Tomfhaines

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(Apologies for being late with this one, I didn’t get in until very late Friday night)

Twenty-four entries is a lot to write about one game, even if it’s a very long one with two big expansions. So I’ve struggled to come up with something to say that can tie it all up. It’s not enough just to say “yeah, it was good,” because everyone already knows that.

So the thing I want to focus on is what this game means for the genre, because the AAA RPG space is shrinking. If we look at the major developers operating in it, we have:

• Bioware: They are apparently releasing another Dragon Age game, but very little has been shown to the public and it’s probably a long way off. I get the overall sense that Dragon Age is a franchise they want to wrap up so they can focus on Anthem. For me (a guy who’s not big on looter shooters), this is disappointing, but I’m not sure Bioware will really be considered an RPG developer at all a few years from now.
• Bethesda: They’re very much set in their ways at this point. I expect Starfield to be the Elder Scrolls in space, more or less, and whatever the next Elder Scrolls game is will probably be Starfield with swords. Some are speculating whether the crashing and burning of Fallout 76 will jolt Bethesda out of their rut. I personally doubt it. I expect Bethesda will be making Bethesda games for the forseeable future.
• Obsidian: The second Pillars of Eternity game, Deadfire, did not sell well. Which was curious for me, because I thought it was very good, though I have a weakness for pirate stuff. In any case, it appears that the market niche Obsidian targets is smaller than they thought. Their upcoming release, The Outer Worlds, looks promising (something like Firefly meets Fallout 2, maybe), but is reportedly scaled-down in terms of ambition. I’ve heard the scale of the game described as double-A rather than triple-A.
• Larian: I sort of feel left out of the whole Larian thing. They have an art and storytelling style that I’ve just never been a fan of – like they’re trying to split the difference been dark fantasy and a Disney movie. However, I’m an outlier in this case. The second Original Sin game got rave reviews, and they’re one of the few developers pushing the envelope in gameplay. However, like Obsidian, they’re something of a niche player.

So if you leave off the people that don’t do real AAA numbers (Obsidian and Larian), the ones trying to get that Destiny money (Bioware), and the ones that are Bethesda (Bethesda), that leaves CD Projekt alone carrying the AAA RPG torch. For the time being, at least, this is the template – and there’s a few things about it worth noticing.

Link (YouTube)

They’re single-character games: Meaning you don’t have party members. In the Witcher games, Geralt would occasionally have someone like Zoltan or Keira Metz tag along for a quest here and there, but only occasionally. Most of the time you’re alone. Cypberpunk 2077, from what we’ve seen so far (above), looks similar: you complete a quest alongside a friend named Jackie, but he doesn’t appear to be a party member in the usual sense.

Personally, I think developers are missing a trick here. Single-character RPGs can get lonely. Players end up starved for some kind of companionship as they’re tramping through empty wilderness. Look how attached people got to Lydia in Skyrim even though she only had 5-6 lines of dialogue. It was just good to have someone else around.

Or another example: when I played Dragon Age: Inquisition, I was one of many players who periodically experienced a bug that made party banter shut off almost entirely – it would only happen maybe once an hour, or even less. It was startling how empty it made the game seem when it happened, and if the small army of people trying to find fixes for it online during that time were any indication, I wasn’t the only one whose experience was affected. Tromping around the Storm Coast for hours with a team of mutes just didn’t feel right.

Cyberpunk might not have this problem so much – it’s set in a bustling city, with plenty of people around. But I still believe that the presence of party members is part of the secret sauce that makes a good RPG work.

They’re ginormous: The Witcher 3 was a certifiably ginormous game, with areas designed around the assumption that you had both fast travel and a horse that can sustain a full gallop indefinitely without ever getting tired. To fully complete the base game was easily an 80+ hour endeavor, and the expansions take it up into the 100-150 range.

This was mitigated by the remarkably high level of polish, but much of it was still busy work. Reveal all the various treasures and monster nests and you’ll have a map that wouldn’t look out of place in a standard-issue Ubisoft grinder. And while the Witcher contracts were never just fetch quests, play enough of them and you start to see the formula emerge: villagers are frightened of a local ghost or somesuch, Geralt investigates and discovers that it’s linked with some kind of tragedy in the past, uses his knowhow to draw the monster out, defeat monster, collect payment. They’re not all like that, but many of them are.

It’s inevitable that games this long and sprawling are going to get repetitive at some point. I understand the appeal of a long RPG. It’s a genre that asks the player to make a long-term investment in a character and a story, and we want to be able to reap the endgame dividends of that investment. And it only stands to reason that if we like something, we want more of it. But to me the insistence that RPGs be a minimum of hella long is handicapping the genre.

They’re actiony: Geralt spends much of his time hitting, dodging, and then hitting again, and based on the gameplay demo for Cyberpunk, it appears that it’s going to play much like a shooter in the combat bits. The days of a major AAA RPG being turn-based or even real-time with pause are long behind us. (When was the last one? The first Dragon Age?) I’m not sure who decided this would be the case. Changing industry habits are usually presumed to the effect of changing consumer tastes, but I suspect they’re partly the cause of them too.

Whatever the reason, number-crunchy mechanics are generally now subordinate to the conventions of whatever genre RPGs are trying to emulate. This is one area that CD Projekt has never been expert in. I’m a guy who loves to tinker with builds – I spend as much time reading character optimization and build forums as I do playing the game itself. But in the Witcher games I rarely tinkered at all. Leveling up sometimes felt like a chore.

This isn’t necessarily the case with real-time RPGs. Andromeda was a disappointing game in many ways, but I did enjoy the combat and build variety. I could play an engineer pet-type build, a mage-type adept, a stealthy sniper, or an ABC Always-Be-Charging vanguard, and they all felt distinct. Whereas the difference between a Geralt who specialized in light attacks and one who specialized in heavy ones often just came down to which one had the cooler-looking armor.

I’m hoping that Cyberpunk takes some inspiration from the rebooted Deus Ex franchise in terms of its build mechanics – in fact, it appears they have. But a part of me is also bracing itself for the thing that makes you shoot 5% better, which can be upgraded all the way to the thing that makes you shoot 15% better… you know the type.

So single-character, ginormous, and actiony – is this the only way forward? I hope not, but it may that the RPG market that once made Dragon Age: Origins a hit has been gobbled up by other genres, most notably open-world games (it’s no coincidence that “single-character, ginormous, and actiony” is a decent description of a typical Rockstar game).

I can think of worse fates than playing RPGs from the likes of Obsidian in between big-ticket games to CDPR’s standard of quality. And while I share everyone else’s gripes about Bethesda, I still play their games in the end. CDPR and Rockstar have made fortunes off of single-player games – a category that was supposedly dying as recently as five or so years ago. I think and hope that the party-based, table-toppier RPG has another few rounds left in it.

And so conclude my thoughts on The Witcher 3. Thanks to everyone who read and commented, and to Shamus, and to CD Projekt Red for putting out a top-notch game. Here’s hoping they’ll put out another.

Blood and Wine was the second the The Witcher 3’s two expansions, released in May of 2016, and it suffers, in my opinion, from Senioritis.

I don’t know how widespread the term is, but in the US, it refers to the condition suffered by high school seniors (who would usually be 17-18 years old) in the second semester of their final year. By then, all of their college applications have been sent off, so they don’t have to worry about grades (so long as they don’t flunk out entirely), they’re relieved to have the whole high school thing almost over with, and there’s little incentive for them to do anything but goof off.

By May of 2016, most of the Witcher 3 team has been working on the game for more than a decade, and the series for even longer than that. It’s hard to begrudge them a bit of carelessness now that the finish line is finally in sight, but the product does suffer a bit for it.

On the one hand, the expansion benefits from some of the same things Hearts of Stone did: the team is more familiar with the tools, they can take a bit more freedom with the story and setting, and they’ve learned how to get the best out of a somewhat limited combat system. On the other hand, the narrative is… I think “easily distracted” is the closest phrase I can find to describe it.

The main storyline’s opening sequence is a good example of this. You encounter a pair of Toussaintese (is that right?) knights who are looking for one Geralt, a Witcher, to help solve a series of mysterious killings in duchy’s capital of Beauclair. So the three of you travel to Toussaint in a cutscene. Shortly after arriving, you pass by a guy getting attacked by a giant, so you kill the giant. Upon arriving to the first crime scene, you find the body has been moved to a nearby villa, so you go to the villa, where you get attacked by a Bruxa (a Bruxa is a type of powerful witch (whoops, vampire, thanks to the comments) that I’m not entirely sure CDPR had to make naked). Then, you go to the capital, where you pass by a tournament where a knight is fighting a big, ornery, armored rodent-like thing called a Shaelmaar. The knight is soon in danger, so Geralt jumps into the arena and you fight that too.

(Note: below the jump are spoilers for the novels, a certain character in them in particular. Use caution if you haven’t read them yet.)

If you’re keeping count, that’s three boss fights in one quest. Usually, it’s CDPR’s habit to have such opponents have some sort of backstory or interesting introduction or twist to them. But here, they’re just… there. You’re introduced to them in one scene, and you’re fighting them in the next, and then you never see or hear from or about them again.

The fights themselves are entertaining enough. I especially liked the Bruxa, an opponent that required me to think on my feet and be less button mash-y and more Witcher-y than usual. I suspect that this sequence was designed as a playable demo to show the new expansion off to game journalists, which is fine, but I wish they’d untangled its various component parts from each other before putting them in the game proper.

The same can be said for the pacing. In one interesting quest hook, the killer’s next victim is dressed as a hare in an elaborate holiday masquerade at a swanky party at the palace. The environment here is lovingly crafted, with guests milling around a finely manicured garden, swapping amusing chatter with each other in gorgeous early-evening lighting. But most players probably won’t see most of it, because what would have been a more involved sequence in other parts of the game is a mad dash to a sequence of quest markers here. Then, later, the relatively routine act of finding out that a master vintner has been pawning off barrels of wine on the side takes 10-20 minutes of slowly walking around a wine cellar and tasting barrels to complete. For the first chunk of the expansion, I spent half of the time wishing the story would slow down and the other half wishing it would speed up.

To polish it all off, there’s a hiccup in the quality of the voice acting. Some of the line readings are odd in inflection or emotion or both, and to top it all off the developers never really settle on what exact accent people speak with in Toussaint. According to the wiki, the expansion had 14,000 lines of dialogue (by comparison, the not-exactly-taciturn Hearts of Stone had 6,000), so it may be that quality control slipped somewhere along the line.

So yes: Senioritis. However, CDPR’s strengths are also on display here. The story’s villains are revealed in a satisfying way, and they’re both well fleshed-out characters with backstories that add depth and context to their actions. (I want to note that between the two of them and their minions, they kill kind of a lot of people. The Witcher 3 devs always seem to expect me to be more forgiving than I am of that sort of thing.) The side content is interesting and well-made, up to their usual standards. Then there’s Corvo Bianco, the vineyard you get as a reward for your help, which you can upgrade and refurbish. I can’t comment on it objectively because upgrading things in games is my kryptonite.

There’s also Regis. Regis is a character from the novels, and it’s the first time we’ve seen him in the series. I might as well put another spoiler warning above this picture just to be safe, the spoilers are below it.

Regis is a vampire. But don’t worry – he’s a friendly one. In fact, his attitude towards blood is something like that of a recovering alcoholic’s towards alcohol: he abstains completely, knowing how dangerous it is. He’s also thoughtful and kind – like Dandelion, Zoltan, and others, his friendship with Geralt speaks well of Geralt. His character is faithfully recreated here, and I was glad to see him. There’s one scene in particular where he and Geralt sit in a graveyard, passing a bottle of mandrake hooch (not the really hard stuff, though) back and forth and just talking. It doesn’t advance the story or reveal any deep secrets, but it does pleasantly characterize both of them. It’s the sort of scene that the Witcher 3 developers have made look easy again and again, but almost no other developer has gotten the hang of.

It’s also worth nothing that by the end of the books, Regis was capital-D Dead. A jerkface sorcerer by the name of Vilgefortz melted him into a column to the point where he wasn’t much more than a red stain and a pile of rocks. Now, in the source material it’s known that vampires have extraordinary regeneration abilities, but this guy was so thoroughly killed to death in Lady of the Lake that everyone involved doesn’t much consider the possibility that he might return.

But now he’s back, his miraculous recovery explained away by a bit of vampire hocus-pocus. I can’t complain too much, as the character is a fan favorite (and a favorite of mine as well), but it gives the impression that the developers are getting a bit impatient with the restrictions of the source material. After three games and so many years, you can hardly blame them. The good way of interpreting this is that they’ve been chomping at the bit to try something different, and they’ll come out of the Cyberpunk starting gate in full lather.

So that’s Blood and Wine. When reading the criticisms above, keep in mind that I hold this game and its expansions to a higher standard than most, and things that are the biggest problems here would barely make the top ten in many well-regarded RPGs. The whole series gets wrapped up in the next entry, where I submit my final and legally binding judgment, as well as my hopes and worries going forward.

 

Once Chime has its hooks in you, you're done for.

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Stephen Follows, a writer and producer who also researches data and statistics on the film industry, writes: Today we're going to use data to answer the question "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" Along the way, we're going to test Die Hard's Christmas bona fides against all movies in US cinemas for the past thirty years, using a variety of methods. I have put details of my sources and methodology at the end of the article. The short story is that unless I say otherwise, the data for 'all movies' relates to all movies shown in US cinemas between 1988 (ie the year of our Lord John McClane) and 2017. Part 1 - Creative: Let's start by assessing the artistic work of Die Hard (as opposed to the commercial product or cultural icon). We'll do this by measuring the Christmas references in the script, on-screen and in the soundtrack. By going back to the film's script we are able to see what the screenwriters saw as part of their vision. The word "Christmas" appears 18 times in the script, which is more than the words "explode" (4), "die" (5), "hard" (11), "shoot" (12), "kill" (13) and "blood" (13), although far fewer times than "gun" (73), "terrorist" (51) and "suddenly" (45). [...] There are a total of 21 distinct Christmassy elements in the movie, ranging from Santa hats and Christmas Trees to festive treats and a pivotal piece of "Christmas Greetings" tape. [...] Audible references: Let's turn to a cultural measure of Christmasification for which we can get large-scale data: songs. I gathered song listings for three-quarters of all movies released over the past thirty years and identified the songs culturally associated with Christmas. Of these films, 95.5% did not feature any Christmas songs at all. Shame. The prevalence of Christmas songs in modern movies varies considerably but in most years it ends up that between 3% and 7% of movies have at least one such ditty. This means that having even one Christmas song makes a film unusually Christmassy compared to most other releases. Die Hard features Christmas in Hollis, Winter Wonderland, a whistled section of Jingle Bells and a rousing rendition of Let It Snow over the end credits. This means that audibly, Die Hard is more Christmasy than 99.2% of all movies released over the past thirty years. Follows makes several more points in his argument. You can read them here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My column this week details the mind-boggling string of outrageous failures perpetrated by Bethesda surrounding the Power Armor edition of Fallout 76. Specifically, it talks about how this $200 edition of the game promised a canvas bag but delivered something worth far less.

Like I say in the article, a company as big as Bethesda has no excuse whatsoever for making this kind of mistake. Only an idiot would cut this particular corner. If you’ve got a customer willing to pay you $200 for a videogame with some extra trinkets, then you need to make sure that customer is happy. Not because you’re a nice person or you care about the customer, but because this customer is a cash cow and treating them well will allow you to extract more wealth from them in the future. I’m not faulting Bethesda for being rapacious and exploitative, I’m faulting them for attempting to be rapacious and exploitative and being completely shit at it.

It’s easy to look at Fallout 76 and see that Bethesda is arriving two years late to the fad of Day Z clones. Fine. They attempted to jump on a trend and they miscalculated. Predicting the future is hard and I don’t fault them for messing up. But the canvas bag controversy? Market segmentation is Business 101. This is the easy stuff. The obvious stuff. If you can’t get this right then what are you doing trying to run a company?

We can compare this to Valve. Recently they entered the collectible card game market with Artifact. It’s a game where the developer allows you to spend real money for a chance to win virtual goods that cost nothing to produce. Not only is the customer spending actual money for imaginary goods, but they aren’t even guaranteed to get the goods they want! And instead of feeling ripped off, that just gives them a reason to pay the developer even more money for another spin with the random number generator.

I can understand why a company would want to run a CCG. There’s a lot of money in it. We can call it cynical or predatory, but at least it’s competent at being cynical or predatory. You don’t start the game up to discover atrocious art, broken mechanics, a horrible interface, countless glitches, rampant cheating, and regular crashes. Artifact might be a runaway success or a commercial flop, but Valve at least made a real product.

Bethesda has gotten it into their heads that quality doesn’t matter. Their game is broken in terms of mechanics. It’s broken in terms of technology. Their $200 premium goods are shameful Walmart trash. Their customer service is broken and dysfunctional. Their public relations is so bad it’s basically self-sabotage.

Maybe some of the blame for this belongs to us folks in the gaming press^[1] . Maybe everyone was too indulgent with Bethesda in the past. We humored their bugs and tolerated their habitual re-releases of Skyrim. Fallout 4 was a mess of childish ideas, idiotic dialog, lazy worldbuilding, and frustrating glitches that demonstrated a palpable contempt for the source material, but critics gave it an 84%. Wolfenstein II was showered with critical praise despite being distinctly inferior to the previous game.

Bethesda has been cutting corners for a long time, and they’ve been getting away with it. They’ve become complacent and even entitled. They’ve gotten it into their head that they can toss out a halfhearted attempt at a classic 90s nostalgia brand and sell millions of copies regardless of quality.

It’s my hope that this controversy isn’t just  a moment of cathartic outrage for the fanbase. I hope this creates a shift in attitudes. It seems like the company is deeply dysfunctional. They have incompetent public relations, shoddy art, no QA, infuriating marketing, shameful IP management. This isn’t just a bad manager or a couple of bad decisions. This is a fundamentally destructive corporate culture.

I’m hoping the failure of Fallout 76 gives them a wake up call and makes them uncomfortable enough that they can enact some sort of reforms. I don’t want to see Bethesda go out of business, but I’d rather watch them go out of business than continue to release games as an elaborate form of shitposting.

 

The setup of the main chunk of Hearts of Stone’s story goes like this: Olgierd von Everec, who first put up the contract to kill the monster in the Oxenfurt sewers, has made a deal with the devil-like figure Gaunter O’Dimm. In order to fulfill his end of the deal, O’Dimm enlists Geralt to make three of Olgierd’s wishes come true.

I get the distinct sense that the writers were given more of a leading role in this expansion, because this is the perfect excuse for them to do all the stuff they’ve probably always wanted with this setting and cast of characters. Olgierd’s wishes can be (and are) as off-the-wall as CDPR would like, and they take advantage: show Olgierd’s (now-dead) brother “the time of his life,” steal an entire house, and a third which is left unrevealed until Geralt has completed the first two.

I would say the writers chose their wishes well, because the first two are clean and promising setups for long set pieces featuring a body-swap comedy and an elaborate heist, respectively. In the first, Geralt attends a wedding while intermittently possessed by the spirit of Olgierd’s late brother Vlodimir, and in the other, he recruits a crew of charming sleazebags to steal a will (the “house”) of a wealthy merchant.

Rather than try and do a blow-by-blow of each of these two sequences, I thought I would just point out a list of things that I enjoyed, and which I think illustrate some of the unique advantages an expansion can have over a base game.

• The player can be presumed to be familiar enough with the characters, or at least the main character, that they’ll recognize contrast. While possessed by Vlodomir, Geralt wears a big grin, fancies himself a silver-tongued charmer, stands with his shoulders wide and his hands on his hips, and makes big, theatrical gestures, all things that are glaringly un-Geraltlike. It’s a running joke that wouldn’t land if we hadn’t spent an entire game playing the big white grump.
•  It allows writers to reflect on, and refine, the characters they’ve created. Shani (our date for the wedding) thinks that Geralt could learn a thing or two from Vlodomir’s ability to enjoy himself and spend less than 80% of his time scowling, and I couldn’t help but think she had a point. It’s a point that Geralt grudgingly acknowledges, and it serves to add a bit more character to the character. To cap it all off, the contrast with the too often boorish and dishonest Vlodomir highlights Geralt’s oft-underappreciated good qualities as well.
• Callbacks and references to earlier parts of the game are an easy trick, but a useful one. The auction house sequence in particular is full of them. In the list of things that connect a player to a virtual world, “mild chuckle of recognition” is an underrated one.
• This might just be me, but I don’t think I’ve ever said no to a heist, not movies, not in games, not in books. It’s about as reliable a delivery mechanism for an entertaining and suspenseful story as there is: show the target, recruit the team, plan the score, have everything go wrong, and have our heroes somehow improvise their way out of the jam. Write more heists, everyone. In my opinion, we’re well short of saturation at this point.

The first two of the three wishes are both lighter in tone, so it’s good that the game makes us do them before the third. In the third, Geralt is to retrieve a certain rose that Olgierd gave his now-deceased wife. This third task brings in a darker tone to the story, as we travel to the now-ruined von Everec estate and defeat a mysterious, faceless creature only referred to as “the Caretaker.”

That done, we enter into a magical painting that we soon learn is a manifestation of Olgierd’s wife’s (her name is Iris) grief. It’s a long, mostly on-rails sequence which is heavy on backstory. That’s not generally a good combination, but in this case I found the backstory, and the character of Iris, compelling enough to hold my interest. To summarize: a side effect of her husband’s deal with O’Dimm led to a change in his personality, giving him the titular “heart of stone” – he gradually loses all feeling and affection towards the world, including towards him own wife. Their relationship falls apart and she dies isolated and abandoned in the mansion.

The version of her that the player encounters in the painting is just an echo of the original, but it led to what was for me the hardest decision in the expansion, maybe in the entire game. The choice does not summarize well, so instead I’ll give the dialogue leading up to it:

Geralt: Need to be honest. If I take the rose, you might cease to exist, as might the world you’ve built around you.

Iris: And what will happen then? Will I be free of the suffering, the sadness? Is it the void that awaits?

Geralt: I don’t know.

Iris: I don’t wish to suffer any longer… but I fear there will be cold and darkness, until… there is nothing at all.

Her existence is pure grief and regret, but isn’t that better than nothing at all? Grief and regret, after all, carry with them the memory of better times. Either way, does Geralt even have the right to make this decision? Complicating things are the mysterious creatures (a ghostly dog and cat) that are bound to this world against their will. Surely their wishes carry some weight as well.

For me, the single line that makes this exchange is “I don’t know.” The player is not given the answer. There are plenty of games and games writers that would have succumbed to the temptation of offering, one way or another, a “right” way out of this decision. I personally decided to take the rose, but not before exhausting every possible dialogue option in a futile search for another way out. I personally feel that leaving the right choice ambiguous is crucial to the tone CDPR is going for.

Either decision allows Geralt to advance the storyline, and meet Olgierd for a rather predictable twist in which O’Dimm fulfills his end of their bargain and arrives to take the man’s soul. At this point the player is given the choice of leaving Olgierd to his fate or intervening and trying to save him. Intervening leads to the ending that the internet tends to regard as the “good” one, but I’m not so sure. Olgierd is, frankly, a right bastard. Some of his right bastardry is explained by the “heart of stone” O’Dimm’s deal gave him, but does that excuse all he’s done? It certainly doesn’t provide any justice to those he and his band have hurt and killed.

In my playthrough, I did intervene (it leads to a sequence where you have to outsmart O’Dimm by finding a reflection of yourself in a “mirror” he can’t break – in this case, a pool of water), but that was more to spite O’Dimm than out of affection for Olgierd. For his part, the man of glass seems to take losing relatively well, offering Geralt a bit of sarcastic applause and what sound like grim promises made in one or several languages we can’t understand.

O’Dimm is a character I can’t quite put a finger on, seeming made of equal parts Witcher universe, literal genie, and Christian folklore, with a dash of cosmic horror thrown in here and there. We never quite learn exactly what in tarnation he is, which in my opinion is a good thing. Some flavors of villain are only diminished by a detailed backstory, and he’s one of them.

One final thing I want to mention is that I think they did a great job with his character model. He is utterly and completely normal-looking, unassuming, and unremarkable, which it seems to me is a surprisingly difficult thing to depict visually. If you passed him on the street you’d most likely forget him right away, which is just right for the character. It makes it that much more distressing when he stops time and then sticks a spoon in a guy’s eye.

So that’s Hearts of Stone. In my opinion, the deal-with-the-devil framing device is only average – it’s what’s inside the frame (the wedding sequence, the interactions with Shani, the dilemma of Iris, the variety of tone) that make it so good. Upcoming entries will look at the second expansion, Blood and Wine, and finally put a bow on the whole thing. See you then.

 

(212): Mass text: dear whatever jerk off who thinks they stole drugs from me. It was birth control. Go fuck yourself. And pray that I don't get pregnant.
(518): Who puts their birth control in a bottle with a smiley face?!
(518): Oh fuck wait.

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Back when CDPR first announced that there would be a pair of expansions – and even used the word “expansion” instead of “DLC” – I predicted to myself that one or both of them would be better than the base game. I personally feel that prediction has been borne out, though it’s an issue about which reasonable people can disagree. The prediction was based on my experience with RPGs, and specifically with RPG content made by a studio that already has a game or more’s worth of experience with its tools under its belt.

I have precisely zero experience with game development, but I have a wealth of experience with baseless speculation about game development. That wealth of experience has helped me notice a common pattern with RPGs: the sequel/expansion – provided it’s made with the same tools – will be better.

For those who aren’t conversant in the vocabulary of baseless game development speculation as I am, I’m using the word “tools” here to describe all of the various software used to make the game. To cite one example, Valve had something called the “Hammer” editor, which I used in the mid-late-2000s to make terrible attempts at Half-Life 2 levels. Most of the most commonly used game engines – say, Unity or Unreal – have comparable editors, along with ways to manage dialogue, combat, and everything else.

They’re the things at the end (or near the end) of the game development pipeline, and it stands to reason that as developers get more practice with them, they become more skilled with them. It can be something as simple and becoming fluent in all the hotkeys and shortcuts, to something as advanced as learning clever workarounds to get them to do things they’re not quite designed to do. To top it all off, I expect developers get just plain faster with them, and able to create and iterate more content in the same amount of time.

Two of the most obvious examples I can cite off the top of my head are the Baldur’s Gate series and the expansions for Fallout: New Vegas. Most people who have played both will agree that Baldur’s Gate 2 was better than the first, and most who have played the Throne of Bhaal expansion will say it’s at least equal to the base game. And for me personally, Fallout: New Vegas’ expansions (Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road) were overall better than the base game.

Other examples of this pattern are somewhat apples-and-oranges, like Fallouts 1 and 2. (You can tell they were more adept with the tools in the second, but there’s an argument that the first is the better game, with the more economically told story.) Either way, there’s always a part of me that gets suspicious when I learn that a studio has changed engines in a sequel, or is developing their own engine. I don’t know enough about game development and engine limitations to actually second-guess these decisions, but that doesn’t stop me from doing so anyway, even if only in my head.

However, I suspect that these improvements in quality aren’t only due to studios becoming more adept with their tools. I always get a palpable sense of freedom when playing expansions, like the developers have thrown off at least some of shackles binding them to AAA RPG convention. In an expansion or DLC, you don’t have to save the world, because presumably it was already saved in the base game. You don’t have to bow to pressure to make everything Big and Epic and Important, or spend time crafting set pieces designed to wow the E3 previewer crowd.

The final suspicion I have is that there’s less crunch when you’re putting out expansions, resulting in a higher-quality product. I can’t really substantiate that, but I suspect it anyway.

In any case, Hearts of Stone ticks all of the boxes I just described. It’s surprisingly big for an expansion that retails for ten bucks, having not only the main storyline (which is probably 8-10ish hours long), but also the Ofieri runewright quests, a fairly big new section of map in the northeast corner, and several new sidequests and Witcher contracts. It has a story that’s built around personal relationships rather than an impending magical apocalypse. Last of all, it lets its hair down more than the base game did. One quest in particular is practically an extended comedy routine.

There’s also Gaunter O’Dimm.

I know this guy is memorable because I actually remembered him. Geralt actually met him briefly in White Orchard during the game’s prologue, and I remember him being conspicuous and a bit unsettling even then. I went into the expansions as spoiler-free as I could manage, but I didn’t manage to not learn that O’Dimm was involved – that said, even when I saw the image that spoiled me, I recognized him right away: “that was that weird mirror guy from White Orchard!”

For those that haven’t played it, I should probably rewind a bit here. The expansion’s main questline starts with a suspicious fellow named Olgierd Von Everec putting up a contract to kill a giant frog monster in the Oxenfurt sewers. The frog is, of course, rumored to be a prince, a rumor that’s confirmed once Geralt kills it and soldiers from his home country of Ofieri show up to arrest him for murder.

The old “I thought he was just a normal frog monster” defense apparently doesn’t fly with them, and Geralt is put on a ship to be transported back to Ofieri for a public execution. Gaunter O’Dimm shows up outside Geralt’s cell, offers to set him free, burns a mysterious mark onto his face, and causes the ship to run aground, giving Geralt the chance to escape.

O’Dimm asks Geralt to meet him at a certain crossroads back in Velen, where we learn that he and Olgierd have some sort of deal, which has resulted in Olgierd being immortal. By this time the comparisons between Gaunter O’Dimm and folklore about the devil has been laid on pretty thick, but the game never (in my opinion) gets quite too on the nose with them. O’Dimm isnt just the devil showing up in the Witcher universe, he’s a Witcher-style take on the devil, with enough differences and ambiguity to keep him novel and mysterious.

He also speaks well of CDPR’s creativity and writing ability. Gaunter O’Dimm is, as far as I know, a completely new character who’s unique to the games. The Witcher series has generally had good writing, but it’s always been writing that’s piggybacked off the tone and worldbuilding of the Sapkowski world they’re adapting. I consider him to be an encouraging sign of the studio’s ability to tell interesting and affecting stories without using Sapkowski’s work as a jumping-off point.

I have another point I want to mention, and that’s the combat. I’ve often been critical of the game’s combat in this series, considering it to be competently enough done but rarely interesting. Hearts of Stone is a step up. For one, they noticeably tuned up the difficulty. Even with me slightly overleveled, the fights with the toad and the Ofieri sorcerer were pleasantly difficult without feeling punishing or unfair. They rewarded patience and positioning: the sorcerer has a tornado-like ability that can stunlock and two-shot you, and standing right in front of the frog at the wrong distance triggers a nearly telegraph-free tongue attack. What’s more, button-mashing is not rewarded during either – instead you have to defend, get a couple hits in, and reset. Without proper tuning, this would make the fights too long, but they didn’t feel that way to me.

In addition, the swarming tactics of the new “arachnomorph” enemy type were a welcome bit of variety. The other boss fights were not quite as good, but they featured health-regenerating gimmicks that kept them at least somewhat interested. In these fights the player can see a glimpse of what the combat of the base game could have been with a bit more tuning and variety.

I hardly got into the story at all this entry, but we’ll do that next time, including what I consider to be its weaker points.

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We’re at the CostCo. They have a sale on new shower heads.

“That’s a nice shower head,” I say. “It’s got the massage head and a hose and everything.”

“It does,” Gini agrees.

“…I could probably install it,” I muse.

“Absolutely.”

“I mean, there’s YouTube videos for that, right? And you shouldn’t have to shut off the water. You shut it off all the time. So I could probably install a shower head.”

“Yup.”

“And I fixed the toilet! I mean, it took me a week to tighten everything so it wasn’t leaking so… I mean, I could change a shower head.”

“You sure could.”

I pick it up. “I don’t see any instructions.”

“They’re probably on the inside.”

“Maybe they’re complicated instructions.”

“I don’t think so,” Gini says. “It’s just a shower head.”

“It’s just a shower head,” I agree, thinking of all the self-help projects I’ve done recently, even though absolutely no one on my side of the family has done any repair work by themselves, ever.

I sit there, pondering the immensity of changing plumbing in my home.

“I’m gonna get the shower head,” I say.

“Good for you,” Gini agrees.

———————————-

“I’m gonna go fix the shower head,” I say on Saturday morning.

“Good luck!”

“I mean, we know plumbers, right? And the worst I can do is screw things up until Monday, right?”

“You got this.”

“Okay,” I say. “If I yell, don’t come get me.”

“You’re on your own.”

“And I’m changing into shorts in case I soak myself.”

“You got it.”

“But when this is done, you’ll probably have a new shower head.”

“I got that impression, yes.”

“Okay. I’m going.”

“Into the bathroom?”

“To replace the shower head. It’s not really fixing it. Cause it’s not broken.”

“Yes.”

“Yet.”

“I know.” She kisses me. “You got this.”

“I got this,” I repeat, and go into the bathroom.

———————————————–

“GINI!” I shout. “I’VE GOT THIS WORKING! COME VIDEO THIS SO I CAN SEND SHOWER VIDEOS TO EVERYONE I KNOW!”

“Okay,” she says. I dance. I don’t stop dancing.

“SHOWER THING,” I sing. “I GOT A SHOWER THING AND IT’S WORKING, AND NOW I’M GOING TO SHOWER.”

————————————————-

“GINI, COULD YOU COME HERE FOR A SECOND?”

“But you’re in the shower.”

“I know! Now, look! It’s showering ON me! This shower head! And it’s got settings! You want me to walk you through the settings?”

“Sure.”

“This one’s what I’m using now, it’s for shaving, so we don’t run out of hot water. But you can make it like this so it goes faster…”

——————————————————

“Okay,” Gini says later that day, throwing on her purse. “We’ve got a Pokemon raid down at Clague Park at 2:30. There’s a Mewtwo, and there’s at least ten people committed…”

“Sure, sure,” I agree absently. “But…. it’s only 2:00.”

“So we get to the park ten minutes early. We’ll socialize a bit. We can even take the dog.”

“We could,” I say shyly. “But… you know… that’s ten minutes you could, you know, spend…”

“I TOLD YOU I’M NOT SHOWERING UNTIL LATER TONIGHT,” she snaps.

“But SHOWER THING!” I whine proudly.

———————————-

She’s showering. I stick my head in.

“It feels really good if you use the shower head on your back,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says. “You told me. Many times.”

“I installed that, you know. By myself.”

“Yes, you did. Now could you leave me alone?”

“Sure. Because the shower’s that good? Right?”

“Yes. Now go.”

——————————————–

Later that evening, I creep up to her. “Hey, sweetie? Could I ask you to lie to me?”

She does a double-take. “About what?”

“The shower.”

“Oh,” she says, then ponders it again, then adopts a quite creditable air of total astonishment. “Why, I never thought you’d be able to install that shower head! And here I am, utterly proven wrong! By gosh and Gomorrah, you were far handier than I ever gave you credit for!”

“Thank you,” I say, then hug her.

She hasn’t divorced me by now. Somehow.

It must be my mad shower skills.

Netflix is about to let you decide how your favorite show will end, Bloomberg reported Monday. From the report: The streaming service is developing a slate of specials that will let viewers choose the next storyline in a TV episode or movie, according to people familiar with the matter. The company expects to release the first of these projects before the end of this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are still private. Viewers will get to choose their own storylines in one episode of the upcoming season of "Black Mirror," the Emmy-winning science-fiction anthology series. The show is famous for exploring the social implications of technology, including an episode where humans jockey to receive higher ratings from their peers. The fifth season of the show is expected to be released in December. The foray into choose-your-own-adventure programming represents a big bet on a nascent form of entertainment known as interactive TV. As Netflix expands around the world, it's looking for new ways to lure customers. By blending elements of video games with traditional television, the company could create a formula that can be applied to any number of series.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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<rcombs> >if you go home with someone and they have the banner of the former Soviet Union hanging on the wall...that’s a big red flag
<Oracle989> rcombs, But if they have a Swiss flag, that's a plus!

++ | --

Last post I covered most of the Kaer Morhen sequence, and called it “Part One” even though “Part Two” is really its own sequence. (Hence this entry’s awkward title.) This is where the game makes an important transition from being one about Geralt to being one about Geralt and Ciri.

Geralt remains the player character 90% of the time, as he did in the first part of the game, but the narrative (of the main questline at least) makes a passenger of him much of the time – it’s Ciri, as often as not, who’s making the decisions and moving the plot forward. While this is happening, the game does something very clever. I’m going to be coy and not tell you what it is yet, though I expect many of you have already guessed.

But I’ll give you a clue and say the first part of the clever thing involves a snowball fight between Geralt and Ciri. The Elven Sage, Avallac’h, is one of the few people who understands how Ciri’s powers work, and, in a bit of a disorienting time skip, we learn she’s been training with him long enough to become frustrated at her own lack of progress. She vents to Geralt, and hidden behind an innocent-looking dialogue option is the option of having a snowball fight with her.

(Ciri, incidentally, is a terrible snowball fighter. She takes way too long to put a snowball together, doesn’t know how to lead a dodging opponent, stands in one place for too long, and doesn’t make any decent attempt at evasive maneuvers, despite her teleportation ability! I personally was disappointed with her on Geralt’s behalf.)

It’s the first of several choices Geralt can make on how to interact with Ciri, which will become important later. It’s also a good tonal antidote to the darkness of Vesemir’s death. CDPR has demonstrated several times that it has a better grasp of tone than most developers. In lesser hands the entire Witcher franchise might have ended up mired in an endless swamp of grimdarkness. Instead, it makes good use of variety and contrast.

Some dialogue during this section sets up the next few quests: recruiting members of the Lodge of Sorceresses and finding ways to undermine the Wild Hunt. But first the game takes an unexpected left turn – a long, mostly on-rails run of encounters that I personally found rushed and disorienting. First, Ciri wakes Geralt up and tells him that she knows where Imlerith is. Imlerith is the member of the Wild Hunt who killed Vesemir, and a character I was barely familiar with at all up until this time during my first playthrough.

Imlerith is partying with the Crones of Crookback Bog on Bald Mountain during an annual celebration they hold there called the “Witches’ Sabbath.” Geralt and Ciri head there, but first they have the option of taking a detour to Vizima to see the Emperor. I initially skipped this option, reasoning from an RP perspective that Emperor had both means and motive to simply take Ciri captive once she was within his power. However, he doesn’t do that, and Geralt has the option of either taking a hefty payout for his services, or if, he turns it down, he gets a swanky new horse.

Then it’s on to Bald Mountain to confront both Imlerith and the Crones. Much like the Novigrad sequence, this whole series of events gave me the impression that the developers were trying to tie up as many stray plot threads as quickly as possible. My guess is that the Bald Mountain section was put in to polish off the crones and give the player an opportunity to avenge Vesemir’s death. The problem is that I was only vaguely aware of who Imlerith even was – before now, I had thought the guy who killed Vesemir was just another nameless Wild Hunt soldier. Unless I’m mistaken, you don’t even see his face until you fight him.

Keep in mind that it was only maybe an hour of gameplay ago that Vesemir died, this revenge seems a bit hurried and half-baked. The sequence is redeemed – a bit – by insight into how the worship of the Crones in Velen is set up, and what the locals believe. This is the sort of thing the Witcher series’ writers are good at – a convincing, imaginative, and creepy folk religion. What’s more, those who believe in it are not just fanatical cultist types, but poor rural people who live a hard life and take what small bits of hope and meaning are available to them.

I think CDPR’s writers, at least in the context of the Witcher universe, are better at telling small stories like this one than big ones. Or it may be the universe itself. I always preferred Sapkowski’s short stories to his novels. It seems that in a fantasy setting like this one, the greater the stakes get, the closer the style runs to familiar cliches.

Geralt and Ciri need a way to be invited to the top of the mountain, resulting in a short jaunt where Geralt retrieves a coin from the bottom of a lake, then fights a Fiend on his way back up the slope. Then, halfway through looking for Imlerith, Geralt and Ciri split off, with Ciri heading off to track down and kill the Crones. It’s not bad as boss fights go, but I can’t help but think that it diminishes the formerly demigoddess-like Ladies of the Wood to reduce them to an enemy you can defeat by hitting them with a sword enough times. But hit them enough times Ciri does, killing Whispess and Brewess before Weaves steals Vesemir’s Witcher medallion off of Ciri’s neck before escaping. With luck, you’ll never see it again, for reasons I’ll have to explain much later.

Meanwhile, Geralt finds Imlerith at the top of the mountain. I like Imlerith’s design. Instead of some slender, graceful finesse fighter, like the standard-issue elf, Imlerith fights with a big shield and a huge club-thing. I had to get behind him for Igni to do any damage, so this fight tended towards the tedious, but with normal equipment it’s rather fun, with a second stage where he starts teleporting all over the place. (Does this break the lore? I thought the Wild Hunt needed one of their “navigators” do to that.)

Like I said, the whole Bald Mountain sequence felt disjointed to me, like they had more extensive plans for each of these plot points but had to scramble at the last minute to tie them all up before release. That said, it’s notable how even the weaker parts of the Witcher 3 are still fun and memorable.

After this uncharacteristically-long on-rails sequence the player is finally – after several hours – returned to the open world again. There, Geralt has four different quests to wrap up before the endgame proper – but, just as notably, this is the most convenient time for a typical playthrough to handle the expansion (Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine) content. However, that’s not what the next entry is going to do. Instead, we’re going to finally learn that Avallac’h’s deal is, and get a sense of what the Wild Hunt is all about as well. See you then.

Strictly speaking, The Witcher 3 has a prologue (in White Orchard) and three acts, which I guess is four parts total. More generally speaking, it has two parts: the stuff that happens before the battle at Kaer Morhen, and the stuff that happens after it.

The battle at Kaer Morhen is the first major emotional climax of the game. The second will come at the ending. This is an important bit for the game to get right, and in my opinion, it gets it right. Pulling this sort of thing off is not easy, as evidenced by the number of games that have botched it over the years. I’ll get into some examples in a bit, but first let’s set the scene: we finally have a way to find Ciri, Geralt and Yen’s adoptive daughter, for whom we’ve been searching this whole time. Avallac’h has secreted her away on a mysterious island called the Isle of Mists.

One of the things CDPR successfully pulled off – for me at least, on my first playthrough – was making me worry that Ciri might be dead. This is tricky territory for a game narrative to navigate. Obviously, the average player understands that it’s unlikely that a major character will die offscreen. And yet the world of the Witcher universe seemed wild and unpredictable enough that I did, in fact, worry about exactly that. I worried if Ciri was Uma (the weird baby thing), and that maybe the trial of grasses would kill her. Later, on the Isle of Mists, I worried if I would be too late to save her. There’s one particularly excruciating shot where Geralt finally sees her comatose body in a hut on said isle, and I imagine most players (or, at least, me) will have their hearts in their throats for it.

Link (YouTube)

(Then, they’re cheeky enough to throw in a teaser for Cyberpunk 2077. In this clip, the relevant part is at the 2:45 mark if you want to indulge in a bit of cheek.)

Ciri teleports Geralt and herself back to Kaer Morhen, and, since the Wild Hunt can track her when she teleports, we know they’ll be hard on her heels. Which is why, prior to retrieving Ciri, Geralt recruits various compatriots from the series so far to assist him in defending against their imminent attack: Eskel, Lambert, and Vesemir (his Witcher bros), Keira Metz (optional sorceress), Yennefer and Triss (non-optional sorceresses), Letho of Gulet (a heavy from the second game, one of my personal favorite characters), Roche and Ves (from the Blue Stripes commando group, also from the second game), Ermion (a druid from Skellige), Hjalmar (brother to Skellige’s new Queen, I wonder if Cerys shows up if you don’t pick her for Queen?), also from Skellige, and others that I hope I’m not forgetting.

CDPR does a clever thing here: they devise a gameplay device whereby the player feels rewarded for a dozen or so sidequests they had the option of completing prior to this. Most of the characters named in the above paragraph were recruited (or not recruited) in some quest or another earlier in a typical playthrough, or are characters we’re familiar with from the previous games.^[1]

All in all, this creates a very satisfying sense of things coming together. The player is further satisfied by coming back to the familiar grounds of Kaer Morhen, which we saw first in the prologue (and, for those who remember, the first game in the series – even the layout will be familiar) and later during the quests we complete with Eskel, Lambert, Vesemir, and Yennefer.

Basically, the game has established an emotional connection to this place and the people in it. That sounds simple when you describe it like that, but it’s proven to be difficult in practice. I can think of many games where some character or another died, and the game obviously expected me to be torn up about it – and yet I wasn’t. One example is with Dishonored and the Empress, another is with Andromeda and Ryder’s father, and Ubisoft’s major releases average 1.5 of these moments per game. They, for the most part, don’t work, or least they don’t work that well. But the one in the Witcher 3 does. I’ll describe it now, and though I’ve kind of been working under a blanket spoiler alert this whole time, I’ll issue another now: there is a spoiler incoming. I put this under the “continue reading” link on purpose.

First, the scene: the Wild Hunt is about to attack. Yennefer is ready with a magical whatsit or whatever that will force them to teleport in away from the castle, so Geralt and his Witcher buddies can ambush them in the forest outside the walls. This is where the fighting starts.

This starts a series of scenes in which Geralt and his compatriots are forced to fall back again and again. There’s a clever pattern established here: all seems lost, and it seems like we’re about to lose a named character, but then we don’t. For example, for a second it looks like Letho has died, but it turns out he was just hiding under a Wild Hunt warrior’s corpse. Then, there’s a second where it looks like Lambert is about to be overwhelmed, but then Keira Metz’s magic saves him at the last minute.

As experienced RPG experts, we of course know exactly what’s going on here: we made all of the “right” choices in previous sidequests, and as a reward we’re going to see all of our favorite characters survive The Witcher 3’s equivalent of Mass Effect 2’s suicide mission. Except, of course, that doesn’t happen, and we’ve finally arrived at the big spoiler (this is your last chance to bail): Vesemir dies.

Ciri is cornered, and the Wild Hunt is about to get her, and they (specifically Eredin, the King, and Imlerith, his jerkoff goon equivalent of a first-chair violinist) threaten Vesemir to tempt her into their clutches. It’s difficult to just describe how affecting this moment is. In the games I mentioned above (like Dishonored and Andromeda), the sympathetic mentor figure dies in the first act, before we’ve even had a chance to get to know them. But here, Vesemir is the curmudgeonly old crank we’ve known since way back at White Orchard (or earlier, if you played the earlier games in the series), and the game has earned an emotional connection between not only him and Geralt but him and Ciri as well.

What’s more, Vesemir was an easy guy to like, which makes the people that killed him easy to hate.

This is important, because this is the first time in the game where I felt a personal sense of resentment towards its villain, who prior to this seemed rather distant and abstract. He killed the man who dozed off while teaching Ciri about ghouls and alghouls, who hunted the Royal Griffin with us, and who left behind the floppy hat Lambert donned to impersonate him. For me at least, this raised my investment.

And man, Ciri was pissed.

One of the things I (and others) have lamented about AAA games is their often-clumsy attempts to be “cinematic.” But this whole sequence featured a (in my opinion) successful attempt at using the language of cinema to ratchet up the emotional stakes of the story. The whole setpiece is long, and much like a successful oner (the warning: tvtropes warning doesn’t carry quite the weight it once did, but it still carries some), it keeps amping up the tension more and more until the audience is craving release.

That release finally comes with Ciri’s expression of raw rage and grief, which drives off the Wild Hunt (their first moment of weakness), and brings Avallac’h out of his recuperation to turn her off. There’s a messiness and a sense of wildness here that I personally thought was effective. We (the player) still don’t entirely understand the limits and rules that govern Ciri’s power – and neither do the enemy, which makes it that much more unnerving.

I’ve (pretty much arbitrarily) divided this sequence up into two parts, and we’ll get to the next part in the next entry, but there’s something I wanted to close on: Vesemir’s funeral. Here, as elsewhere, CDPR demonstrate their knack for timing. It’s important that, after such a long, uninterrupted action sequence, the player gets a little downtime, and the game provides it by giving us an opportunity to process what just happened, and the death of Vesemir, at his funeral.

While Vesemir’s body burns, Geralt can talk to Ciri, Letho, Roche, Ves, Ermion, Eskel, Lambert, Keira, Hjalmar, and, perhaps most importantly, Zoltan, who advises him to strike back against the Wild Hunt while they have the advantage. It’s hard for me to exaggerate just how right CDPR got the emotional beats for every character here. With Eskel planning to abandon Kaer Morhen to the march of time, with Letho having nothing in his future but running from his eventual reckoning, with Ciri’s guilt, and with Zoltan’s reliable good sense and courage, everything is right even in the aftermath.

I don’t know quite what else to say. Many games have attempted this type of blockbuster get-the-player-emotionally-invested-in-the-proceedings sequence, but, for my money, no other developer has pulled it off this well. (The closest, in the semi-cinematic-RPG genre at least, is the final act of Mass Effect 1, in my opinion).

These dialogues mark the end of the Battle for Kaer Morhen sequence, but we’re not quite done yet. This is the start of the second section of the game, and the start in some ways is a bit rocky. We’ll discuss how and why in the next entry.