2392: Blood and Wine

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Finished The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine this evening. Spoilers follow!

While I think, on the whole, Hearts of Stone was my favourite part of the complete opus that is The Witcher 3, Blood and Wine’s main story comes a close second.

Blood and Wine’s effectiveness comes from its exceptional use of juxtaposition. The bright and vibrant colours of the France-inspired region of Toussaint contrast strongly with the rather dark main storyline, and likewise does the duchy’s self-professed love of “virtuousness”, pomp and circumstance clash rather a lot with how things really are.

On a more macro scale, Blood and Wine is effective because it is so different to the rest of The Witcher 3. The lands that you’re exploring aren’t dirty, poverty-stricken regions in which everyone except the very richest is fighting for survival. The narrative you’re following isn’t something of earth-shattering importance. And the overall tone outside of the main narrative is filled with plenty of levity and even a few in-jokes here and there, though none so obtrusive as to spoil the overall atmosphere that CD Projekt Red has spent three games crafting so masterfully in the series.

I particularly liked Blood and Wine’s narrative for being a vampire-centric plot, since I’m a sucker for that sort of storyline, particularly those that humanise vampires and make them complex characters. Villain Dettlaff in Blood and Wine is most certainly a complicated character and, to be sure, he commits some truly reprehensible acts, but at the end of it all there are some very difficult decisions to make as to who is really to blame for everything that transpired, and whether things could have been done any differently.

Blood and Wine’s take on vampiric mythology reminded me quite a bit of White Wolf’s classic series of role-playing games Vampire: The Masquerade (or, perhaps more accurately in The Witcher’s case, Vampire: The Dark Age). We have “higher vampires” treated almost as the aristocracy of the monster world thanks to their intelligence and ability to make rational — albeit often rather emotional — decisions. Said vampires are split into clans that scattered around the world. Said vampires tend to show a more monstrous side when driven into a frenzy or provoked, and at this point display numerous supernatural abilities. And, of course, it’s nowhere near as easy to get rid of a vampire as having some garlic hanging around your neck then sticking a stake through their heart.

So effective was Blood and Wine’s take on vampire mythology that I’d love to see CD Projekt Red take on the Vampire: The Masquerade franchise at some point. I have no idea whether or not that will ever happen, given that the last Vampire game that was supposed to show up — based on the World of Darkness at large, not just Vampire — became vaporware at some point a few years back, and thus the status of the license is perhaps questionable. Even without the license, though, I’d love to see CD Projekt Red tackle at the very least a Vampire-esque title.

What might that look like? Well, I envisage something along the lines of the wonderful Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, only with a more well-realised setting thanks to the improved technology since that classic came out in 2004. I have great faith in their vision for a futuristic dystopia city in Cyberpunk 2077, but I’d love to see their take on the undead underbelly of a modern city, too. It doesn’t necessarily need to be fully open-world a la Grand Theft Auto — in fact, the past few entries on this site have probably made clear I’d rather it wasn’t — but there should be plenty of opportunities for The Witcher-style plot branches and decision-making, since the tabletop version of Vampire was always about shades of grey in morality and trying to balance your own dwindling Humanity against the influence the Beast had over you — as, indeed, was Bloodlines.

Seeing Regis and Dettlaff in action in one of the climactic scenes of Blood and Wine made me very much want to play a game with their superhuman abilities — and, let’s face it, even though I wasn’t a big fan of The Witcher 3’s combat, anything is better than the wild flailing of the original Bloodlines.

More importantly, though, good games of Vampire are often about avoiding conflict rather than seeking out trouble; indeed, a number of the clans you are able to represent in the game have rather poor martial skills, their abilities instead lying in the ability to persuade, sweet-talk, seduce, bribe, intimidate, sneak, hack and all manner of other alternatives to baring fang and claw. And with the whole The Witcher series, CD Projekt Red has proven beyond all doubt that it is excellent at developing interesting, compelling, well-written stories in which often simply talking your way out of a perilous situation is an option on the table. That strength of the developer as a whole would lend itself well to a Vampire (or Vampire-inspired) game; perhaps one day, in my dreams, it will happen.

For now, I think my time with The Witcher 3 has come to a close; just shy of 100 hours for the main story and both expansions, I feel I’ve very much got my money’s worth, plus there’s a whole host of things I can go back and do if I ever feel like playing it again. I’m very much glad I played it through to completion, but right now, I think it’s time for a palate cleanser. C’mon down, Gal*Gun…

2391: You Can Go to That Mountain

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My lukewarm feelings towards The Witcher 3’s open-world nature got me thinking a bit today as I progress through the Blood and Wine expansion pack, which, unlike Hearts of Stone, suffers from some of the same issues I had with the main game: most notably the numerous distractions that the game world offered having a detrimental effect on the overall pacing of the main story.

I got thinking: is this a fundamental problem I have with open-world games in general, or is it something that seems particularly glaring with The Witcher 3? After a little reflection, I have to conclude that, for me anyway, it’s the latter.

I thought back to my time with Xenoblade Chronicles X on Wii U and how much I enjoyed exploring the vast open world that game offered — and why I think much more fondly of that game’s open world than I do of The Witcher 3’s.

I think it’s to do with the emphasis the game places on its different elements. In Xenoblade Chronicles X, while the main story was interesting enough, it was, oddly enough, mostly a minor distraction from the real meat of the game: exploring the planet Mira fully. The game got a fair amount of criticism for this on its original release, but I found that it worked really well. Xenoblade Chronicles X’s emphasis was not on telling that single main storyline; its emphasis was firmly on making you believe that you were exploring an alien world, acting as part of a brave team of humans who were slowly finding out more about where they had ended up, and putting out the numerous fires that result when people of various backgrounds and cultures are all thrown into a rather desperate situation together with one another.

Xenoblade Chronicles X’s story, in other words, was nothing to do with those cutscenes and boss fights and whatnot; its story was your story of how you came to Mira, worked your way up through the ranks, got yourself a Skell and proceeded to become one of the leading authorities on the flora and fauna this strange and diverse planet had to offer. Along the way, you’d help out with various things that happened, and all the things you did had an impact on the world. Help someone with the preparations for building a water treatment plant, for example, and the next time you pass a big lake, said plant will be there.

The Witcher 3, meanwhile, is the opposite type of RPG to Xenoblade Chronicles X, which I’d either describe as being mechanics-centric or featuring a quasi-emergent narrative. The Witcher 3, by contrast, has a specific story to tell. Sure, there are a number of branching points and different endings you can get based on the choices you make along the way, but the main story beats between the beginning and the end are largely similar for the most part.

When you place this much emphasis on an ongoing story, it absolutely kills the pacing if the narrative suddenly comes to a grinding halt while the protagonist goes off and does something completely unrelated to the main plot. This was made all the more apparent to me with Hearts of Stone, which chose to focus pretty much entirely on its central plot with minimal distractions along the way, and was all the better for it. I’ve also been enjoying Blood and Wine a lot more by following its main plotline and minimising the number of times I get distracted by side content. I can always come back and do that side content later, anyway; after you finish the main story of The Witcher 3 and its expansions, it basically turns into the Xenoblade Chronicles X style of RPG: no clear “main” narrative to follow, just the things you choose to engage in, whatever they might be.

I also found myself thinking why this bugged me so much with The Witcher 3 when I’ll happily spend hundreds of hours grinding in a JRPG more conventional than Xenoblade Chronicles X, often putting the plot on hold in the process. And I think it’s largely because, despite their reputations for strong, linear narratives, many modern JRPGs are very much mechanics-centric rather than narrative-centric. In many cases, the most time I’ve spent with a JRPG comes after the end credits roll, when progressing through the story no longer matters and it becomes purely about the mechanics — Compile Heart games are always particularly good for this.

I don’t know. I don’t want to sound like I don’t like The Witcher 3, because I absolutely, definitely do. I think it’s more that The Witcher 3 received such gushing, unequivocal praise from press and public alike around its launch that I, coming to it rather late and thus free of most of the hype, am seeing the warts where a lot of people didn’t — or chose to look past them.

Or perhaps I’m just a grumpy old man who doesn’t like open-world games. Who knows? Either way, I’m going to see Blood and Wine through to the end, because I absolutely want to know what happens. I do not, however, feel the same draw with The Witcher 3 to see everything and do everything that I do with something like a Compile Heart RPG — and consequently will probably put it down for good once those end credits roll — and I think I’m fine with that.

2390: Hearts of Stone

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I finished The Witcher 3’s first expansion pack Hearts of Stone this evening, and I’ve come away thoroughly impressed. In fact, I’d be inclined to go so far as to say that I enjoyed the tightly focused (and somewhat shorter) experience that was Hearts of Stone’s main story considerably more than the main story of Wild Hunt and all its various distractions.

Hearts of Stone benefits from not trying to be too grand in the story it tells. It concentrates largely on a single character — one Olgierd von Everic, who happens to be the initial contact to start the expansion’s questline — and proceeds to weave an interesting, mysterious and thought-provoking tale with a few enjoyably Silent Hill-esque twists along the way.

Hearts of Stone, I feel, benefits considerably from playing it the way I played it: ignoring all other sidequests I had in my journal and simply ploughing through the entirety of the main story from start to finish. Perhaps I would have felt less lukewarm about Wild Hunt as a whole if I had tackled its main scenario in this way; certainly for a good 90% of the Wild Hunt main narrative, I was considerably outlevelled for the challenges it offered, making even supposedly climactic encounters rather trivial at times. (I tried using the “enemy upscaling” option, but this led to ridiculous situations where starving wild dogs could rip me to shreds at a moment’s notice rather than Geralt slicing through them like butter, and consequently turned it right back off afterwards.)

Anyway, hard to say in retrospect; certainly I can say with confidence that the best way to play Hearts of Stone is to play through the entire main story without getting distracted along the way, since this gives it an excellent sense of pace and progression, leading to an absolutely brilliant final area that was far more interesting and enjoyable than pretty much anything in the main game.

Hearts of Stone also fixes a few other issues I had with the main game, most notably certain instances of combat. While I got through Wild Hunt using the same old combo right the way through, Hearts of Stone had some really cool boss fights that demanded careful dodging and timing of attacks as well as observing enemy attack patterns. Some of the encounters were even vaguely puzzly; a late-game encounter with a wraith that jumps in and out of paintings proved to be particularly memorable for this reason.

The best thing about Hearts of Stone is that it concentrates on what the whole The Witcher series has always done best: tell interesting, personal stories with bags of characterisation, filled with shades of grey morality and some agonising decisions to make. Olgierd makes an excellent central character as he’s quite a piece of work, but not quite enough for him to be considered loathsome beyond redemption. On the contrary, Hearts of Stone’s tale has such a driving force behind it because it’s clear that there’s a chance, however small, that Olgierd can find redemption and peace if only all the pieces fall into place.

The other highlight of Hearts of Stone is Gaunter “Master Mirror” O’Dimm, whose exact role I shall refrain from spoiling for the benefit of those yet to play the expansion. Suffice to say that from his initial mysterious introduction through his occasional enigmatic appearances at various points throughout the main story, he proves to be an extremely effective character whose intentions are never entirely clear — at least until you discover the truth about him, that is, but you’ll have to find that out for yourself.

I got to the end of Wild Hunt feeling like the more I played The Witcher 3, the less I liked it; it was starting to feel a bit like a chore by the time I beat the main game, but Hearts of Stone has reinvigorated me, and now I’m very much looking forward to jumping straight in to Blood and Wine, the pastel-coloured fairy-tale adventure in the land of Toussaint that has had me so intrigued ever since I first saw how different its vivid screenshots seemed in comparison to the drab colours of the main game regions. It certainly has a lot to live up to after Hearts of Stone, mind you, so let’s hope it delivers.

2388: Two Things The Witcher 3 Didn’t Need to Be

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I’ve been playing a fair bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt recently, and while it is certainly a very good game indeed, there are two issues with it where I feel the experience as a whole would have been better served if they… well, if they weren’t there.

As it happens, they’re two rather major aspects of the game’s design as a whole, but thankfully the things that the game gets right more than outweigh the annoyances that these two particular aspects present me with. (Your mileage may, as ever, vary.)

All right, let’s jump right in then.

1. The Witcher 3 didn’t need to be an open-world game

Here’s how I play open-world games:

Spend first hour or so looking around, wowed in all the usual ways (wow, much draw distance, very mountain in the distance can go there, so pretty) and deliberately taking “the long way” to get to my specified destination.
After first hour or so, start using faster means of transportation. (Geralt’s magical teleporting horse Roach, in the case of The Witcher 3)
After another few hours, start using fast travel points.
50+ hours in, start very much resenting the fact that there are approximately 300 miles of identical-looking forest/hills/mountains between me and where I actually want to be, and naturally I haven’t yet unlocked a fast travel point where I want to be yet.
See destination is on other side of mountain. Attempt to climb mountain. Fail. Swear. Get annoyed. Go around mountain. Discover that there was passageway not marked on map that would have saved me about half an hour of virtual travel time. Swear again.

The fact that The Witcher 3 is an open-world game does have a few benefits, primarily that it gives you a good sense of both the geography of the various regions in which you find yourself and the scale of said regions. However, the fact remains that as with most other open-world games, there are far too many vast tracts of nothingness, and the few interesting things that are there out in the open world are throwaway distractions that become mind-numbing chores after a while.

The Witcher 3 could have been a much tighter game with a better focus had it taken a similar approach to its two predecessors: set the action in large and interesting but self-contained and more carefully designed zones that don’t have any unnecessary fluff in them. As it stands, there’s a whole lot of game world in The Witcher 3 that just isn’t very interesting and really doesn’t need to be there.

2. The Witcher 3 didn’t need to be a role-playing game

I’m serious! Despite the game revolving around a man with swords chopping monsters’ heads off, I really don’t think The Witcher 3 benefits from its RPG mechanics at all. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that they are, by far, its weakest aspect. Combat is boring and formulaic (slash, slash, slash, dodge, Igni/Aard for fire elementals, repeat has gotten me through the whole game so far), the perks you acquire when levelling up don’t seem to have particularly noticeable effects, and you spend most of the game fighting the same monsters anyway, only with gradually increasing numbers next to their names, and occasionally with a few extra spikes on their backs.

Then there’s the whole dissonance thing in that protagonist Geralt is supposed to be some sort of monster-slaying badass, having survived the considerable trials of two previous games, but here he starts at level 1 again, barely able to hold his own against a drowner until he starts wearing some proper armour.

Chuck out all the RPG elements (including equipment, since once you get one of the sets of Witcher gear you pretty much make everything else in the game completely irrelevant), I say, keep the combat if you absolutely must (for, indeed, the world of The Witcher is a violent place, and fights are inevitable at times) but make it an action game rather than an RPG.

What The Witcher 3 gets right

I mentioned at the start that despite these two pretty major issues I have with the game, it still manages to be an enjoyable, compelling experience. And that’s because the more adventure game-type aspects of it — the dialogue, the puzzle-solving, the detective work — are outstanding. I would have been more than happy to have nothing but the main plot of Wild Hunt and maybe a couple of the Witcher Contracts, presented more as a sort of adventure game with combat. Keep the player on a tighter leash when traversing the world, remove the extraneous and unnecessary fluff, and I think it would have been a much better game.

Ultimately all this is moot because The Witcher 3 is still an astoundingly good game that is well worth your time if you have a computer or console capable of running it, but I can’t help feeling that some of that time and effort CD Projekt Red expended in making sure that there were just the right amount of trees in the south-west corner of Velen could have been better used for other purposes.

Let’s hope they learn some lessons from this game with their upcoming Cyberpunk title, which I’m very excited for, particularly as, believe it or not, there’s a throwaway teaser for it in The Witcher 3’s main plot.

I’ve now beaten Wild Hunt’s main storyline and I’m feeling like I’m probably just going to make a beeline for the two expansion main storylines without distractions along the way. I’m already at the recommended level to start the second expansion and I’ve only just started the first, so I feel this may end up actually being the optimal way to experience the game anyway, leaving all the side content available if I feel like just jumping back into the world at a later date to hunt some monsters.

2362: Geralt’s Private Dicking

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I’ve been enjoying The Witcher 3 so far. It’s a lovely looking game with an interesting plot, some great characters and a shitload of things to do.

To a certain extent, I almost wish it was an adventure game rather than an RPG.

The reason I say this is that The Witcher 3, much like its predecessors, is at its absolute finest when presenting protagonist Geralt with quests that are much more complex than “go to x and kill y”. Which, to be fair, is most of them, since The Witcher has never really done the whole “bring me 15 squirrel ears” thing, thankfully. However, the real highlights of the game are the quests that involve a lengthy investigation of something strange that has been happening.

These quests, of which there are numerous, play out in a similar manner to something like the enormously underrated Murdered: Soul Suspect, requiring you to comb crime scenes for information (perhaps using Geralt’s heightened Witcher Senses) and come to some conclusions of your own as to what happened. Many of these quests have branching paths and different consequences for how you choose to proceed in them, too, making for an interesting experience where you never feel like you’ve made the “wrong” choice.

Since the world of The Witcher is one of dark fantasy, a lot of the things Geralt ends up investigating are pretty gruesome and horrifying. But, as with most people who deal with the unpleasant on a daily basis, Geralt has both a strong stomach and a wry sense of very black humour.

Herein lies one of the biggest strengths of the whole Witcher series when compared to the interminable tedium of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series: personality. Despite the fact you can build Geralt’s abilities how you see fit as he levels up, he is a strongly written character in his own right. Sure, there’s a certain degree of leeway in how much of an asshole you can be to people throughout, mostly in order to allow for various different conclusions to narrative threads, but even with these options available, Geralt is still a well-defined character who maintains a consistent personality throughout the whole game. Whole series, in fact; he’s grown and changed over the course of the three games he’s been in to date, but he’s still recognisably Geralt.

I’m intrigued to see how well-paced the whole game is. It’s entirely possible to avoid the story-based quests altogether and just go hooning around the countryside on horseback looking for “points of interest” to clear, which usually involve killing monsters or bandits, but this gets a bit tiresome after a while. Instead, the best way to play, it seems, is to focus on a quest and where it takes you, pick up any other quests you might find on your way between key locations, and perhaps drop in on any points of interest that come up on your journey if they’re not too far out of your way. Attempting to “grind” your way through each of the game’s maps by methodically clearing out all the points of interest is clearly a way to drive yourself to insanity, and indeed it’s precisely because I did this in Oblivion that I grew to hate the Elder Scrolls games. (Well, that coupled with their complete lack of personality and atrocious storytelling, anyway.) Thankfully, it’s not necessary; it takes only a thousand experience points to gain each and every level, and completing quests is by far the most efficient means of getting said experience points, so in many ways the game is actively pushing you towards its most interesting things to do, which is absolutely fine by me.

Been playing for 18 hours so far and Geralt hasn’t shagged anyone yet, though; wonder if I’m doing something wrong…

2354: They’re Both for Monsters

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(yes, I found a way to put a beard on my model in ComiPo! Woo!)

I’ve been playing a bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt lately. I’ve been meaning to give it a go for ages, but it’s never quite dropped in price enough for me to want to jump on board; thankfully, the combination of the Steam Summer Sale and Andie generously buying me a copy as an anniversary present means that I can now explore this game to my heart’s content.

Playing Witcher 3 alongside Ys: Memories of Celceta is an interesting experience, because it’s a study in contrasts between Western and Eastern game design philosophy. Both of them have a surprising number of elements in common: they’re both action RPGs, they both involve exploring a large overworld, fighting monsters and completing quests, they both feature a muscle-bound man with white hair tied back in a ponytail (though he’s not the protagonist in Celceta, instead acting as a Dogi-substitute and cipher for the ever-mute Adol) and they’re both very good. But they’re both very different.

Celceta is fast-paced and action-packed. Its combat is very arcadey, with lots of flashy special effects, overblown sound effects, rockin’ music and celebratory messages flashing up on the screen as you do things like use the right attack type to take advantage of enemy weaknesses. In contrast, Witcher 3 feels almost sedate in its pacing, even in combat, which, thanks to its excellent animations and fluid movement, has an almost dance-like feeling about it as opposed to the frenetic leaping around of Celceta.

The upshot of this is that Witcher 3 is a surprisingly relaxing game to play. This might sound strange, given that the setting for the Witcher series is one of the darkest, bleakest takes on Western fantasy out there, but I’ve absolutely found it to be the case. While in Celceta you can’t relax for a moment when you’re out in the overworld because everything is trying to kill you, in Witcher 3 there’s plenty of opportunity to explore, wander off the path into the bushes and just start walking in a direction to see what’s there. Worthwhile things are marked on the map so you’re not wandering completely aimlessly — unless you want to — but for the most part the game’s rather sedate pacing has the pleasant feeling of a walk in the countryside or the woods rather than constantly fighting for your life, even though the countrysides and woods of Witcher 3’s world are far more dangerous than what your average rambler might have to contend with.

Both games have their place, then, and I’m enjoying them both a great deal. I feel like on the whole, I tend to enjoy the more frenetic, chaotic, joyful pace and tone of the Japanese approach to RPGs more — they cheer me up with their sheer energy — but there’s most definitely something very appealing and oddly relaxing about the more sedate pacing and carefully crafted periods of solitude in games like The Witcher 3.