All right, cards on the table: is The Witcher 3 a good game? Yeah, obviously.
Really, you could leave it at that. It’s a good game that’s both fun and
intriguing; there are thrills to be had, but you only have to play for an hour
or two (if that) to realize that this isn’t your standard-fare adventure. That’s kind of a given, since I’m guessing
that The Witcher 3 is one of 2015’s
biggest games both in terms of popularity/hype and the actual scale of its world.
I had my doubts beforehand because open-world games have lost their
pizazz in the wake of an industry that’s trying to run the subgenre into the
ground (should we blame GTA5’s success
for that? Who knows?), but CD Projekt RED’s
latest deserves whatever praise it gets…even if it’s not exactly ZOMG BESTEST
GAEM EVAR material, but whatever. You’re
in good hands with it.
But you’re not here to see me give my blessing,
are you? So let’s get in deep with the
game -- and try not to develop a Gwent addiction. First off…
Once again, the theme of this miniseries is
“elements”, inspired by
my beloved Stratovarius and the song of the same name. Bloodborne
was all about the fear, and MGSV
was all about the anger. So,
next in line is -- you guessed it -- sorrow.
That’s not to imply The Witcher 3 makes
me sad in the same way that, say Watch
Dogs does. I’ll explain what I mean,
but first I have to go on a pretty big tangent.
Like I said, open-world games are pretty common
these days. In an age where console
generations can no longer be counted on to have huge graphical leaps,
developers need to find ways to prove that they’re evolving the game
(figuratively and literally). And how
have a lot of them chosen to do that?
Make their worlds as big as possible…and beautiful, by extension, but
the scale’s a top priority. The problem,
as many have noted, is that the worst of these open-world games -- or in some
cases, even the best of them -- can’t justify the size of their stomping
grounds. There’s breadth, sure, but it’s
pointless if there’s not even a sliver of depth. I’d say that stuff like Watch Dogs is treading water, but that’d imply there was water to tread, and not just a dried-out
pothole.
It’s not as if
open-world games are an evolutionary dead end, though. It’s just that there’s a big caveat
determining their success: there has to be something, anything that justifies the breadth. It opens up the question of whether or not I
(or anyone, for that matter) wants every game out there to be some 100+ hour
endeavor (I don’t), but let’s set that aside for now. The important thing is that a game should
create a situation where a player will at least want to keep playing, and not just because of some Pavlovian
hamster wheel.
Just like with any
creative outlet, there’s no wrong way to do it.
The golden rule is “whatever you do, do it well”, and I’d like to think
that if games are making it to store shelves with millions of dollars invested
in them, they should probably have the hows and whys ironed out. Well, ideally. But in any case, it’s the mission of the devs
to offer up meaningful content, whether it lasts for a few hours or a few
months. Chalk that up as the other
golden rule -- when it comes to games, at least. Unfortunately, that golden rule ends up
getting broken again and again, for any number of reasons. Lack of foresight, hubris, complacency, and
more can turn what should be a masterpiece into a miserable little pile of
data. Potentially, the tides are turning
against mediocrity (assuming that you’ve got at least 80 million dollars
burning a hole in your pocket); Metal
Gear Solid V has long since shown people how to get the most out of a big
world.
But its mechanics are
its own. The same goes for The Witcher 3 -- and it offers up
something just as good.
As you can guess -- especially
if you read my post on it -- MGSV skews
very heavily towards the gameplay instead of the story. That’s not to say there’s no story, but it’s downplayed for the
sake of letting the player become the greatest soldier in the world on their
specific terms; all told, it’s an approach that works. At least, it works for me -- which is
strange, because I’m usually the guy who screams into the night about the
stories in games.
It’s not like I’ve
turned my back on storytelling, though.
It’s just that these days, it seems like a lot of developers are more
than willing -- if not eager -- to toss out narratives for the sake of
gameplay…the quality of which is debatable.
Titanfall famously axed a full
campaign for the sake of multiplayer, which didn’t work out too well for it in
the long run. Same goes for Evolve.
Star Wars Battlefront and Rainbow Six Siege have both taken heat
for lacking campaigns, and haven’t replaced the missing content with anything
more than a mere diversion. Okay, sure,
the alternative is usually that we get stuff like Call of Duty or any given Halo,
but that’s no excuse. I want game devs
to work on their stories, not drop them entirely because “no one cares about
the story” or “it’s too haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard”.
Like, these guys understand that maybe people don’t care about the
stories because their stories are kind of shit, right?
So, what does The Witcher 3 have that other games
don’t? Well, it’s got a sincere
commitment to a story, for one thing -- and ostensibly, consistent themes. If MGSV
is all about the gameplay, The
Witcher 3 is…about the story and the gameplay to a lesser extent, but screw
it. This post’s about the story.
The key thrust of the
game’s main story is that it follows Geralt, the titular witcher (read: bounty
hunter, monster-killer, and sell-sword sorcerer). His mission: to find and protect his
not-quite-but-might-as-well-be-daughter Ciri, who’s been missing for who knows
how long. More specifically, he’s out to
make sure she and her unique powers don’t fall in the hands of the Wild Hunt, a
fabled band of marauding horsemen who spread death and desolation wherever they
go. That circumstantially means that
Geralt is also hunting for Ciri,
playing detective and trying to follow her trail (both for his own satisfaction
and the completion of a job he takes on in the early hours), but what’s
important is that he’s got a wide world to search. A wide, wide, wide, wide, wide world.
I “jokingly” said that I
would tap out of The Witcher 3 if it
had more of the piddling chores-in-disguise sidequests that made Dragon Age: Inquisition borderline
unplayable. And while I’m sure that
those sorts of quests are still in the game, they don’t appear in the form of
some towering tidal wave. You’re not destined to collect X number of items or
kill Y number of monsters; again, they’re still in there, but the saving grace
is that there’s still context for what you’re doing.
The things you do matter. I mean that in the long-term sense, as the
game promises, but in the short-term sense, you can still get the feeling that
there’s some level of importance to
what you’re doing. Even if the quests
don’t necessarily contribute to the main story, they at least create the sense
of progress and accomplishment. Simply
put, it’s one Sidequest Trap that I don’t mind ripping into my ankle.
The trick to the game’s
sidequests -- the best of them, at least -- is that they actually manage to
make you care about what’s going on.
It’s not just about getting loot or EXP rewards, but about being an
active participant in the world laid out before you. One of the game’s earliest instances has you
running into Lena, a young lady who as left in critical condition after a bit
of bad luck. As Geralt, you have two choices:
you can put her out of her misery since she has virtually no chance of
recovery, or you could take that
chance by brewing a special potion -- one that works on witchers, but
guarantees agony for the average Jill or Joe.
I opted to give her the potion, because it seemed right (or right
enough) at the time. So the quest was tentatively
completed, with Geralt saying it would take some time before anyone would know
the results.
I made sure to visit
Lena a few times during my travels so that I could hopefully have a
conversation with her -- you know, see how her recovery was going and
such. But when I saw her again (and
again, and again), she was still on the same bed, still as a statue. Why?
Well, as it turns out -- which I discovered via the quest’s description
in the menu -- I’d effectively made sure she would never make it out of that
bed. Not under her own power, at
least. Whoops.
A quest like that goes a
long way towards establishing and codifying the main ideas behind the
game. The world of…uh…The Continent (no,
really) isn’t one powered by ideas and optimism, and it’s sure as hell not
going to be saved by them. Courage and
hope didn’t save Lena from a miserable fate, which serves as a reminder that
despite its breadth, and despite its beauty, Geralt’s world is ultimately a sad
one.
It’s pretty easy to make
sweeping assumptions based on Geralt’s look and air. I’ve already done so; even now, I think his
default design is kind of dumb. White
hair, scars, dark armor with lots of belts and metal bits, golden eyes…if he
was in an anime (or a Japanese game at large), then I’d bet most people would
laugh him off the PS4. But he’s actually
an all right guy, proving that you shouldn’t judge characters based on the way
they look. Yeah, he’s got the standard
gruff anti-heroic voice, and he’s one of countless other fictional bounty
hunters who are only bounty hunters for the sake of having a cool title, but
there’s more to him than that.
Pared down to basics,
Geralt is a cynical, aloof, sarcastic asshole.
But it’s entirely justified in this world because look at the world he’s living in.
You basically can’t trust anyone, up to and including the quest-givers
strewn about.
It’s not often that
things are as simple and clean-cut as you’d hope. For example, you can take on a quest that
eventually has you tracking down a werewolf (and eventually fighting said
werewolf). But the more you play
detective, the more you realize that the full details of the story haven’t been
given to you. Basically, you get
involved in a love triangle that ended very poorly, wherein the werewolf is
actually an innocent guy who went all monster-mash on his wife. Said wife had a sister who loved Mr.
Sabrewulf, and engineered a plan to have him scare the missus away --
buuuuuuuuuut it ended in the wife’s death, and the wolfman barely in control of
his actions. He’s still got just enough sentience to realize what he
did, though.
So halfway into a
shockingly-difficult boss fight, you have a choice to make. The sister rushes in with tears in her eyes
to protect her wolfy love, and apologizes profusely for creating such dire
circumstances. Unfortunately, there’s no
happy ending where everyone gets what they want; the wife’s still dead, and as
Geralt you get to choose whether to let Jon Talbain Jr. tear apart the sister
for the sake of his revenge, or if you spare the sister and put her love
down. That’s a level of extensiveness
you don’t really get in sidequests -- and in some games, the main quest.
What I’m getting at here
is that there’s a point to the quest, and plenty of others throughout The Witcher 3. It’s one thing to have a world that’s
expansive (and expensive) as all hell, but it’s another thing entirely to make
it feel alive. The quests are a good way
to establish that, as well as to cater to some important ideas and themes. Everyone has a story, both in games and in
the real world; if you want to get involved, however, you do so as an
outsider. A neutral third party. A judge.
In the game, you pretty much have to judge people and see their foibles
laid bare -- their lust, their greed, their envy, and most of all, their
dishonesty. Bit by bit, you have to
crack them open and reveal every last shred of their story if you want to
proceed. It puts Geralt in an
interesting position, but it ultimately makes sense in terms of deciding his
character’s trajectory.
There’s something very
snide about the game’s main witcher -- a holier-than-thou, smug sense of
superiority. But again, it’s entirely
justified, and even makes for a more interesting character. Geralt’s more than a hundred years old thanks
to the experiments/treatments that made him a witcher in the first place (God,
everything about this guy sounds like it comes from the bowels of
fanfiction.net). Inevitably, that means
he’s been in “the biz” for a long time now.
He’s seen it all, up to and including the worst of what humanity has to
offer. Its capacity for sin, violence,
decay, and of course stupidity has long since been noted, no doubt; in a sense,
he’s numb to the cries of the idiots who often ended up in a bad place because
they didn’t have a little common sense.
The only thing Geralt
can trust for sure in his world is money.
That’s an incredibly sad thing to say, but the evidence has certainly
piled up. Seemingly nice people have all
these dark secrets that only get exposed by his witcher senses and the tied-in
detective work he has to do. When it’s
time for the confrontation, suddenly even the innocent can look like massive
crooks. Meanwhile, you’ve got the
run-of-the-mill assholes strutting around, be they enemy bandits, crusty
mercenaries, corrupted nobles, or (of course) other quest-givers. If you deal with that on a daily basis, you’d
burn out within a month. Maybe a week. And Geralt, potentially, has been at this
line of work for decades.
How is this guy still sane? Or…is
he sane?
Now, it may seem like
I’d be diametrically opposed to what The
Witcher 3 is offering vis a vis its story.
It’s a world full of anti-heroes, assholes, and secret assholes, where
treachery and depravity rule! Who needs
likability and charisma when you can have malaise at best and misery at
worst? And in all honesty, the game can
get pretty exhausting at times. Am I
fighting for a cause I believe in? Or am
I just going through the motions? Do I
care about the world so lavishly rendered around me? Or is it just a heartless slog from A to B as
I build my strength and money?
Who knows? It’s not as if there’s some ironclad answer
here. But if you ask me, there are two
saving graces at play -- and they’re what make The Witcher 3 fascinating.
This is where the player
comes in. Like a lot of games, The Witcher 3 lets you decide what sort
of character you want to be. Granted the
choices aren’t as clear-cut or binary as good karma/bad karma (as the Lena
quest proved), but you can still make a push toward a paragon or renegade if
you want -- though Geralt will still keep his general personality intact. In any case, witchers have a reputation for
being heartless sell-swords only out for the money; bit by bit, you can repair
that image on a small scale.
You don’t necessarily
have to take rewards -- the biggest ones, at least -- from people you do work
for, and you can still show some semblance of kindness throughout. It’s a minor thing, but it helps create the
sense that you’re trying to do the right thing in a world that, for one reason
or another, has lost its way. Even if
you can’t count on others to have virtue or reason, that shouldn’t stop you
from doing what’s right. Well, in
theory, at least; if you don’t take rewards every chance you get, you’ll
eventually start hampering your inventory -- and your fighting ability as a
result.
Something tells me that The Witcher 3 is not the game for people
who willingly proclaim that they’re the Eternal Optimist.
I don’t think I’m that
far off-base with my assessment, though.
As proof of that, there’s the Bloody Baron, and all of the events tied
to him. The gist of it is this: Geralt
finds out that one of the local warlords knows about Ciri; eager to make use of
the lead, Geralt meets the Baron face to face to see what he knows. Naturally, the Baron doesn’t give that
information out for free; he wants Geralt to use his witcher skills to figure
out where his wife and daughter went, under the assumption that some monsters
got to them. He’s not entirely wrong,
but -- once again -- there’s more to the story.
As it turns out, the
Baron got into a drunken fight with his wife, and ended up driving her away --
not to mention that she took her daughter along with her. More pressingly, the Baron’s misbehavior led
to the death of their unborn child; in the world of The Witcher 3, that’s the kindling for the birth of a new
monster. So basically, Geralt has to (or
rather, can choose to) help the Baron by performing a special ritual to lay the
unborn to rest…which involves the Baron carrying what might as well be an asset from the
Fetus of God stage up to his home while Geralt fends off incoming wraiths, and the unborn has to be kept calm
during the escort mission trek or else it’ll turn into a monster and the
Baron will never have the closure he needs.
So yeah, that
happens. Also, I’m retroactively hoping
that you didn’t try to see the Fetus of God if you haven’t before. Shit’s nuts.
Also, NSFYS (not safe for your soul).
Even with all of that,
the quest isn’t over; the Baron’s loved ones are still well out of his reach,
after all. More to the point, Geralt
doesn’t exactly have an incentive to bring them back to the man who terrorized
them for years on end (as alcoholics who commit to domestic abuse are wont to
do). But this is where The Witcher 3 gets another leg-up on the
competition. Yeah, the Bloody Baron’s
done some nasty things over the course of his life, not to mention some of his
more recent “accomplishments”. But he’s
not a bad guy.
He’s boisterous, a
little crass, and threatening when he needs to be, but he’s also willing to
treat his guests with hospitality and entertainment. He’s not to be messed with, presumably, but
he’s also a big barrel of laughs and fun when given the chance. And critically, he’s genuinely remorseful
when the time comes to confess his sins.
He knows what he did was wrong.
He’s trying to make up for it. He
wants to see his family again. He wants
redemption.
And guess what? Geralt -- and you -- can give it to him.
To be fair, it’s not as
simple a task as saying “you’re forgiven”; the problem is that you have to get
the Baron’s family to forgive him as well, up to and including a daughter who
wants nothing to do with him ever again.
But the intent is there, and it means something beyond EXP or
karma. It’d be easy enough for
Geralt/the player to write off the Baron when the truth comes out, but the two
of them have a very intense, very sincere heart-to-heart. Even if Geralt rightly has every reason to
scoff at the Baron (and indeed, all of the other people he meets on his
travels), he’s still more than willing to lend more than his silver sword to
others. His world may be full of sorrow,
but on some level, however minute, he can make the people he runs into a little
bit happier.
All things considered,
he has every reason to. Despite his
nomadic lifestyle (and an idealized one, at that), Geralt is still a devoted
family man -- or at the very least, someone who’s more than capable of showing
love, cheer, kindness, and all sorts of emotions. You can interact with his magic-slinging
lover Yennefer on whatever personal -- and physical -- level you want when you
cross paths with her, but it’s not as if those scenes are there to let players
gawk at her sweet baps. They’re there to
establish that there are still people he cares about (and before you ask, yes,
that includes female and male
characters).
I guess that’s the
thing, isn’t it? The Witcher 3 is a sad place, full of corruption and
treachery. That’s a given. Even so, it’s the sort of thing that makes
Geralt hold those that he can trust closer to his heart; because there are so
few people out there he can count on, it makes him want to hold those near and
dear to him even nearer and dearer to him.
In that sense, you could
say he’s more motivated by love than money; he’s out to defend the happiness of
others, as well as his happiness. On top of that, the people he cares about are
still alive -- so not only are there more opportunities for characterization,
but it’s proof that you don’t need revenge as the de facto motivation for a
lead and his story.
Ubisoft, are you taking
notes? I hope you’re taking notes. And I don’t just mean “dump more money so we
can render the highest-fidelity bricks the game industry has ever seen”.
And there you go. That’s The
Witcher 3…in terms of story, at least.
The gameplay’s solid as well, no question -- leagues above Dragon Age: Inquisition, for example -- but
explaining its particulars would take another two or three thousand words, and
I’m already a ways into this post. So
maybe I’ll talk about that another time.
Besides, Hanukkah’s
over. It’d be in my best interests to
wrap things up, wouldn’t it? So with
that in mind, THIS…IS THE FINAL.
Hmmm. I wonder if there’ll be dragons in this game.
No comments:
Post a Comment