizens and outcasts from human society. Some of them escape to the woods and become the Scoia'tael, terrorists or freedom-fighters, depending on which group you belong to. Humans abuse them and occasionally outright kill them, sometimes causing riots to start in reprisal. Religious fanatics such as the Order of the Holy Flame and the Witch Hunters abound, and pestilent plagues break out from time to time. On top of that, much like medieval Europe, various kingdoms and empires are constantly at war, and the world is full of vicious monsters. It is not a pretty place to live.
It is to deal with the over-abundance of monsters that the Witchers were originally created. They are a small, tightly knit order of mercenary monster hunters. The overall order is broken down into various schools, each of which has a base in some remote place, where they spend the winter, and then in spring, the Witchers spread out across the land, walking the roads in search of monster contracts put out by the besieged populace. New Witchers are created mostly by recruiting homeless orphans, who are then put through rigorous tests and given mutagenic substances, so that only 3 in 10 survive. The substances mutate their bodies to make them stronger and quicker than normal humans, as well as give them yellow cat-like eyes, and enable them to deal with the supernatural power of their intended adversaries. The surviving youths are then extensively trained in swordfighting, knowledge of monsters, alchemy, and the use of primitive magic. Once they master all of these things, they become a Witcher.
The trilogy of games (and the novels by which they were inspired) deals with a specific Witcher, Geralt of Rivia. He is the best known among them, having achieved great fame before the first game even begins. In the original Witcher, Geralt's barely conscious body is found by the fellow Witchers of the School of the Wolf near the ruined fortress of Kaer Morhen, their base of operations. Months earlier, he intervened on the behalf of non-humans in a massive riot in Rivia, and a youth in the crowd stabbed him with a pitchfork, killing him. However, months later he is alive, and without any memory of what happened in between. As Geralt slowly recovers his memory over the course of the first two games, he is entangled in various conflicts going on in the world, from the mundane to the grandiose. As soon as he arrives at Kaer Morhen, the fortress comes under attack by a criminal syndicate known as the Salamandra. The criminals steal Witchers' mutagenic secrets, forcing Geralt and the other Witchers to head out to retrieve them. Eventually, Geralt is able to wipe out the Salamandra, but in the process, learns that they were hired by the leader of the Order of the Flaming Rose, a madman who (aside from having very unique time-space relationships to Geralt) wanted to use the Witcher secrets to create an army of supermen to lead humanity to salvation from a terrible prophecy. On defeating him and his plans, the events of the second game begin, in which Geralt follows the trail of a highly skilled assassin who seems bent on taking out all the monarchs of the Northern kingdoms. The assassin turns out to be a fellow Witcher (although from a different school), and eventually, he turns out to be but a pawn for the power hungry Nilfgaardian Empire, seeking to sow discord among the Northern kings, to soften them up for its eventual invasion.
It is at this point that Witcher 3 begins. Nilfgaard has invaded the weakened North, but found a formidable adversary in the one remaining northern King, who in the spirit of the Witcher universe, instead of being a noble figure fighting for his people, is actually a vicious and blood-thirsty madman. This situation, which greatly sets the atmosphere of the game, of the land, the people, and the game characters being stuck between an aggressive foreign invader and the neighborly mad tyrant is not only highly realistic and thought-provoking, but also bears some parallels in my opinion to World War 2, and how Poland must've felt in those days, being stuck between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
The game world reflects this very well, especially the main map in the game, which is full of corpse-covered battlefields, trees decorated with hung people, some from one side, some from the other, but mostly neutral Temerian peasants caught in between. These images hit you right away, as soon as your start the game (after the tutorial), and combine with many others to create a startingly realistic and interesting world. The world of the Witcher 3 is indeed very well crafted. It is beautiful in its vistas and nature, and ugly in its slums and atrocities, and it feels very real. The main city in the game, the independent city of Novigrad, is likely the largest settlement ever depicted in an RPG, making most others look like villages by comparison. It has many neighborhoods, stretches as far as the eye can see, and is filled by crowds of NPCs. The rest of the world consists of smaller settlements and large tracts of wilderness, from the swamps and woods of Velen to the snowy mountains and seas of Skellige Islands.
While the atmosphere and lore of The Witcher 3 are undeniable strong points, the very best things about this game are without a doubt its dialogue, writing and cut-scenes. It's not so much the plot-lines being great, as fundamentally, most of them are fairly plain, but rather how they are presented. The quality of the writing, the acting, and the voice-overs is just on a different level from other RPGs. You often feel like you are watching a movie when viewing cut-scenes, and that is pretty rare for a video game, where often dialogue tends to be on the cringe-worthy side. In this game, the dialogue is deep, involving, emotionally touching, occasionally hilarious, and always interesting. While this definitely holds true for the main quest-line, and the important secondary quests, what's much more surprising is how quite often, even the dialogue for some out-of-the-way minor quests can be just as good. And given how much content there is in Witcher 3, this quality is simply breath-taking.
Speaking of which, another strong suit of the game is its sheer scope. This is a massive behemoth of an RPG. Finishing most of the content of the main game (before the expansions) resulted in a 203 hour save-game for me. The total time spent in the game, tracked on Steam, was 325 hours, and completing it took roughly 2 months of dedicated gaming. It is THAT big.
Another beautiful thing about Witcher 3 is the way it handles choices and their consequences. This is not an on-rails RPG, where nothing you do matters, but it is also not an RPG with telegraphed black-and-white choices that we are used to. You are constantly presented with choices in the dialogue or in your actions, and a lot of them don't necessarily affect stuff beyond that dialogue or quest, but any one potentially can, and without warning. At any point, a choice you made earlier can affect the game world in a major way that could not be possibly predicted. Moreover, most of these choices are so morally gray and blurred, that there is never an easy one. For me, I typically lacked information to make a really educated decision, and simply went with my gut. A lot of times, it came back to bite me, and resulted in events that were the exact opposite of what I would have wanted, and yet, the fact that I made those choices, and they brought about those events was exactly what made the game world feel real and alive, despite the unwelcome consequences.
Oh, and the game is absolutely breath-takingly beautiful if you have the hardware. The mountain vistas in Skellige could've been taken off a promotional Swiss Alps poster, the beaches in Velen, the thick woods and the dense crowds of Novigrad are all absolutely gorgeous. The technology behind the game is quite impressive, with excellent animations, and features such as materials looking different in the rain, and water dripping off of Geralt when he steps out of a river. Hair and clothes swirl in the wind, and animals have fluffy fur. On top of the technology, the art direction is also wonderful. Architecture looks on point, city and village layouts are realistic and immersive, and clothes are intricately detailed. This game is a feast for the eyes. The sound effects and music are also great, from the terrifying howls of monsters to the unique Easter European sounding music during combat.
By this point, the game sounds pretty swell, doesn't it? However, you might have noticed that we have not covered a little thing called gameplay yet. And unfortunately, the actual gameplay of Witcher 3 is not quite up to the incredible standards set by its writing, atmosphere, and visuals. That is not to say it is terrible, but just not on the same level. The combat system, in which you will be participating quite often, is a definite improvement from the previous two games in the series, but still not quite there. Fundamentally, it has very sound principles, whereby Geralt must watch his enemy and then perform a counter move when they attack, which will allow him, if executed properly, to hit them once or twice in safety. In this way, Geralt would dodge a monster, parry a human, or roll from a large monster, and then get his damage in. Unfortunately, in terms of implementation, there are a lot of issues with this.
One issue is that the enemies have AI that allows them to avoid Geralt's attacks if he just spams them. This is a good thing, as it would encourage more tactical gameplay, and countering, but unfortunately (probably due to the developers wanting to make the game easier and not drive away potential customers), this AI is coded in a strange way where it only kicks in after a few hits allowed. This essentially allows the player to spam attacks and get away with it for the most part, especially in later stages of the game, where the player grows so powerful that 1-2 attacks can finish the enemy off.
Another issue is that due to Geralt's nature as a supernatural fighting machine, most of the fights that he participates in are one-vs-three-or-more variety. Since no one can fight at those odds against equally skilled opponents, this pretty much predetermines the enemies to be relative weaklings. Most fights in Witcher 3 against a single opponent are completely easy, and the fights against groups, which, while certainly more challenging, also often feel cheap and annoying, when that third or fourth guy stabs you in the back. It is just not how I would go about designing a good combat system.
It is also very easy to become completely overpowered in combat, which might come in helpful against the bosses, but would ruin the realism of the main game-world. If someone levels up many abilities, uses the right weapons, armor, oils, potions, decoctions, and everything else that's available to the Witcher, they will probably end up one-hitting everything in the game-world short of boss-level enemies. But where is the fun in that?
The final, and perhaps most annoying, thing against the combat system are the boss fights. In a common tactic for RPGs, Witcher 3 makes its bosses tougher not through better AI or technique, but by giving them ridiculous amounts of hitpoints, super high damage, and cheap tactics such as always teleporting behind you or other things of that nature. This kind of stuff leads to many reloads (especially on the higher difficulty settings), and is by a wide margin my least favorite part of this otherwise mature game.
Again, this is not to say that the combat system is terrible. Overall, it's actually pretty decent by RPG standards, and a well executed fight against 4 bandits can feel exhilarating, as you alternate between parrying them, dodging out of the way of charges, switching targets, and repositioning yourself. It is simply not up to the standards set by the truly great aspects of the game.
Now the part of the game that is the worst by far is the exploration. Witcher 3 has one of the largest RPG worlds ever created, and with a top-notch atmosphere and world building to boot, so how could exploration possibly be bad? The two culprits most responsible for this are the game's mini-map and the icons on its main map.
In the spirit of modern games, Witcher 3 tries to hand-hold the players as much as possible, lest they get lost in the wilderness of freedom and never find their way back to buying the next game. So instead of the NPCs describing to the player how to get to their destination, as in the old RPGs, here the NPCs simply say go to that tree/barn/house south/north/west of here, and since that is not enough information for the player to find anything, the helpful mini-map contains a breadcrumb trail showing the player where to go. The main map (and the mini-map) also contain question mark icons for places of interest around the world. The in-game impact of these seemingly minor features is immense. Instead of watching the world, searching for clues, and thinking, these features make the player constantly scan the mini-map, to make sure they are following the cookie-trail, not unlike the modern zombies staring at their cell phones, ignoring the world around them. Instead of wandering about and "exploring", the player simply goes from question mark to question mark, to check off the list. Add to this the fact that there are no real puzzles, or any thinking involved in quests in order to "solve" them, and the game has a distinct feeling of a lack of player agency (outside the choices and consequences in dialogue).
I don't want to finish on a sad note, however. Yes, Witcher 3 is by no means perfect, but neither are most other games. Despite its shortcomings in the area of exploration, and some other minor flaws, the combination of its outstanding writing and atmosphere, beautiful presentation and technology, massive scope, and decent combat combine to produce a truly impressive overall result. The term next-gen gets tossed around a lot, but Witcher 3 definitely feels like a next generation game compared to the RPGs that came before it. It is a game that will stay with you for a long time after you finish playing, and a clear sign that despite all the negatives that came with the mainstreaming of gaming, there are still excitement and promise to be found.
The games take place in a fantasy setting that is a mixture of medieval Europe and Tolkien, and are much darker than your typical fantasy fare. The elves and dwarves are still here, but they typically live in ghettos, as second-rate citizens and outcasts from human society. Some of them escape to the woods and become the Scoia'tael, terrorists or freedom-fighters, depending on which group you belong to. Humans abuse them and occasionally outright kill them, sometimes causing riots to start in reprisal. Religious fanatics such as the Order of the Holy Flame and the Witch Hunters abound, and pestilent plagues break out from time to time. On top of that, much like medieval Europe, various kingdoms and empires are constantly at war, and the world is full of vicious monsters. It is not a pretty place to live.
It is to deal with the over-abundance of monsters that the Witchers were originally created. They are a small, tightly knit order of mercenary monster hunters. The overall order is broken down into various schools, each of which has a base in some remote place, where they spend the winter, and then in spring, the Witchers spread out across the land, walking the roads in search of monster contracts put out by the besieged populace. New Witchers are created mostly by recruiting homeless orphans, who are then put through rigorous tests and given mutagenic substances, so that only 3 in 10 survive. The substances mutate their bodies to make them stronger and quicker than normal humans, as well as give them yellow cat-like eyes, and enable them to deal with the supernatural power of their intended adversaries. The surviving youths are then extensively trained in swordfighting, knowledge of monsters, alchemy, and the use of primitive magic. Once they master all of these things, they become a Witcher.
The trilogy of games (and the novels by which they were inspired) deals with a specific Witcher, Geralt of Rivia. He is the best known among them, having achieved great fame before the first game even begins. In the original Witcher, Geralt's barely conscious body is found by the fellow Witchers of the School of the Wolf near the ruined fortress of Kaer Morhen, their base of operations. Months earlier, he intervened on the behalf of non-humans in a massive riot in Rivia, and a youth in the crowd stabbed him with a pitchfork, killing him. However, months later he is alive, and without any memory of what happened in between. As Geralt slowly recovers his memory over the course of the first two games, he is entangled in various conflicts going on in the world, from the mundane to the grandiose. As soon as he arrives at Kaer Morhen, the fortress comes under attack by a criminal syndicate known as the Salamandra. The criminals steal Witchers' mutagenic secrets, forcing Geralt and the other Witchers to head out to retrieve them. Eventually, Geralt is able to wipe out the Salamandra, but in the process, learns that they were hired by the leader of the Order of the Flaming Rose, a madman who (aside from having very unique time-space relationships to Geralt) wanted to use the Witcher secrets to create an army of supermen to lead humanity to salvation from a terrible prophecy. On defeating him and his plans, the events of the second game begin, in which Geralt follows the trail of a highly skilled assassin who seems bent on taking out all the monarchs of the Northern kingdoms. The assassin turns out to be a fellow Witcher (although from a different school), and eventually, he turns out to be but a pawn for the power hungry Nilfgaardian Empire, seeking to sow discord among the Northern kings, to soften them up for its eventual invasion.
It is at this point that Witcher 3 begins. Nilfgaard has invaded the weakened North, but found a formidable adversary in the one remaining northern King, who in the spirit of the Witcher universe, instead of being a noble figure fighting for his people, is actually a vicious and blood-thirsty madman. This situation, which greatly sets the atmosphere of the game, of the land, the people, and the game characters being stuck between an aggressive foreign invader and the neighborly mad tyrant is not only highly realistic and thought-provoking, but also bears some parallels in my opinion to World War 2, and how Poland must've felt in those days, being stuck between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
The game world reflects this very well, especially the main map in the game, which is full of corpse-covered battlefields, trees decorated with hung people, some from one side, some from the other, but mostly neutral Temerian peasants caught in between. These images hit you right away, as soon as your start the game (after the tutorial), and combine with many others to create a startingly realistic and interesting world. The world of the Witcher 3 is indeed very well crafted. It is beautiful in its vistas and nature, and ugly in its slums and atrocities, and it feels very real. The main city in the game, the independent city of Novigrad, is likely the largest settlement ever depicted in an RPG, making most others look like villages by comparison. It has many neighborhoods, stretches as far as the eye can see, and is filled by crowds of NPCs. The rest of the world consists of smaller settlements and large tracts of wilderness, from the swamps and woods of Velen to the snowy mountains and seas of Skellige Islands.
While the atmosphere and lore of The Witcher 3 are undeniable strong points, the very best things about this game are without a doubt its dialogue, writing and cut-scenes. It's not so much the plot-lines being great, as fundamentally, most of them are fairly plain, but rather how they are presented. The quality of the writing, the acting, and the voice-overs is just on a different level from other RPGs. You often feel like you are watching a movie when viewing cut-scenes, and that is pretty rare for a video game, where often dialogue tends to be on the cringe-worthy side. In this game, the dialogue is deep, involving, emotionally touching, occasionally hilarious, and always interesting. While this definitely holds true for the main quest-line, and the important secondary quests, what's much more surprising is how quite often, even the dialogue for some out-of-the-way minor quests can be just as good. And given how much content there is in Witcher 3, this quality is simply breath-taking.
Speaking of which, another strong suit of the game is its sheer scope. This is a massive behemoth of an RPG. Finishing most of the content of the main game (before the expansions) resulted in a 203 hour save-game for me. The total time spent in the game, tracked on Steam, was 325 hours, and completing it took roughly 2 months of dedicated gaming. It is THAT big.
Another beautiful thing about Witcher 3 is the way it handles choices and their consequences. This is not an on-rails RPG, where nothing you do matters, but it is also not an RPG with telegraphed black-and-white choices that we are used to. You are constantly presented with choices in the dialogue or in your actions, and a lot of them don't necessarily affect stuff beyond that dialogue or quest, but any one potentially can, and without warning. At any point, a choice you made earlier can affect the game world in a major way that could not be possibly predicted. Moreover, most of these choices are so morally gray and blurred, that there is never an easy one. For me, I typically lacked information to make a really educated decision, and simply went with my gut. A lot of times, it came back to bite me, and resulted in events that were the exact opposite of what I would have wanted, and yet, the fact that I made those choices, and they brought about those events was exactly what made the game world feel real and alive, despite the unwelcome consequences.
Oh, and the game is absolutely breath-takingly beautiful if you have the hardware. The mountain vistas in Skellige could've been taken off a promotional Swiss Alps poster, the beaches in Velen, the thick woods and the dense crowds of Novigrad are all absolutely gorgeous. The technology behind the game is quite impressive, with excellent animations, and features such as materials looking different in the rain, and water dripping off of Geralt when he steps out of a river. Hair and clothes swirl in the wind, and animals have fluffy fur. On top of the technology, the art direction is also wonderful. Architecture looks on point, city and village layouts are realistic and immersive, and clothes are intricately detailed. This game is a feast for the eyes. The sound effects and music are also great, from the terrifying howls of monsters to the unique Easter European sounding music during combat.
By this point, the game sounds pretty swell, doesn't it? However, you might have noticed that we have not covered a little thing called gameplay yet. And unfortunately, the actual gameplay of Witcher 3 is not quite up to the incredible standards set by its writing, atmosphere, and visuals. That is not to say it is terrible, but just not on the same level. The combat system, in which you will be participating quite often, is a definite improvement from the previous two games in the series, but still not quite there. Fundamentally, it has very sound principles, whereby Geralt must watch his enemy and then perform a counter move when they attack, which will allow him, if executed properly, to hit them once or twice in safety. In this way, Geralt would dodge a monster, parry a human, or roll from a large monster, and then get his damage in. Unfortunately, in terms of implementation, there are a lot of issues with this.
One issue is that the enemies have AI that allows them to avoid Geralt's attacks if he just spams them. This is a good thing, as it would encourage more tactical gameplay, and countering, but unfortunately (probably due to the developers wanting to make the game easier and not drive away potential customers), this AI is coded in a strange way where it only kicks in after a few hits allowed. This essentially allows the player to spam attacks and get away with it for the most part, especially in later stages of the game, where the player grows so powerful that 1-2 attacks can finish the enemy off.
Another issue is that due to Geralt's nature as a supernatural fighting machine, most of the fights that he participates in are one-vs-three-or-more variety. Since no one can fight at those odds against equally skilled opponents, this pretty much predetermines the enemies to be relative weaklings. Most fights in Witcher 3 against a single opponent are completely easy, and the fights against groups, which, while certainly more challenging, also often feel cheap and annoying, when that third or fourth guy stabs you in the back. It is just not how I would go about designing a good combat system.
It is also very easy to become completely overpowered in combat, which might come in helpful against the bosses, but would ruin the realism of the main game-world. If someone levels up many abilities, uses the right weapons, armor, oils, potions, decoctions, and everything else that's available to the Witcher, they will probably end up one-hitting everything in the game-world short of boss-level enemies. But where is the fun in that?
The final, and perhaps most annoying, thing against the combat system are the boss fights. In a common tactic for RPGs, Witcher 3 makes its bosses tougher not through better AI or technique, but by giving them ridiculous amounts of hitpoints, super high damage, and cheap tactics such as always teleporting behind you or other things of that nature. This kind of stuff leads to many reloads (especially on the higher difficulty settings), and is by a wide margin my least favorite part of this otherwise mature game.
Again, this is not to say that the combat system is terrible. Overall, it's actually pretty decent by RPG standards, and a well executed fight against 4 bandits can feel exhilarating, as you alternate between parrying them, dodging out of the way of charges, switching targets, and repositioning yourself. It is simply not up to the standards set by the truly great aspects of the game.
Now the part of the game that is the worst by far is the exploration. Witcher 3 has one of the largest RPG worlds ever created, and with a top-notch atmosphere and world building to boot, so how could exploration possibly be bad? The two culprits most responsible for this are the game's mini-map and the icons on its main map.
In the spirit of modern games, Witcher 3 tries to hand-hold the players as much as possible, lest they get lost in the wilderness of freedom and never find their way back to buying the next game. So instead of the NPCs describing to the player how to get to their destination, as in the old RPGs, here the NPCs simply say go to that tree/barn/house south/north/west of here, and since that is not enough information for the player to find anything, the helpful mini-map contains a breadcrumb trail showing the player where to go. The main map (and the mini-map) also contain question mark icons for places of interest around the world. The in-game impact of these seemingly minor features is immense. Instead of watching the world, searching for clues, and thinking, these features make the player constantly scan the mini-map, to make sure they are following the cookie-trail, not unlike the modern zombies staring at their cell phones, ignoring the world around them. Instead of wandering about and "exploring", the player simply goes from question mark to question mark, to check off the list. Add to this the fact that there are no real puzzles, or any thinking involved in quests in order to "solve" them, and the game has a distinct feeling of a lack of player agency (outside the choices and consequences in dialogue).
I don't want to finish on a sad note, however. Yes, Witcher 3 is by no means perfect, but neither are most other games. Despite its shortcomings in the area of exploration, and some other minor flaws, the combination of its outstanding writing and atmosphere, beautiful presentation and technology, massive scope, and decent combat combine to produce a truly impressive overall result. The term next-gen gets tossed around a lot, but Witcher 3 definitely feels like a next generation game compared to the RPGs that came before it. It is a game that will stay with you for a long time after you finish playing, and a clear sign that despite all the negatives that came with the mainstreaming of gaming, there are still excitement and promise to be found.