2419: Happy Anniversary, Titan Quest

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Titan Quest Anniversary Edition is currently just £5 on Steam, and it’s completely free if you own any other Titan Quest products already. You should go buy it and play it, because I have spent most of the evening doing so and I like it a whole lot.

Titan Quest Anniversary Edition combines the original Titan Quest and its expansion Immortal Throne into one package, cleans the whole shebang up for modern computers — the original came out in 2006, hence the “anniversary” thing — and unleashes it on the world for existing fans and newcomers alike to enjoy.

Having never played Titan Quest, I fell into the latter category. It had just never quite appealed to me for some reason, despite it being the sort of hack and slash loot-whoring game I enjoy coupled with Greek mythology, which I was in love with as a child — and despite the game often being discussed in hushed, reverential whispers any time anyone brought it up.

£5 for a remastered version of the game and its expansion in one complete edition was too good an offer to turn down, though, so I took the plunge and gave it a go, partly to sate my own curiosity and partly to have something to play online with my friend Chris, who had also been going back and forth about whether or not he wanted it.

If you, like me, have never played Titan Quest, here’s the deal. You play a male or female Greek person who initially has no character class. You save a farmer’s horse from being eaten by satyrs, then you embark on a journey to cleanse the land of evil seemingly for no other reason than “because why not”. Your character is given precisely no backstory and no real motivation to do their thing, but in this sort of game that’s probably a good thing. While the lore in the Diablo games is substantial and interesting, its execution in-game leaves a lot to be desired, and in latest installment Diablo III in particular, by far the most enjoyable way to play the game is in “Adventure Mode”, which dispenses with the narrative and linear structure altogether in favour of giving you freedom to go anywhere at any time to chase down various objectives.

Titan Quest doesn’t quite go that far in abandoning the traditional narrative structure — you still progress from “unknown Greek person” to “hero of legend” over the course of the game — but the plot is very much de-emphasised in favour of the excellent mechanics.

At level 2, you unlock a “specialism” — essentially a character class with its own skill tree plus a mastery meter you need to pump skill points into in order to unlock the next “tiers” of skills. (Said meter isn’t entirely useless; each point you put into it gives you a substantial increase to your base stats.) Then at level 8, you unlock another specialism and can start pumping skill points into that as well, allowing you to effectively mix and match skills from two entirely different classes to create your own custom build.

And these classes aren’t your usual warrior-thief-mage trinity, either — they’re all interesting, and all present interesting combinations when combined together. All together, there is a caster type that specialises in cold and electricity; another caster that specialises in fire and earth; a close-range physical attacking type person; a highly defensive physical attacker (who can apparently do some tremendous things with shields later in the game); a tree-hugging hippy that can summon wolves, heal things and infect enemies with plague; a hunter type that is good with bows and spears; and a backstabby thiefy rogue type deal that is good at inflicting pain but not so good at taking it.

The great thing about this system is that you can make a variety of different character types — all together, there are 36 different combinations, each of which has its own unique name. You can combine the Defense and Warfare masteries to create Conqueror, for example, which is a tank that also hits incredibly hard. Or you could combine the Earth and Nature masteries to create Summoner, a character that is able to summon a variety of different minions to do their bidding, including an earth golem, some wolves and a nymph, and be able to sit back, pelt the enemies from a distance and heal their minions as needed.

The combat itself is fundamentally satisfying. Humanoid enemies are thrown around with satisfying ragdoll animation; birds explode in a shower of feathers; skeletons shatter into pieces. The variety of skills mean that there are a lot of different ways you can protect yourself or go on the offensive, too, and so far I haven’t felt like there’s a “bad” combination; with two different masteries, you can either cover the weaknesses of the first with the second, or enhance the first’s strong points with the second.

Then, of course, there’s just something wonderfully enjoyable about hacking and slashing through recognisable creatures from mythology. The game appears to act as pretty much an Ancient Greece’s Greatest Hits, promising confrontations with Medusa, the Hydra and numerous others over the course of the adventure — and I believe you also take a trip to ancient Egypt and China later, too, which opens up possibilities for all manner of interesting confrontations.

I hadn’t expected to like the game quite as much as I did when I booted it up for the first time. But, well, the 5 hours of playtime Steam has already recorded for me — I bought it earlier this evening — probably speaks for itself.

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.