Tomfhaines

It’s a bit of an abridged entry today due to the holiday, but I thought I’d button up some of my thoughts on the first part of the game.

In Which I Try to Figure Out What Exactly Is Going On

After finally gathering up various macguffins (the phylactery, the incantation to activate it, and a weird baby thing called Uma), Geralt and company are ready to polish off the first half of the game. If you haven’t played The Witcher 3, or even if you have, the parenthetical in the previous sentence might be a bit confusing. It’s still confusing to me, and I’ve played through the game several times.

This is Uma. He's a weird baby thing. It's ok if you're confused.

Basically, we’ve been on Ciri’s trail this whole time, following rumors, gathering clues, and talking to people who met her passing through, trying to figure out what exactly has happened to her and where she is now. This is difficult because Ciri is a child of the “Elder Blood,” also known as the “Hen Ichaer.” I won’t lore dump about this right now, but suffice it so say she has unique magical abilities, chief among them the ability to teleport.

The problem is that she doesn’t entirely have control over these abilities. If she gets into a sticky situation, she can teleport out, but she won’t always know where she’ll arrive until she gets there. This obviously makes tracking her difficult, and it explains why we have to trek all over creation to piece together her story. Now I’m a reasonably attentive person, and I’ve played this game multiple times. However, even I am not entirely sure what exactly happened to Ciri and in what order. I’m going to try and reconstruct my understanding of events, without cheating by looking at the wiki.

• Ciri is attempting to escape the Wild Hunt, who want her for reasons we don’t entirely understand yet. She is being aided by a mysterious Elven mage. The Wild Hunt has the ability to track her when she teleports.
• She arrives (I believe) in Skellige first. She fights some of the Wild Hunt in a forest before teleporting again (I believe). At this point (or possibly before) her Elven companion is cursed by Eredin, King of the Wild Hunt. However, the curse does not take effect immediately.
• Ciri teleports to Velen, where she helps a young girl escape a werewolf in the forest, then finds herself in the company of the Bloody Baron. After spending some time at Crow’s Perch, she travels to Novigrad.
• The Elven Mage also goes to Velen (I’m not sure where this part fits in the timeline). He enlists the help of Keira Metz to create a potion which will delay the effects of the curse.
• The curse is somehow connected to a phylactery, which is now broken (how?). Ciri enlists Novigrad gangster “Whoreson” Junior to fix it. (This part is confusing even on its own, and I covered it in the Novigrad section)
• Ciri’s Elven companion somehow secrets her away on a magical isle called the Isle of Mists. Here she’ll be hidden from Eredin, unless she uses her teleport ability again.
• The mysterious Elf goes back to Skellige (the Isle of Mists is accessed from Skellige so perhaps it was to deliver Ciri there). Here he finally succumbs to his curse, which turns him into the weird baby thing called Uma. If you know what kind of personalities Witcher Elves, and especially the Aen Elle, have, this isn’t as strange as it sounds. The purpose of the curse was to humiliate the Elf.
• At some point Ciri spent some time in a village in Skellige called Lofoten, which was attacked by the Wild Hunt shortly afterwards. I think this was right before she went to the Isle of Mists, but I’m not sure.
• The weird baby thing is collected by a local Skellige trader, who keeps it as a curiosity before losing it in a card game to the Bloody Baron.
• Geralt collects Uma at Crow’s Perch, once he finally learns that it’s connected to Ciri. Now he, Yennefer, Triss, and the other Witchers are returning to the Witcher stronghold at Kaer Morhen to try and figure out how to lift the curse.

Hoof. That’s a lot of stuff, and I’m not sure I got it all right. Between the fact that this sequence of events involves magical shenanigans, the details of which are not always made available to the player, periodic teleportation of the main character, and the fact that you learn everything in bits and pieces and out of order, it’s no wonder that by the time I arrived at Kaer Morhen I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing and why.

To clear things up, I've decided to include this screenshot with no context whatsoever.

This isn’t necessarily a damning indictment of the first part of the game. Creating a detailed timeline of what exactly happened to Ciri and when isn’t essential to the player’s experience. What’s more important is that we’ve gotten to know and like the main characters, and hopefully feel close enough to Ciri that we have some measure of the parental concern that Geralt does.

But it’s not entirely unimportant, either. In an open world game like this, when you spend a good chunk of your time following the marker on the compass, it’s easy to lose track of your original goal. It doesn’t help when the goal is confusing. On the one hand, Geralt is looking for Ciri. On the other, at some point I basically just gave up on trying to deduce her location using available clues and instead just resigned myself to the knowledge that the game would pull something out of its ass at the appropriate time. That’s not the ideal state of mind you want in a genre that traffics in immersion.

It’s why it’s good, I think, that there’s a bottleneck in the middle of the game to refocus and simplify things. So Vesemir gets the gang back together at Kaer Morhen, and we get to the good part.

The Importance of Downtime

One of the many ways “gameplay” is defined is “a cycle of challenge and reward.” You present the player with something difficult to do, and once they succeed, you reward them. In RPGs, the reward is often either experience points, a new party member, some kind of swanky magical doodad, or all of the above.

But another possible reward, and an underutilized one at that, is downtime. Downtime is the absence of gameplay. It’s a break, a sequence where you don’t have to shoot or stab anything, or make any tough jumps, or solve any puzzles, or whatever. Where you just get to bask in the game world and enjoy it for a bit.

And now, at Kaer Morhen, the player gets the opportunity to get smashed with Geralt’s fellow Witchers. It’s goofy, doesn’t advance the story, and features what by now is the RPG cutscene standard of poorly executed drinking animations. (Seriously, why has no studio managed to create a realistic-looking animation for a character drinking liquid out of a cup? Just mocap it if you have to!)

No drowners, no bandits, no water hags. Just Lambert doing his Vesemir impression.

I’ve noticed that a disproportionate share of the games I’ve found most memorable have had well-crafted downtime. Half-Life 2 is a game that rewards players with expertly-timed downtime. I’m guessing that most people who played Final Fantasy VII still remember going on a date at the Golden Saucer more than two decades later. Bioware, even in their current diminished state, still has downtime chops. The Citadel DLC was basically downtime. In Mass Effect: Andromeda, the “movie night” sequence was the same.

It’s a trick that I wish more studios would add to their repertoire. It’s the necessary balance to the urge to make everything bigger and more intense and more epic. Cycles of tension and relaxation are crucial to music, drama, and virtually every kind of art. Games, in my opinion, are no exception.

So, this Independence Day, we celebrate downtime. In the next entry, we get back to business. After all these hours of gameplay, we’re finally going to find Ciri. Stay tuned.

Skellige is too sprawling to be summarized in any kind of wieldy way, so instead I’ll pick out a couple of high-water marks I particularly liked and find instructive.

The Cave of Dreams

I suspect a good chunk of players don’t know this quest even exists. I know I missed it entirely on my first playthrough, and probably would have missed it again on my second, had I not learned about it on the internet in the meantime.

You can start it either by stumbling across “Blueboy” Lugos (son of Clan Drummond Jarl “Madman” Lugos) outside a cave in an out-of-the-way spot most probably won’t go to, or you’re directed towards the quest after completing a Witcher contract to unhaunt the local haunted lighthouse. The wrinkle is that Blueboy Lugos dies in an entirely different questline, so if you do that one before the lighthouse contract (which I would guess is the case for most people) you’ll never see this one.

In fact… I botched my current playthrough, and finished the bear attack quest long before (long enough that I had no saves to reload) remembering I wasn’t supposed to do that. So I had to pull screenshots off the internet.

In any case, Blueboy Lugos and his two friends Uve “Jabberjaw” and Jorulf the Wolverine (Skelligans have the most advanced nicknames of any culture in the Witcher universe) are preparing to explore the “Cave of Dreams,” which in the local folklore is said to be the place where you face your greatest fears. It’s something like a vision quest – you go in the cave, eat a variety of hallucinogenic herbs and mushrooms, and then trip out. And CDPR is up to the task of pulling this off.

No one screenshot can do the place justice, but this one of the giant ghost whale comes the closest.

Once inside, Blueboy and his two friends each face their respective greatest fears. Uve Jabberjaw fears insulting the King again (his did it once while drunk and tore his own tongue out to keep his honor), Jorulf the Wolverine faces his guilt over indirectly causing his father’s death by becoming distracted by Sirens, and Blueboy Lugos faces down a ghostly version of his own father. Finally, Geralt faces a ghostly Eredin and confronts his greatest fear – losing Ciri.

This is quite the long and involved sequence for an easily-missed sidequest that has no effect on anything else in the game. It’s a measure of the sheer size of The Witcher 3 that something like this, which would be a major setpiece in almost every other game, is almost an afterthought here.

However there’s something I find oddly frustrating about this. Here you get a trio of friends who are entertaining to be around, and each gets a nice bit of character development, and then one unceremoniously dies later and the other two are barely heard from again.

Is this game TOO big? CDPR has achieved an extraordinary and hitherto unseen combination of size and polish, but for all that part of me wonders if it couldn’t have been cut down a bit. It’s a strange combination of complaints, the inverse of that old joke: “The food is excellent! And the portions are so large!” But by scaling down some of the make-work tasks (treasures, monster nests), taking it a little bit easy on the map size, and maybe cutting, say, the weakest third of Witcher contracts, I wonder if they couldn’t have realized the potential of this sequence a bit better, integrated it a bit more smoothly into everything else.

This is a criticism that could frankly be directed at other RPGs moreso than it could this one. Somehow we’ve collectively decided that RPGs should be long. Like, “completionist playthroughs bump up against or exceed 100 hours” long. But one of my most satisfying roleplaying experiences recently has been Obsidian’s Tyranny. I enjoyed that game and played it several times, not feeling cheated at all by a game that you could knock out in 25 hours without rushing anything. Many of the classics of the genre (Deux Ex and the original Fallout come to mind) would be considered short games by today’s standards.

Overall, the game is strong enough that even criticisms of it exist in a speculative state half the time. But I do wish RPGs as a genre would relieve themselves of the belief that they have to be Baldur’s-Gate-2-long.

Cerys an Craite

In what amounts to a giant sidequest, Geralt must influence the decision of who is to be Skellige’s next king after the last one died. In the end it comes down to two claimants, Hjalmar and Cerys, the son and daughter of the powerful noble Crach an Craite. Each is trying to make a name for themselves via a great deed – Hjalmar wants to defeat Undvik’s frost giant, and Cerys wants to cure the Jarl of Spikeroog of a mysterious mental affliction.

Amidst all the things the game does well, animation is one you don't always hear talked about. You can get a good sense of Cerys' personality just by the way she stands.

Said Jarl, Udalryk, is experiencing terrible nightmares that lead him to both self-harm and a generally miserable existence. He believes the gods are punishing him for a childhood accident that left his brother, Aki, drowned. Cerys initially believes it to be a curse, but she and Geralt eventually determine that it’s the work of a deliciously creepy creature called a Hym, a spirit that attaches itself to guilty souls and feeds off of them.

The Hym can be beaten in a conventional boss fight, or Cerys can engineer a trick that sees Geralt toss an infant into a furnace – this causes the Hym to detach itself from Udalryk onto Geralt, who’s feeling guilty about his new status as a baby murderer. Fortunately, Cerys secretly spirits the (thankfully unmurdered) baby out of the back of the furnace as soon as it’s thrown in, relieving Geralt of his guilt and the Hym’s company along with it.

The whole thing is cleverly and evocatively done, well enough that it makes me wonder how CDPR would do if they ever made a horror game. My personal horror preferences eschew jumpscares and gore in favor of the sticky, heavy feeling that comes of the right balance of regret, shame, helplessness, and the uncanny invading the mundane. Not that CDPR has no jumpscare chops – there were moments in this quest, “A Towerful of Mice,” and others that gave me a good startle – but this is where I was most frightened, even though they never lean all the way into the horror aspect (which would not be entirely appropriate for the genre anyway).

It also helps characterize Cerys in opposition to her brother Hjalmar. Both here and in her later investigation of the massacre at Kaer Trolde, Cerys shows initiative, cunning, and an even keel. By contrast, Hjalmar (though he’s not without his admirable qualities) tends to run headfirst into every obstacle and let others clean up for him afterwards. So when it came time to pick the isles’ next monarch, I chose Cerys again, even though I had initially planned to pick Hjalmar this time for the sake of variety. This often happens to me in RPGs – I plan to make different choices on a second/third playthrough, only to find myself making the same ones again because I can’t bring myself to change them. Oddly, I don’t (usually) find this restricting when it happens. I think it’s a sign of good immersion.

That wraps up Skellige. Next up, the characters convene at Kaer Morhen, starting a sequence of events that sees them finally find Ciri. But first, there’s something I should probably acknowledge.

The Cyberpunk 2077 Trailer

Back when I first started this series, Cyberpunk 2077 was on my mind, and I wanted to use a deep dive into The Witcher 3 to make highly dubious predictions about the quality of CDPR’s upcoming (still no release date, though sometime in 2019 is likely according to the cognoscenti) game. So I’d be remiss not to remark on the first official update we’ve had on that project in years.

As most of you probably already know, CDPR released a new trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 at this year’s E3, and it went like this:

There was also a gameplay demo shown to members of the press behind closed doors. The reactions to the above ran the gamut, but three in particular stood out: the surprising amount of daylight (cyberpunk as a genre tends to favor nighttime, the rainier the better), the fact that the protagonist appears to be yet another stubbly white guy with a strong jawline, and the revelation that the game would be played from the first-person perspective.

As far as the protagonist is concerned, it appears that the guy we saw in the trailer is just one possible protagonist, and there’s a full range of character creation options available, which is good news.

As for the unexpected colorfulness, I personally like it. For one because AAA gaming tends towards the excessively washed-out gray/brown spectrum, and for another because cyberpunk, like it’s ancestor-genre noir, is susceptible to monotony of tone. The developers claim there will be a full day/night cycle, and there were a couple nighttime shots in the trailer that passed muster with me personally.

This isn’t an area I’m worried about. There’s no rule that says dystopias can’t have variety. When you consider that the dystopian elements of the current IRL setting we live in now have tacked as close to Aldous Huxley as William Gibson, I think it would be missing a trick not to include a bit of sunlight and glitz.

As for the first-person perspective, you wouldn’t think this would even be news. A half-dozen or more major first-person games come out every year and no one bats an eye. Why so much ruckus over this?

Consider, I guess, that the only games CDPR has ever made are The Witcher, The Witcher 2, and The Witcher 3. (And the Gwent standalone game, but that’s something like a spinoff.) I can’t think of another major developer so associated with a single franchaise. It’s honestly a bit jarring to see them do anything else. Cars? Machine guns? Neon jackets? Even the music was unexpected. Even though it doesn’t make sense, a part of me was expecting this game to have the same “Hans Zimmer meets Bulgarian Folk Choir” style as The Witcher, not the driving, synth-heavy beat we got.

Instead, we got something completely different. Upon reflection it shouldn’t be surprising, but tell that to my confused brain. It’s like walking into your local Chipotle and seeing that the staff are all wearing scuba gear. There’s no particular reason to think it will affect the quality of your burrito, but a part of you is still going to feel off guard.

I personally remain hyped, though also sympathetic to those who have difficulty with the first-person perspective due to motion sickness. One of the things that’s particularly encouraging to me is the presence of Mike Pondsmith. Pondsmith, if you don’t know him, is the creator of the tabletop setting (originally called “Cyberpunk 2020”), and with me he has the credibility of an old-school pen-and-paper guy.

Seeing him so openly involved in the project makes me feel like CD Projekt still retains enough of their original scrappiness to pull this thing off with some soul. Back in the day, they acquired the videogame rights to the Witcher universe for what in retrospect has been a song. I wonder if ten years from now I’ll be writing the same thing about Cyberpunk 2020/2077. They retain that (admirable, in this case) nerdy faith that the world will be rewarded by sharing in their underappreciated obsessions.

Though there’s no gameplay available to the public, those reporting back from CDPR’s demo have been almost universally glowing in their descriptions. Of course, a demo is not a game. (One particularly unsettling report was that this was the best E3 demo since 2012’s Star Wars 1313.)

Who knows if we’ll see anything else soon, or if it’ll be another long stretch of radio silence. Either way I’ll be paying attention. But the next entry will be back to The Witcher 3 – see you then.

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Skellige is the third of the game’s three major areas, and a nice tonal contrast from the first two. Velen smells like peat and wet leaves. Novigrad, of course, smells like sewage. Skellige, however, smells like pine needles and juniper. How do I know what fictional locations smell like? I just do. You know I’m right.

See? Juniper.

The historical inspirations here are a mashup of Norse and the odd bit of Celtic, particularly in the language. Skellige’s inhabitants supplement their income by periodically raiding sea traffic and coastal settlements in the Viking style. I think we’re meant to like the Skelligers. They have physical courage, an independent streak that appeals to a modern audience, and are loyal to their friends and honorable to their own.

For all that, I can’t shake the knowledge that this lot make their fortunes (such as they are) through armed robbery. This is a consistent problem in fiction that makes protagonists out of Vikings and Pirates and the like. Thematically, they like to play up the whole freedom and independence thing, and play down the fact that these supposed good guys are essentially stickup gangs with boats. Just once I’d like to see a piece of fiction grapple with that issue more thoroughly.

In terms of overall gameplay experience, I’d say that Skellige is my favorite of the three main areas, though they all have their strong and weak points. First reaching the isles – and realizing the size of them – was a memorable experience during my first playthrough, a sort of “damn, this game really is big” moment. I took some time to ride Roach around at a canter, just listening to the music.

That’s a good sign, when a game’s mood is well-conveyed enough to get the player to slow down and soak it all in. The most comparable thing I can remember is first riding into Mexico in Red Dead Redemption.

Upon arriving at Kaer Trolde, we witness the funeral of the recently departed King Bran, setting up the “who will be the next King/Queen” dilemma that drives many of the region’s quests. It’s also our first opportunity to interact with Yennefer since the prologue. Which means that there’s no more putting it off. It’s high time we got stuck in and settled this once and for all.

Triss vs. Yen: The Definitive, Official, Final, Legally Binding Answer

I may be exaggerating. I’ve found the whole Triss vs. Yen debate to be remarkably civil and amicable by fandom shipping debate standards, but there is a debate. It often cleaves along book-game lines, as Yen/Geralt is the book-canon pairing, whereas game-only fans are more familiar with Triss from her presence in the first two installments.

Personally, I’m a Triss man. I can’t explain it better than to say that I actually enjoyed Triss’s company, and liked talking to her, whereas with Yen I was always bracing myself for the next insult. That said, the more I thought about the choice between the two the less I liked it, and the more I found it to encapsulate some of CD Projekt’s foibles when depicting female characters.

Yen, in my opinion, is the more fully realized of the two. Triss is likeable, agreeable, smitten with Geralt, and likes to do the right thing. All things we the players are disposed to like, and yet I often felt like there should have been additional dimensions to her, ones that I kept looking for but never quite found.

Yen, by contrast, is the one who has a discernible personality that exists independently of Geralt. She’s fiercely protectively of Ciri, impatient with obstacles (sometimes to a fault), justifiably confident in her own abilities, and has a ruthless streak strong enough to occasionally be unsettling. She’s also much more likely to challenge Geralt, and is often persuasive in doing so.

They nailed her look, in my opinion. This is pretty much exactly how I pictured her in the books.

The problem, for me, is that Yen’s behavior often bumps against being emotionally and even physically abusive. There’s one sequence in Freya’s garden where, in the middle of her usual needling, she briefly relents and makes a show of affection, only to return to her usual dismissiveness right afterwards, a pattern familiar to those familiar with abuse. Much later, at Kaer Morhen, she gets frustrated with Geralt and teleports him hundreds of feet over a nearby lake, to fall into the water. Of course it’s played for comedy, but I had a hard time finding it funny.

In genre fiction of every type and medium, there’s a common dichotomy to be found between strong female characters and “strong” female characters. The former have coherent characterization and narrative agency that grows naturally from said characterization. The latter tend to substitute belligerence for “strength” and can come off as a back-patting exercise for their (usually male) writers.

Yen is that rare character who’s both strong and “strong” at the same time. I can’t quite find it in me to either endorse or condemn her. Complicating this issue is the fact that I suspect the developers themselves are on Team Triss. Triss was in the first two games (Yen wasn’t), players completing a typical playthrough will have the opportunity to complete Triss’s romance sequence before ever having the opportunity to start Yen’s, and in general Triss comes off more as the “right” option.

The first Witcher game famously featured a rather juvenile mechanic whereby Geralt could navigate your way inside the pants of various female NPCs and commemorate his conquests by collecting explicit playing card versions of them. Generally speaking, the series has outgrown that sort of thing. But habits like that die hard, and when they do remain they’re slippery and hard to pin down from a critical perspective. I don’t at all mean to say that the Witcher 3’s romances are just exercises in rank misogyny. They’re not. But I’d be lying if I said that the options available to the player left zero sourness in my mouth afterwards.

Which is why I have some wariness in me for Cyberpunk 2077, given that the only glimpse we’ve seen of that game so far features an attractive woman wearing relatively little clothing. It’s not egregious. It alone is not enough to throw stones. But it is enough to be suspicious.

Undvik

Now onto to something I can uncritically praise. The Undvik sequence was among my favorite parts of the entire game. A short summary of the setup: Crach an Craite (a powerful Skellige noble) has a son named Hjalmar. Hjalmar, seeking to make a name for himself, has gathered up a crew of rowdies to sail to Undvik, a once-prosperous isle that has since been abandoned after it was terrorized by a fearsome frost giant.

Undvik is something like an island-sized dungeon. Upon arrival, Geralt tracks down the now-scattered and disorganized survivors of Hjalmar’s original expedition, and sees the aftermath of the giant’s work. Speaking for myself, I was kind of scared on Undvik. It really felt like I was on a dangerous, deserted island, far away from any kind of help, facing a terrifying creature I wasn’t sure I was up to fighting.

The frost giant is a example of good monster design and characterization. You really have to see him in motion to get the full effect.

The whole sequence also does well to characterize Hjalmar, who all things considered is not a major character. You see him change from a brash, cocky type to a more sober and humbled one, which makes it easier to endorse him as King later, if you choose to do so. (You can also pick his sister Cerys.)

I’m not going to cover all of Skellige in great detail. A big chunk of the area’s major quests are actually optional (you can just do Yennefer’s stuff and pretty much ignore the politics, if you’re inclined). However, there will be one more post about Skellige before we move on to the big Kaer Morhen setpiece. See you next week.

 

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This week I want to cover a few different topics, with my comments on each.

 

The Crones of Crookback Bog

The Bloody Baron got more press, but to me personally, Geralt’s interactions with the Crones (and the even more mysterious being they deposed, so mysterious that fans usually refer to it as just “the thing in the tree”) are the highlight of Velen.

For those that don’t know, the Crones are the beings Anna Strenger went to for help when she was pregnant with the Baron’s child. They’re three… things. Witches? (Demi)gods? Former Druids? It’s not clear, but whatever they are, they’re powerful and extremely unsettling.

Left to right: Whispess, Brewess, and Weavess.

This, to me, is top-notch character design. Even after having seen this scene before, playing it this time creeped me out all over again – the wicker cage thing over Brewess’ face, the twitchy, almost insect-like movements of Weavess, the profoundly obscene way that she strokes the severed legs she has strapped to her belt, Whispess’ necklace of severed ears… and the music, too. Even going back to the orphanage after the quest is over, hearing the music makes me nervous. (Here’s a link if you feel like listening.) The game’s composer is a man named Marcin Przybylowicz, and as Nobuo Uematsu (composer for the Final Fantasy series) is celebrated for his work, so should Przybylowicz be if you ask me. Eastern European folk music is rich ore to mine, and he mines it well. I think more of this game’s unique mood comes from its music than people realize.

The Crones were also the first thing I encountered in the game that made me feel like I was in danger. Generally speaking, Geralt is a cool guy who kills monsters and doesn’t afraid of anything, but in this scene I was saying to myself “Now Geralt, be polite. You don’t know what these things even are.” The player doesn’t know much more. Some of Velen’s inhabitants worship the Crones (they refer to them as “The Ladies of the Wood” or the “Good Ladies”), and there are two in-game books you can read (called the “Ladies of the Wood” and “She Who Knows”) which will tell you a bit more, but neither book can be considered a reliable source of information. Still, here’s the text of “She Who Knows”:

Folk say they were four at first. The Mother, She-Who-Knows, the Lady of the Wood, came here from a faraway land and, since she suffered terribly from loneliness, she made three daughters out of dirt and water.

A long, long time ago the Mother was sole ruler of all of Velen. Her daughters brought her the people’s requests and served as her voice. Each spring, sacrifices of grain, animals, and men were made to the Lady of the Wood on her special night. Yet as the years passed, the Lady of the Wood slipped deeper and deeper into madness. Her madness eventually spread over the land – men took to abandoning their homes and setting out into the bog, where they became food for beasts. Before long, Velen was drowning in blood.

The daughters saw their land nearing destruction and took it upon themselves to save it. When spring came once more, and with it the night sacrifices, they killed their mother and buried her in the bog. Her blood watered the oak atop Ard Cerbin, and from then on the tree grew wholesome and hearty fruit for the people. As for the Lady’s immortal soul, it refused to leave its beloved land, and so the sisters imprisoned it. To this day it lies trapped beneath the Whispering Hillock, where it thrashes about in powerless rage.

I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for fictional folklore. I’m a sucker for lore in general, of course, but folklore in particular scratches me right where I itch. Many writers never quite master the trick of how much to reveal and how much to leave murky and evocative, but CD Projekt’s writers do.

The Crones send Geralt to destroy She-Who-Knows (aka the thing under the tree), who takes the form of a creepy bramble-covered thumping heart thing. At this point the player can either destroy it or free it, via a ritual that puts its soul into a black horse, each with a different outcome for the orphans in the bog and the nearby village of Downwarren. Many games have had similar choice-and-consequence mechanics defeated by players simply quicksaving and trying out all options before deciding. The Witcher 3 works around the save scumming problem via a straightforward method: they delay the consequences until well after the choice is made.

So basically, I liked this part of the game. Let’s get to another part of the game I liked.

Keira Metz and the Towerful of Mice

King Radovid of Redania is hunting down magic users, so many of them have gone into hiding wherever they can. One is a Sorceress named Keira Metz, who has information on Ciri. She sends Geralt first into a cavern inhabited by a mysterious Elf she was seen with, and later to a gloomy haunted tower.

We explore the tower and, with the help of a spirit-locating lantern Keira gave us, piece together what happened: a Lord and his family lived there, his daughter fell in love with a local fisherman beneath her station, the Lord’s mistreated subjects rose up and stormed the castle, and the daughter was (through a mishap involving a potion that mimicks death) left for dead by the man she loved. Oh, and a mage researching the Catriona plague was there too, who was experimenting on mice, which is actually not directly related to everything else, but accounts for all the mice scurrying around as you ascend the tower.

This being the Witcher universe, this tragic story has produced a curse, and the Lord’s daughter is now a dangerous creature called a “pesta” or “plague maiden.” (It’s about as inviting as it sounds). Geralt can break the curse by either taking the daughter’s bones off the isle (thereby releasing her on the wider world) or by telling her former lover what happened, and returning him to the tower, where the curse is broken when he kisses her.

Her elbows are too pointy. 7/10 would not bang.

This whole sequence is not a big deal in the larger scheme of things. It’s just one of dozens of optional sidequests. And yet its quality speaks to the quality of the entire game. Both the Towerful of Mice quest and the interactions with the Crones demonstrate CD Projekt’s mastery of mood.

To me, mood may be the single most important thing a game can have – and also the hardest to produce. It’s the result of doing everything else well. There are certain through lines in the series’ narrative habits: supernatural events are nearly always connected to some kind of human foible, there’s a persistent sense of the present being tethered to the regrets of the past, and even when we mechanically understand what happened there’s always a dimension of understanding that’s withheld from us.

It all adds us to a sense of solidity – a game world that’s credible, for lack of a better word. They nailed it once. Can they do it again? Cyberpunk, both as a genre and a specific Mike Pondsmith-designed setting, doesn’t share the same mood. And creative workers that show talent and inspiration in one context may not show as much in another. I don’t have any insight into this question at the moment other than to say we’ll have to wait and see.

But that’s enough of the floofy lore-and-talky/read-y stuff. Let’s discuss some game mechanics.

The Reverse Difficulty Curve

I’ve played through this game three full times now (plus all the playthroughs aborted by my severe restartitis), using conventional builds in addition to my current naked punchmage build. And every time, the hardest fights have always been in the first third of the game. Specifically, two sequences: the one in the cave, where you have to defend Keira Metz from wild hunt dogs while she closes portals, and the one at Crow’s Perch where you have to defend the Baron from wraiths as he takes the botchling to the threshold of his castle.

Both have been hard, but even in this playthrough’s overleveled state, the fight with the wraiths took many tries to win. Wraiths have two main attacks: a normal one, and a teleporting double attack. If you fight one at a time, you just stay close to them so as to trigger the normal attack and not the teleporting one, a trick that should be familiar veterans of FromSoft games. However, if you have to fight 3-4 of them at once, you can’t keep them all at the same range, you get chains of them teleporting into you, and things get hairy fast.

This is probably what my own personal hell will look like.

This was also the case in the first game. For me personally, the hardest fight in the Witcher 2 was the one where you have to defeat the guards to raise the gate in La Valette Castle – in the prologue. And it wasn’t just beginner’s fumblings either (though it was partly that). That fight remained hard even on subsequent playthroughs.

This isn’t even just a CD Projekt problem, but an RPG problem. I’m currently struggling to think of a major RPG I’ve played that didn’t have a reverse difficulty curve. Right now I’m playing Deadfire (the sequel to Obsidian’s crowdfunded isometric throwback Pillars of Eternity), and it’s the case there too. Bioware games generally aren’t that hard, but to the extent they are, it’s usually in the first half. In every major RPG I remember playing, this is the case: struggle in the first third, things get easier in the second, and by the endgame you have some variety of OP build that just steamrolls everything.

Mechanically speaking the culprit is mostly the multiplicative effect of advantages the player gains over the course of the game. As they level, players stats go up, but they also earn new abilities and bonuses, and they also get more adept with the mechanics. The combination of these things leads the player to quickly outpace the enemies in terms of power level growth. This is now happening in my current Witcher 3 (now post-Keira and the Baron) playthrough. Igni and Axii are OP thanks to upgrades; not only that, but putting so many points into signs has sent my stamina regeneration through the roof, meaning I can now nearly spam these now super-powerful abilities.

(There is a mod that pretty much completely rebalances the game’s combat, if its descriptions are to be believed: The Witcher 3 Enhanced Edition. I haven’t tried it yet and kind of wish I had known about it before I started this playthrough. I am going to try it and will report back if there’s anything interesting there. It changes the way attacks are targeted and removed all enemy scaling(!), both of which sound too good to be true. I’ll guess I’ll find out soon.)

I don’t have some clever way to fix this problem except “make the early parts of the game easier and the later parts harder,” which is the sort of thing that’s probably trickier than it sounds. But I thought I’d discuss here since this particular part of the playthrough is generally the hardest. Contrast it with “big” boss fights later (like Eredin), which you can, by that point, generally just cruise through.

We’ve now wrapped up most of the major stuff in Velen. Next week we head to Skellige. See you then.

My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?

Ramon Schönborn, Germany

First, let's get a few things out of the way:

In real life, we can't put a metal pole between the Earth and the Moon.[1] The end of the pole near the Moon would be pulled toward the Moon by the Moon's gravity, and the rest of it would be pulled back down to the Earth by the Earth's gravity. The pole would be torn in half.

Another problem with this plan. The Earth's surface spins faster than the Moon goes around, so the end that dangled down to the Earth would break off if you tried to connect it to the ground:

There's one more problem:[2] The Moon doesn't always stay the same distance from Earth. Its orbit takes it closer and farther away. It's not a big difference,[3] but it's enough that the bottom 50,000 km of your fire station pole would be squished against the Earth once a month.

But let's ignore those problems! What if we had a magical pole that dangled from the Moon down to just above the Earth's surface, expanding and contracting so it never quite touched the ground? How long would it take to slide down from the Moon?

If you stood next to the end of the pole on the Moon, a problem would become clear right away: You have to slide up the pole, and that's not how sliding works.

Instead of sliding, you'll have to climb.

People can climb poles pretty fast. World-record pole climbers[4] can climb at over a meter per second in championship competition.[5] On the Moon, gravity is much weaker, so it will probably be easier to climb. On the other hand, you'll have to wear a spacesuit, so that will probably slow you down a little.

If you climb up the pole far enough, Earth's gravity will take over and start pulling you down. When you're hanging onto the pole, there are three forces pulling on you: The Earth's gravity pulling you toward Earth, the Moon's gravity pulling you away from Earth, and centrifugal force[6] from the swinging pole pulling you away from Earth.[7] At first, the combination of the Moon's gravity and centrifugal force are stronger, pulling you toward the Moon, but as you get closer to the Earth, Earth's gravity takes over. The Earth is pretty big, so you reach this point—which is known as the L1 Lagrange point—while you're still pretty close to the Moon.

Unfortunately for you, space is big, so "pretty close" is still a long way. Even if you climb at better-than-world-record speed, it will still take you several years to get to the L1 crossover point.

As you approach the L1 point, you'll start to be able to switch from climbing to pushing-and-gliding: You can push once and then coast a long distance up the pole. You don't have to wait to stop, either—you can grab the pole again and give yourself a push to move even faster, like a skateboarder kicking several times to speed up.

Eventually, as you reach the vicinity of the L1 point and are no longer fighting gravity, the only limit on your speed will be how quickly you can grab the pole and "throw" it past you. The best baseball pitchers can move their hands at about 100 mph while flinging objects past them, so you probably can't expect to move much faster than that.

Note: While you're flinging yourself along, be careful not to drift out of reach of the pole. Hopefully you brought some kind of safety line so you can recover if that happens.

After another few weeks of gliding along the pole, you'll start to feel gravity take over, speeding you up faster than you can go by pushing yourself. When this happens, be careful—soon, you'll need to start worrying about going too fast.

As you approach the Earth and the pull of its gravity increases, you'll start to speed up quite a bit. If you don't stop yourself, you'll reach the top of the atmosphere at roughly escape velocity—11 km/s[8]—and the impact with the air will produce so much heat that you risk burning up. Spacecraft deal with this problem by including heat shields, which are capable of absorbing and dissipating this heat without burning up the spacecraft behind it.[9] Since you have this handy metal pole, you can control your descent by clamping onto it and controlling your rate of descent through friction.

Make sure to keep your speed low during the whole approach and descent—and, if necessary, pausing to let your hands or brakepads cool down—rather than waiting until the end to try to slow down. If you get up to escape velocity, then at the last minute remember that you need to slow down, you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise as you try to grab on to the pole. At best, you'll be flung away and plummet to your death. At worst, your hands and the surface of the pole will both be converted into exciting new forms of matter, and then you'll be flung away and plummet to your death.

Assuming you descend slowly and enter the atmosphere in a controlled manner, you'll soon encounter your next problem: Your pole isn't moving at the same speed as the Earth. Not even close. The land and atmosphere below you are moving very fast relative to you. You're about to drop into some extremely strong winds.

The Moon orbits around the Earth at a speed of roughly one kilometer per second, making a wide circle[10] every 29 days or so. That's how fast the top end of our hypothetical fire pole will be traveling. The bottom end of the pole makes a much smaller circle in the same amount of time, moving at an average speed of only about 35 mph relative to the center of the Moon's orbit:

35 miles per hour doesn't sound bad. Unfortunately for you, the Earth is also spinning,[11] and its surface moves a lot faster than 35 mph; at the Equator, it can reach over 1,000 miles per hour.[12]​[13]

Even though the end of the pole is moving slowly relative to the Earth as a whole, it's moving very fast relative to the surface.

Asking how fast the pole is moving relative to the surface is effectively the same as asking what the "ground speed" of the Moon is. This is tricky to calculate, because the Moon's ground speed varies over time in a complicated way. Luckily for us, it doesn't vary that much—it's usually somewhere between 390 and 450 m/s, or a little over Mach 1—so figuring out the precise value isn't necessary.

Let's buy a little time by trying to figure it out anyway.

The Moon's ground speed varies pretty regularly, making a kind of sine wave. It peaks twice every month as it passes over the fast-moving equator, then reaches a minimum when it's over the slower-moving tropics. Its orbital speed also changes depending on whether it's at the close or far point in its orbit. This leads to a roughly sine-wave shaped ground speed:

Well, ready to jump?

Ok, fine. There's one other cycle we can take into account to really nail down the Moon's ground speed. The Moon's orbit is tilted by about 5° relative to the Earth-Sun plane, while the Earth's axis is tilted by 23.5°. This means that the Moon's latitude changes the way the Sun's does, moving from the northern tropics to the southern tropics twice a year.

However, the Moon's orbit is also tilted, and this tilt rotates on an 18.9-year cycle. When the Moon's tilt is in the same direction as the Earth's, it stays 5° closer to the Equator than the Sun, and when it's in the opposite direction, it reaches more extreme latitudes. When the Moon is over a point farther from the equator, it has a lower "ground speed," so the lower end of the sine wave goes lower. Here's the plot of the Moon's "ground speed" over the next few decades:

The Moon's top speed stays pretty constant, but the lowest speed rises and falls with an 18.9-year cycle. The lowest speed of the next cycle will be on May 1st, 2025, so if you want to wait until 2025 to slide down, you can hit the atmosphere when the pole is moving at only 390 m/s relative to the Earth's surface.

When you do finally enter the atmosphere, you'll be coming down near the edge of the tropics. Try to avoid the tropical jet stream, an upper-level air current which blows in the same direction the Earth rotates. If your pole happens to go through it, it could add another 50-100 m/s to the wind speed.

Regardless of where you come down, you'll need to contend with supersonic winds, so you should wear lots of protective gear.[15] Make sure you're tightly attached to the pole, since the wind and various shockwaves will be violently battering and jolting you around. People often say, "It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end." Unfortunately, in this case, it's probably going to be both.[17]

At some point, to reach the ground, you're going to have to let go of the pole. For obvious reasons, you don't want to jump directly onto the ground while moving at Mach 1. Instead, you should probably wait until you're somewhere near airline cruising altitude, where the air is still thin, so it's not pulling at you too hard—and let go of the pole. Then, as the air carries you away and you fall toward the Earth, you can open your parachute.

Then, at last, you can drift safely to the ground, having traveled from the Moon to the Earth completely under your own muscle power.

(When you're done, remember to remove the fire pole. That thing is definitely a safety hazard.)

[1] For one, someone at NASA would probably yell at us.

[2] Ok, that's a lie—there are, like, hundreds more problems.

[3] You may occasionally see people get excited about the "supermoon," a full Moon that appears slightly larger because it happens at the time of the month when the Moon is closest to Earth. But really, the full Moon always looks surprisingly large and pretty when it's near the horizon, thanks to the Moon illusion. In my opinion, it's worth going outside and looking at the Moon whenever it's full, regardless of whether it's super or not.

[4] Of course there's a world record for pole climbing.

[5] Of course there are championship competitions.

[6] As usual, anyone arguing about "centrifugal" versus "centripetal" force will be put in a centrifuge.

[7] At the distance of the Moon's orbit and the speed it's traveling, centrifugal force pushing away is exactly balanced by the Earth's gravity—which is why the Moon orbits there.

[8] This is why anything that falls into the Earth hits the atmosphere fast enough to burn up. Even if an object is moving slowly when it's drifting through space, when it gets close to the Earth it gets accelerated up to at least escape velocity by that final segment of the trip down into the Earth's gravity well.

[9] People often ask why we don't use rockets to slow down, to avoid the need for a heat shield. You can read this article for an explanation, but the bottom line is that changing your speed by 11 km/s takes either a tank of fuel the size of a building or a tiny heat shield, and the tiny heat shield is a lot easier to carry. Thanks to heat shields, slowing down is much easier than speeding up—which requires the aforementioned giant fuel tank. (For more on this, see this What If question).

Heat shields only work for slowing down; if there were a way to use the same heat shield mechanism to speed up, space travel would get a lot easier. Sadly, no one's figured out a practical way to build a "reverse heat shield" rocket. However, while the idea seems silly, in a sense it's sort of the principle behind both Project Orion and laser ablation propulsion.

[10] Yes, I know, orbits are conic sections which in the case of the Moon is technically not exactly a circle. It's actually a pentagon.

[11] I mean, unfortunately in this specific context. In general, the fact that the Earth spins is very fortunate for you, and for the planet's overall habitability.

[12] It's common knowledge that Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, measured from sea level. A somewhat more obscure piece of trivia is that the point on the Earth's surface farthest from its center is the summit of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, due to the fact that the planet bulges out at the equator. Even more obscure is the question of which point on the Earth's surface moves the fastest as the Earth spins, which is the same as asking which point is farthest from the Earth's axis. The answer isn't Chimborazo or Everest. The fastest point turns out to be the peak of Mt. Cayambe, a volcano north of Chimborazo. And now you know.

[13] Mt. Cayambe's southern slope also happens to be the highest point on Earth's surface directly on the Equator. I have a lot of mountain facts.

[15] For aerodynamic reasons, this gear should probably make it look like you're wearing a very fast airplane.

[17] If it helps, people have survived supersonic ejections before—and even a supersonic aircraft disintegration—so there's hope.

Last week, I had intended for this post to cover some of the game’s side content. I’ve since changed my mind – some of topics I wanted to discuss about that I’ve decided to put on hold until after I covered the main Velen quests.

The “Bloody Baron” sequence of events includes the multi-step quests “Family Matters” and “Ladies of the Wood,” which together see Geralt piece together the story of how exactly local warlord Phillip Strenger’s family was torn to pieces and came to various kinds of tragedy. It got oodles of acclaim – it won a Golden Joystick award for “Best Gaming Moment,” and both PC Gamer and Kotaku did write-ups on how it was made.

I’m of several different minds about this whole sequence. I’ve praised the Witcher games in the past for being “realistic” (in the literary sense of the word, not the literal sense), and this video covers the core of that argument if you want to know it in more detail. The Bloody Baron story meets many of my own informal criteria for realism: a believable messiness, an emphasis on the personal, events that are relatively small in scale in comparison to their surroundings, and characters who at least occasionally confound our dramatic expectations. And, broadly speaking, I like literary realism.

So I was surprised to find myself uneasy with this quest. It’s my personal – though relatively casual – belief that every good story has a moral. In some cases the moral is up-front and obvious, like with an Aesop’s fable, and in some cases the moral is complex and squirrelly enough that it defies conventional methods of explanation and can only be glimpsed through fiction. Put another way, even in literary realism, which tends to resist pat value judgments, stories are trying to say something about the world. And my personal reading of what the Bloody Baron sequence is trying to say is that the behavior of the titular character is at least partially excusable, and that perhaps the Baron shouldn’t be considered a villain at all.

Let’s look at that behavior. Our first direct contact with the Baron’s existence is at the inn we’re sent to to locate the Emperor’s spy. The village surrounding the inn is being terrorized by the Baron’s men, to the point where parents are disguising their daughters as boys in hopes of sparing them from being raped. Geralt has an encounter with them in the inn itself, and you can either fight them or talk them down.^[5]

No idea what this lot are on about, but I want some of whatever they're drinking.

Now I don’t necessarily mean to say that a commander bears full culpability far all the actions of his men in a situation like this, but surely he bears some. It’s not as though the Baron thinks the soldiers under his command are angels. In his first conversation with Geralt he says that they’re “good at pulling up the floorboards to find a peasant’s last sack of grain,”^[6] so he’s apparently aware that at the very least his men are taking food from desperate people by force.

If I had to guess the intentions of the writers, I would guess that they deliberately built up a fearsome and brutal reputation in the mind of the player, only to subvert it once Geralt meets its owner. Phillip Strenger, aka the “Bloody Baron,” is in fact an affable and friendly person, even endearing, in a sort of sweaty, booze-soaked way. He knows that we’re looking for Ciri, and we learn that Ciri was a guest at Crow’s Perch for a time, and was treated with genuine hospitality.

He tells the story of how exactly she came to be there, leading to another one of the game’s vignettes where she becomes the player character. Ciri finds herself in a forest (for reasons unknown to the player at this point) where she rescues a child from wolves before using Witcher techniques to dispatch a werewolf, at which point a man she rescued brings her to the Baron.

Ciri's gimmick, gameplay-wise, is that she can teleport short distances in place of dodging and quickstepping. I wish we'd gotten more chances to play as her.

Strenger, however, is not willing to share the entire story until Geralt helps him with a problem: his wife and daughter have been kidnapped. By this point the player has probably already seen the “have you seen this person” posters for them around various villages in the region, including the town at the base of Crow’s Perch. Geralt uses his Witcher senses to investigate the rooms they disappeared from, and finds a clue in the shape of a protective medallion, leading him to investigate the local Pellar.

(I like it when I learn things from games. A “pellar” is the name of a certain brand of fortune teller and practitioner of folk magic, broadly in the pagan tradition. If you’re not afraid of the wikipedia rabbit hole, here’s the article on “Cunning Folk in Britain.” I assume there must have been a comparable tradition in Poland. At some point during this series I’m going to comment/speculate on the game’s translation and how strong – in my opinion, at least – it is.)

From the Pellar’s information the player can gradually, over many steps in the questline, reconstruct what happened. First, you learn what you probably already suspected by this point: the Baron’s wife (Anna) and daughter (Tamara), weren’t “kidnapped” at all, but fled from the physically abusive Strenger. Before they fled, Anna learned she was pregnant. Not wanting to have another of the Baron’s children, she went to the local hideous, unsettling coven of witches, the Crones of Crookback Bog (we’ll cover them in more detail in future entries).

The Crones offered Anna a deal: they’ll induce a miscarriage in return for her service. I thought this plot point was a bit forced – was “pledge service to supernatural beings” really the best abortion option available to her? The western tradition records abortofacient herbs and other techniques going all the way back to ancient Greece. Anna is a noblewoman, and not without resources, in a setting with both alchemy and magic. But whatever, I guess I’ll go with it.

Then Anna went to the Pellar to get a medallion to protect her from the Crones. During the struggle with the drunken Strenger on the night of their escape, she lost the medallion, and a Fiend (a beast controlled by the Crones) abducted her and carried her into the bog to fulfill the terms of her agreement. At some point, her mind snaps (the game is a little vague on this), and Geralt meets her at the orphanage there, where he knows her only as “Gran,” caretaker of the orphans.

(Oh yeah, and at one point during all of this you have to retrieve the Pellar’s goat, which has wandered off to eat strawberries.)

Of COURSE you have to chase down his goat, Geralt. Did you forget what genre of game you were in?

You might have noticed that this story is a little convoluted. It doesn’t help that, much like the Dandelion/Ciri backstory in Novigrad, the player only learns bits of it at a time, and out of order to boot. In fact, you never even get to hear Anna’s side of the story, since by the time you meet her she’s taken on her “Gran” persona.

After Anna and Tamara fled, the Baron buried the miscarried fetus without naming it, causing it to turn into a super creepy monster called a “botchling.” At this point Geralt has the option of killing it, but the better option is to perform a ritual where Strenger gives it a name and accepts it as his own, perhaps earning a scrap of redemption along the way.

So Anna, the victim of abuse^[7], gets a fragmented, confusing story relayed through hearsay. The Baron, by contrast, gets a dramatic story, a distinct and unique personality, and several scenes where he gets to demonstrate regret for his actions.

To the game’s credit, said story, personality, and scenes are well executed. The English voice actor^[8] does an excellent job, his dialogue is well written, and the cutscenes are well directed (to the extent that word applies to a game). But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that the developers went out of their way to humanize the Bloody Baron, who by merits is an abuser and a brutal warlord, a monster of a person, but only gives us the barest glimpse of his primary victim.

I didn't get a good screenshot, but throughout this scene Strenger is staring at his own hands, a simple but effective staging that - for me personally at least - added pathos.

This brings us back to the idea of stories having morals. In a simple fable, the moral is determined by the author. But in more complex works of fiction, and even more so in interactive fiction (like games), ownership of the moral belongs partly to the audience. The Kotaku article on this quest (which I also linked above) had a section which illuminated this concept in action:

My version of the quest ended basically in tragedy. The wife, seeking independence, appeared cursed to work for the ladies of the wood, the hideous Crones. The daughter, thoroughly disgusted, rejects the Baron’s desire for a relationship. Having lost everything, the Baron hung himself outside of his home. But Geralt had the information he needed, so he went on his way.

Though shocked at the sight of the Baron—I spent all this time on this quest, only to have everything turn to shit?!—I wasn’t particularly upset, either. In my mind, the Baron wasn’t deserving of his family’s forgiveness.

“This is your interpretation of what happened,” said Sasko. “Another person may have described this situation in the following way: ‘I saved the Baron’s wife from death and the Baron couldn’t take it. He’s not going to harm anyone any more. This family was broken and destroyed long before this quest even happened and there was nothing that could be done to undo such destruction.’”

Based on what CD Projekt RED has seen, player reactions ran the gamut.

“For me this story is very personal,” said Sasko. “I was born in a poor village in the Polish mountains and in my childhood I saw families broken by alcohol and violence. Being a child, I saw parents hitting kids and fighting with each other, while at the same time being in love and doing everything for their families. After the game was released, I watched the playthroughs, read forums and e-mails and observed what I expected to see: players reacted very differently, depending on their background. People who forgave the Baron were not the minority, which proved for me that giving this choice to the players was the right thing to do.

In some stories, the authors know the moral before they start, and in some, the creative act is an attempt to find it. Stories of the second type are the ones that really stick with me.

There’s no real good outcome to the quest as far as the Strengers are concerned. The Baron either hangs himself, or takes his mentally broken wife to a “healer” in the mountains, which we no have particular reason to think will work. Either way, Crow’s Perch is taken over by the Baron’s second-in-command (a nameless Sergeant), who seems inclined to let his men indulge in all their worst impulses, so if anything the life of the average Velenite just gets worse.

I couldn’t personally bring myself to think well of Phillip Strenger. I believe the character’s remorse was genuine, but for abusers “genuine” doesn’t necessarily mean “permanent,” and neither is it necessarily useful for their victims. I wish we could’ve seen more of Anna’s side of the story. We do see more of Tamara’s side of the story (there’s an optional side objective where you can learn where her life has gone she left), which is good, but still (in my opinion) not enough.

So that’s the Bloody Baron. Despite all the accolades it received, I don’t think it was the best quest in the game. However, the things it did well, it did very well, and I think much of its quality probably grew out of the personal connection its creator had for the subject. I hope at least some other developers have taken a lesson from its success: don’t be afraid to make things messy and personal, and don’t feel like you have to know exactly what you’re trying to say with every story you write. Drawing the moral out of a complex story is at least partly the prerogative of the audience.

Next week, we stay in Velen and cover the crones and Keira Metz’s quests. See you then!

The bad part is over. Now it’s time for the good part!

Two of my favorite quests in the game are in the second half of the Novigrad storyline, and they’re both ones I’d like to cover in at least some detail, because I personally consider them to be examples of how to do it right. I skip over a lot of things in these posts, mostly because The Witcher 3 is a very long game and to cover everything in detail would take forever. But I’m not going to skip over these two quests, because (in my opinion) they’re instructive. They’re examples of two types of quest that you don’t often see anymore. I’ve named them the “nailbiter” and the “soother” (I’ll explain the names).

First up, the nailbiter. Caleb Menge, high-ranking thug in the employ of the Church of the Eternal Fire, is in possession of two pieces of information crucial to us: Dandelion’s location, and the location of the treasure looted from Dijkstra’s vault. Triss comes up with a plan for Geralt to “capture” her and deliver her to Menge, in hopes that Geralt can wheedle out the information he needs as payment. This requires Geralt to pay a part: he has to make the Witch Hunters believe that he doesn’t care about Triss, or even actively dislikes her. Triss, for her part, knows she’s likely to be tortured once she’s in Menge’s clutches.

This leads to a situation that is unfortunately relatively rare in modern RPGs: one where there’s meaningful gameplay to be had through dialogue. Geralt has to be careful what he says, what he admits to, how he reacts to provocation, and what information he presses for, because being careless will give the hustle away. And keeping Menge’s con won’t be easy – at a glance he looks like a dumb goon, but by now we know that, in his own way, he’s a canny operator.

Menge is paranoid about dopplers, one of many reasons that I suspect they played a bigger role in whatever the original incarnation of this questline was.

I say that this is rare because too often in RPGs (or any kind of story-driven game) dialogue and gameplay are kept at arm’s length. Generally speaking, nowadays you can’t fail a dialogue section – the player can either exhaust all the various options or skip them, and their decision to do either the one or the other doesn’t affect anything else. But when talking to Menge and the Witch Hunters there are a variety of different ways to screw the pooch.

The game lays deliberate traps for the player, most of which tempt them to pull a sword out and start swinging out of an excess of gentlemanly sentiment towards Triss. Triss knows she’ll be mistreated at the very least, and likely tortured, but insists to Geralt that he keep his cool. This leads to us trying to poker face our way through a conversation in Menge’s office while we can hear the sounds of Triss having her fingernails torn out^[8] next door. It’s impressively tense, which is why I’ve nicknamed this type of quest the “nailbiter.”^[9]

It also does something clever: it asks us to trust Triss past the point where many of us are comfortable. In a bit of scene-setting that probably could’ve been better explained to the player, Triss is wearing fake Dimeritium shackles. Dimeritium is a metal that can render spellcasters helpless, so during most of the scene^[10], Triss is capable of escaping at any time but endures for the sake of the charade.

CD Projekt’s overall posture towards female characters can be unpredictable – too often, they settle back into a familiar juvenility, but in The Witcher 3 they frequently reward the player for trusting in their competence and/or punish them for being protective past of the point of respect. This is a pattern that will return later, and in my opinion is crucial to the emotional core of the game.

This whole sequence is not long, and nor is it a big-ticket setpiece quest like some others, but it is an example of a well-constructed roleplaying situation. A roleplaying situation: something that’s surprisingly difficult to pull of in a CRPG. For all the debt the genre owes to tabletop gaming, the discouraging truth is that situations like this (playing an elaborate bluff on an NPC), which are (mechanically speaking) a snap with a live DM, are fraught with practical challenges when they move from the tabletop to the keyboard/controller.

A nice continuity nod: in the game, as in the books, Sorceresses don't like having their fingernails torn out.

This conversation with Menge can take several branching paths which can lead to several different outcomes. That means that CDP had to invest limited resources into making content that it’s likely a large percentage of players will never see^[11]. I can understand why developers hesitate to do this sort of thing, but I encourage them to do it anyway. I believe that some of the unique magic to be found in well-done CRPGs can be found in their imperfect recreations of the tabletop experience.

This is one of the reasons I find myself getting unreasonably hyped for Cyberpunk 2077. The Witcher universe, as an intellectual property, had its origins in Sapkowski’s novels and short stories, rather than in pen-and-paper roleplaying. The Cyberpunk universe, on the other hand, does have its origins there, and the fact that Mike Pondsmith appears to have some level of hands-on involvement gives me hope that actual roleplaying will feature, as opposed to the too-usual segregation of story and gameplay. Or maybe I’m just setting myself up for disappointment – I guess we’ll know soon enough.^[12]

At the end of the quest, Menge is dead and Dandelion is still a captive. Our heroes have to convince the Church of the Eternal Fire to move him to Oxenfurt, where he’s scheduled to be executed, in the hopes that they can spring him en route. For this they require the services of a doppler, a creature that can take the shape of other people. A doppler friend of Dandelion’s named Dudu featured in his original heist of Dijkstra’s fault, but has since gone into hiding, and could be disguised as anyone. So, Geralt does the obvious thing and stages a play he hopes Dudu will show up to watch.

This is the “soother” – the quest that’s lighter in tone than the game surrounding it, giving some relief to the player and a pleasant contrast to everything else. Instead of growling threats at people and chopping up monsters with a sword^[13], Geralt spends his time collaborating on a script, recruiting jugglers, and finally playing himself onstage.

Soothers can vary in tone. I consider the opera house sequence in Final Fantasy VI to be one, as well as Mass Effect 3’s Citadel DLC. In fact, Bioware romances in general could be grouped into the category. They’re particularly useful in a game like The Witcher 3, whose relentless grimness threatens to become overpowering without them. Excessive self-importance is, in my opinion, one of the most frequently committed sins in AAA gaming

A nice moment. Dudu the Doppler, who has a missing eye he can't disguise, takes Ciri's form - the first time Geralt has 'seen' her since she was a child.

With Dudu successfully recruited, Geralt and Zoltan ambush the prisoner convoy taking Dandelion to Oxenfurt. A guard takes off on horseback with him captive, and Geralt chases them to a house inhabited by a pair of dwarven painters.^[14] By the time you actually rescue Dandelion, I’d guess that many players have lost track of why they were even after him in the first place. But he dutifully gives his piece of the “where is Ciri and what is she up to” puzzle: she was in possession of a phylactery, and had memorized a mysterious incantation with an unknown purpose, which Dandelion fortunately remembers.

And so ends the Novigrad section of the main quest. It started off weak but ended strong, which is better than the other way round if you ask me. My next entry will cover various types of side content, which is a big – and in my opinion, spotty – part of the game. See you then.

Of the game’s three main questlines (Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige), I personally consider Novigrad to be the weakest.

This isn’t because of Novigrad itself, which as I’ve said is one of my favorite cities in all of gaming. Rather, it’s because the quests, which invovle finding Dandelion, unraveling a heist, navigating the city’s underworld, and finally taking on the Church of the Eternal Fire, are frequently disjointed and full of stray threads. During my first playthrough, I remember often losing track of exactly what I was doing and why.

I personally suspect that the entire area was the subject of significant last-minute cuts which required a rapid reshuffling the story. I say I “suspect” this because I don’t claim to have any inside knowledge of the development process – however, the suspicion is a strong one. There were many things here that made my “last minute scramble in development” spider senses go off: how the various figures of Novigrad’s underworld were introduced in more detail than their significance in the story seemed to merit, the detail invested in the buildings of Temple Isle (the Church’s home base), most of which were only seen in one cutscene, the rather wet-fart resolution of the whole “find Dijkstra’s treasure” quest (we just never find it, and we knew it was Dandelion all along anyway), and numerous smaller rough edges, some of which I’ll mention as we go on.

Temple Isle. You'd think that big tower in the middle, with all the flames would be important, right? But we never go there.

I’m not trying to dump on the developers here. The Witcher 3 was a massive game with massive ambitions, and given all that it’s a miracle it came out as polished as it did. What’s more, as I’ve heard more stories about the development of this game or that game, I’ve come to believe that one of the most important skills a game developer can have – and especially if you’re in a management position – is improvisation.

What recollections of the development of various classic RPG’s that have filtered out into the world of RPG nuts corroborate this. Without launching into a bunch of long-winded stories, many of the classics, both Infinity Engine and otherwise, had last-minute changes, features cut short by looming deadlines, and emotions in their teams in the months before going gold that could easily fall under the category of “sheer panic.”

If anything, it seems that a smoothly-running pipeline that stays running smoothly right up until release is the exception, not the rule. But if you have to cut a level in the final stage of your production schedule in a Call of Duty game or something, it may be a relief, but in a genre that features complex stories it’s not so simple. In my opinion, in the case of the various quests involving Dandelion and Novigrad, the improvisation could have been better. Or maybe I’m way off base, there were no last minute cuts, and this was just rough writing from the beginning. Either way, my complaining will proceed as scheduled.

Other games drop references to recent pop culture. The Witcher 3 drops references to Cyrano de Bergerac.

It starts out promising enough, if a bit confusing. Dandelion is missing, and Geralt is trying to track him down by talking to his various romantic prospects, helpfully catalogued in his journal. None of them know where he is, but they each have bits of confounding intelligence to share: Dandelion was interested in the work schedules of a local bathhouse, Dandelion met with a mysterious woman he claimed was his sister, Dandelion was researching a recently deceased nobleman, Dandelion wanted to talk to a certain alchemist, Dandelion was studying different types of fungus.

The player, by this point, is obviously supposed to be mystified at all this, but there’s an explanation coming. First, we confer with Zoltan, who reveals that Dandelion’s “sister” is in fact his current special lady, a singer named Priscilla. We find her performing at one of the city’s swankier inns, and there’s a nice cutscene where she performs a song about Geralt and Yennefer.^[2]

So Priscilla knows the score: Dandelion was planning a heist to steal the treasure of one “Sigi Reuven,” who we soon learn is actually Sigismund Dijkstra, a former Redanian spookmaster turned crime lord. We have to talk to Dijkstra, since he can help us find another big-time Novigrad gangster named Whoreson Junior, who may have taken Dandelion captive. So we found Priscilla, to tell us to find Dijkstra, so he can help us find Whoreson Junior, and then we finally find him he’ll tell us that Caleb Mange of the Witch Hunters has Dandelion. The first time I played the game, by the time I got two-thirds of the way through all this I was a mixture of irritated and confused.

Not Jack Johnson and Tom O'Leary!

Most of the above plays out in a quest called “Get Junior,” which has you visiting the crime boss’s various enterprises (his house, a casino, and an underground fighting pit) and dispatching the endless mooks who try to stop you. There’s another quest, given to you by Dijkstra, to solve the mystery of who robbed his now-empty vault and how.

Of course, we know it was Dandelion, but the “how” of it is rather clever. Remember all the things Dandelion was researching? They all come back into play now. The fungal research was to create an antidote for the toxic spores in the sewer he used as his getaway route. The dead nobleman was impersonated by a creature called a doppler (more on them later), who dropped an explosive device down a pipe that went through the vault wall.

Of course, there’s still the question of why he was doing all of this. Dandelion is not an Ocean’s 11-style heist planner by trade or inclination. This is where you learn bits of the truth in bits and pieces, in this bit of quest dialogue or that one, and out of order to boot. Near as I can tell, what happened is this:

1. Ciri came to Dandelion with a broken phylactery (a magic gizmo, we’ll learn what it is and how she got it later)
2. Dandelion, instead of making use of his extensive contacts in the worlds of both sorcery and academics, turned to local degenerate thug Whoreson Junior, who “knew a guy” (this is the only explanation I managed to find)
3. Whoreson demanded a staggering amount of money for performing this service, so much that Dandelion had to rob a bank vault owned by one of the city’s most dangerous people
4. Dandelion robbed the vault with the help of the doppler named Dudu, but then apparently didn’t give Whoreson the money for reasons I never managed to figure out
5. Whoreson kidnapped and tortured Dudu, who was rescued by Ciri
6. Whoreson’s men chased Ciri and Dandelion all the way to Temple Isle, where they were captured by the Temple Guard (getting them to the other end of Novigrad required a comically long chase sequence)
7. Somehow the Temple Guard got ahold of the treasure too, I didn’t catch how (Dandelion got it out on a barge. It’s not like it was on his person or anything, that would’ve been impossible)
8. Even though he never got the money, Whoreson went ahead and had the phylactery fixed anyway (he gives it to you when you storm his hideout)

Maybe there’s a better explanation for all of this in some note I never picked up or something, but my impression while playing through all this was that the whole thing was a mess. There are some cool things: the heist is mechanically interesting, each of Novigrad’s underground bosses is some kind of interesting hook (except Whoreson, who’s just a disgusting person overall), and at one point you get to talk to a rock troll. I feel like the raw material for an interesting – and less frustrating – adventure is here, but it just doesn’t cohere into anything.

Fortunately, the worst is over. The rest of the stuff in Novigrad is quite good, and in part two we’ll cover the last part of the search for Dandelion, which handily outperforms the first. See you then.

Last week we advanced the Novigrad storyline, and I had a specific reason for doing so that’s turned out to be a bust.

You see, this part of the Novigrad storyline involves trying to track down the vanished bard Dandelion through a list of his now-abandoned romantic dalliances. One of these was with a Nilfgaardian noblewoman named Rosa var Attre. Rosa is a swordfighting nut, and Geralt at one point gives her fencing lessons with a wooden sword. In previous playthroughs, I could’ve sworn you got to keep the wooden sword afterwards, because I remembered keeping it as a comedy item to use occasionally. However, they either changed this for some reason or my addled memory got the Rosa var Attre wooden sword mixed up with the “prop sword” you use in a much later quest.

This is a great tragedy because I was hoping to use the wooden sword. Swords have instant-kill animations when used on foes knocked down by Aard or stunned by Axii, and certain monster trophies give Geralt a certain percentage change to “dismember” (ie, use one of the instant-kill animations). The thought of one day chopping the heads off the terrifying warriors of the Aen Elle with a wooden sword was very tempting, but alas it is not to be. I may just give myself the weapon with the console, once I figure out to my own satisfaction whether that counts as cheating or not.

I wanted to mention these at least once. The loading screens have these cool comic-looking images that keep you up to date on the main plot. I always like when a game takes the time to do something interesting with its loading screens.

Fortunately, with the support of friends and family, I eventually overcame my disappointment. Seeing Zoltan again helped. For those that haven’t played the series, Zoltan is one of Geralt’s dwarf friends who’s shown up in all three games. Zoltan is also an avenue into understanding my own answer to what you could call the “Geralt question.” The “Geralt question” is basically this: does Geralt suck?

The reason I ask is that many people have trouble enjoying the Witcher games because of him. On the one hand, I can understand the objection. Geralt stands at the intersection of several extremely well-worn cliches. Badass loner-type: check, growly voice: check, makes his living through violence: check, frequently cynical outlook on life: check, multiple attractive women try to get in his pants: check. I admit that doesn’t look promising on paper.

I also admit that I sometimes find Geralt’s dialogue frustrating. Too often he’s nasty to people he’s just met without any good reason. His cynicism – expressed in these cases as a dogged determination to interpret everyone’s motives in the worst possible way, often absent any evidence – can wear thin. If this were the only incarnation of Geralt, I might not like him either. But you see a different, less guarded, more likeable, Geralt when he’s around his friends. He shows appreciation and real affection instead of passive-aggressive digs.

Geralt’s friends speak well of him, in my opinion. Zoltan, Dandelion, and Triss, all of whom show up in all three games, are good people. Not without flaws, but good people. They show particular concern for the disadvantaged and downtrodden, commodities that are in ample supply in the Witcher universe. They’re also all thoughtful people (even Dandelion, who’s used as comic relief more than the others, is presented as a thoughtful person in his own way), with a healthy suspicion of too-pat explanations for how the world works. The Witcher is very much on the darker end of the fantasy spectrum, and dark fantasy can get oppressive when there aren’t any likeable people to balance out the tone. Having them as recurring characters also creates a sense of real comraderie.

If I'm understanding this line correctly, Dwarves in the Witcher universe 'train' by drinking beer, which makes sense given everything else we know about them.

With all of the above in mind, I personally have decided to like Geralt, and since I’m the person in charge of this sort of thing, that means everyone else is legally obligated to do so as well.^[2] I don’t even mind his growly voice, a trope that at this point is overused to the point of comedy. They’ve been using the same English voice actor (Doug Cockle) since the first game back in 2007, so to me the voice is grandfathered in.

And when the chips are down, Geralt shows more than cynicism. The games have trafficked in the idea that Witchers are supposed to stay neutral in disputes they encounter, but they haven’t let it become suffocating, and have often drawn insight from the realization that aloof neutrality works better in theory than it does in practice. When gentleness and understanding is called for, Geralt does in fact have it in reserve, which to me makes his occasional obnoxiousness seem like the out-of-place thing instead of the core of the character.

To top it all off, there’s Geralt’s relationships with Yennefer and Ciri, which in my opinion are very well done. But we’ll get to those when we meet those characters. Apologies for the short entry this week, I’ve been busy with other projects. Next week we cover the Novigrad storyline, and speculate about what could’ve been.

Last week we ran into an enemy I couldn’t beat, and resolved to go back to Velen and knock out a few levels first. I ended up knocking out two, because I’d forgotten how slow leveling is in the early game. EXP is just hard to come by. I nip back to White Orchard, and the first quest I do is one where I help a Temerian guerilla recover medical supplies from an ambush site. My reward? Eight XP. Eight. If my calculations are correct, and I believe they are, that’s a single digit number. Even early on, it takes several hundred XP to level up. This might take longer than I thought.

So I traipse around White Orchard, hitting up every place of power for the free skill points, and do the “Devil by the Well” contract. Still only level four. Back to Velen, I do a fairly long and involved quest where I’m reunited with Letho of Gulet, one of the villains from the second game.^[2] Then, three horse races east of Crow’s Perch, then fist fights in three different villages, then the “Woodland Beast” contract, which requires me to kite Alghouls around a stand of trees for like ten minutes. Still only level four. At this point I’m wondering if figuring out the leveling curve was something of a last-minute scramble for CD Projekt.

Finally, I'm around civilized people who appreciate the finer things in life, like punching.

Finally, out of ideas and with so much of my quest log way above me in level, I do the thing I’d resolved not to do: I start grinding out monster nests. When I started this series I promised to not just gush about the things I like but also to bellyache about the things I didn’t. Well, here’s some of me fulfilling the second half of that promise: combat has never been CD Projekt’s strong point.

They have gotten better with practice, of course. The first game put its swordfighting mostly on autopilot, with an unusual system of timed mouseclicks to increase damage. It was a bit clunky and mostly notable for its novelty. The single thing I remember most about the second game’s combat is the rolling – the endless, nonstop rolling. On the higher difficulties (I admit I never played the “Dark” difficulty they added in post-release patches) I would roll practically in between every hit. It wasn’t that much of an ordeal, but the fights often ended up looking silly. There were also some flow-breaking irritants, like the fact that you drank potions from the meditation screen.

The third installment has gotten combat more right than the first two. The addition of a quickstep is welcome, and it is a system that rewards several different kinds of skills: positioning (basically, don’t get surrounded by nekkers/drowners and the like), timing (time your dodges correctly), tactical awareness (ie, knowing when enemies are and aren’t stunlocked – they can’t just be button-mashed to death), and preparation (using the bestiary – one of my favorite series features – gives you a real edge).

There’s no single thing that’s glaringly wrong with it, but for all that it never quite clicked with me either. I played the game for the first time right after I finished Bloodborne. Granted, that’s something like asking a comedian to go onstage right after Richard Pryor, but it was still striking how different the overall vibe of combat was between the two games despite the mechanical similarities. I’m going to list some of the way I felt like The Witcher 3 came up short. None of them are glaring flaws by themselves, but they add up to substantial room for improvement.

I should mention that while I'm using a punchmage build for this playthrough, the criticisms I have of the game's combat apply to conventional builds as well.

1. There’s not as much variety as there seems. There are other weapons, like clubs and axes, that you can loot and use, but there’s very little reason to use anything but swords. This makes sense given the source material, but that doesn’t make it much less restrictive in practice. There are also build options – like the crossbow talents and a big chunk of the alchemy tree – that I imagine hardly anyone uses. I wanted to use a strong attack build at one point in one of my playthroughs because I liked the Bear school armor so much, but once I actually the build put together, I just used fast attacks instead and found they killed things faster. You can play through the whole game using pretty much nothing but Quen and fast attacks, and that seems to be what a big chunk of players do. The combat mechanics never much rewarded experimentation or creativity – not for me at least.
2. Things get repetitive. Throwing new things at the player regularly in an RPG with a fifty-plus hour main quest and an ocean of side content is a tall order. But it still struck me how many of the different monsters weren’t much more than palette swaps of something else. Some stood out – Leshens and Foglings were both unique, and the first time a Fiend ever hypnotized me was something new. But those were the exceptions rather than the rule.
3. Too much HP-sponginess. This might be me rather than the game, because I think this about so many games that I play: I wish that almost every mob did more damage and had less HP. A mob that can really hurt you is the one you remember, the one that makes fights exciting. Instead, many of the The Witcher 3’s boss fights had me repeating that same fairly short pattern of moves, like hit-hit-hit-quickstep-repeat, over and over again.
4. Some gameplay options are frankly overpowered. I wasn’t even a full signs build in my second playthrough, but Igni’s “firestream” mode still could trivialize most encounters. In fact, it’s already starting to do that in my current one.
5. Reverse difficulty curve. This problem isn’t unique to the Witcher series, it’s something I run into all the time in RPGs, but its especially apparent in these games. In my playthroughs the hardest combat encounters in both the second and third games came in the first third or so of the runtime – and that persisted even on subsequent playthroughs, indicating that it wasn’t just about the rate at which I learned the game mechanics.

My Geralt exclusively drinks booze for roleplaying reasons, which makes it a little tricky to get good screenshots of my vanquished foes.

Good combat is important – it can keep me playing a game I otherwise am not feeling. I had no shortage of criticisms of Mass Effect: Andromeda, but by the end I was suprised to find out I’d plunked almost 250 hours into that thing because I enjoyed the combat so much – and not just because Vanguarding is fun, either. I had several different builds I enjoyed playing. By contrast, in The Witcher 3 I can stumble across a bandit camp or grave hag and feel nothing but irritation.

Some of these issues are the product of unique things about the setting, like the fact that you’re playing a specific character with a specific “class” so to speak (Witcher), which makes variety harder to pull off. But I don’t think that excuses everything – some of this is just poor design.

That was a lot of griping. I’m going to be returning to some of this later, but for now lets get back to Geralt. He’s looking for Triss in Novigrad, but she’s in hiding as magic users are persona non grata with Menge and his thugs. Geralt tracks her down to a hidden hideout called the “Putrid Garden,” base of operations for the local underworld honcho called the King of Beggars. This is our first glimpse of Novigrad’s underworld, but it won’t be the last.

After the meeting, you go with Triss on the type of menial job she has to take now to survive: using her magical knowhow to clear the rats out of a warehouse. On the way you have to fight the drowner that defeated me earlier, and I’ve learned something about the game’s leveling mechanics that might be an issue going forward.

You see, if a mob is more than five levels above Geralt, it’s marked (if you have the UI turned on, which I occasionally do to check things) with a skull icon. I don’t know exactly what’s happening mechanically, but this makes them way harder to beat. I know that because I tried beating this drowner at both level four and level five, and there was a huge difference. Same with the level ten witch hunters you fight later on: at level four, a single quick attack from one of them was enough to kill me, and Igni never set them on fire. At level five, a quick attack took less than a quarter of my health, and Igni’s firestream mode was enough to barbeque them pretty much every time.

This may throw a wrench in any attempts to do content that’s significantly above me in level. Honestly, I wish the developers hadn’t included this particular mechanic. They give you the option of doing the different parts of the main quest in any order, but then do something like this? Not the choice I would have made.

Anyway, Triss hasn’t heard news of Ciri, but does recommend an Oneiromancer (who can interpret dreams) named Corinne Tilly. Unfortunately, she’s trapped in a haunted house, natch. Geralt investigates and finds out the hauntings are the doing of a mischievious creature called a godling. This is the type of fun little vignette CD Projekt are experts at.

I saw this jump scare coming and it still made me jump.

Now rescued from the “haunted” house, Tilly is free to use her ability to help me locate Ciri. One thing the Witcher 3 devs consistently get right is the flavor of magic. I’d never heard of “Oneiromancy” before this quest, but its inclusion feels completely natural while at the same time retaining that level of mystery that the series does so well. It also uses the dialogue as an excuse to give the player some optional backstory. Moments like this are important for getting the player emotionally invested in Ciri’s fate.

We learn that Ciri interacted with Dandelion, a foppish (though he doesn’t quite rise to the level of spoony) bard who’s one of Geralt’s oldest friends. Dandelion has recently been left a local brothel in the will of one of his wealthy patrons, but the man himself has disappeared.

Corinne Tilly. CD Projekt can and does write mature and thoughtful stories. For all that, I wish they would lay off the cleavage a little.

Next week, we’ll follow the thread of Dandelion’s disappearance, and I’ll learn to deal with disappointment. For details, tune in next episode.

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Before we continue with the main quest, I’d like to take some steps to advance the game’s biggest and most elaborate side quest^[2]: the search for Geralt’s adoptive daughter Ciri.

I'm normally not a fan of Improbable Fantasy Eye Colors(TM), but I have to admit Ciri's eyes look pretty cool.

Now for an aside that concerns games and their presumed audience.

Without going into exhaustive detail, at some point in the eighties the game industry collectively decided that they were going to consider young boys to be their core audience. I’m quite familiar with this, since I was on the receiving end of it, and am pretty close to the bulls-eye consumer for this model. I played Super Mario Bros. and Zelda when I was in elementary school, Wolfenstein and Doom when I was in middle school, and Final Fantasy when I was in high school. At some point I played Fallout, which detoured me slightly (though permanently) off the beaten path, but broadly speaking their whole “market to young boys” thing definitely worked in my case.

This strategy was the product of an industry trying to find its legs again after a painful crash. But what started as a temporary tactical move calcified into habit, and the (AAA at least) games industry has kept making and marketing games mostly towards me and people like me ever since. Of course, now my generation is well into its thirties, so I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that starting around five years ago a new kind-of-genre has emerged that I’ve come to call the “Dad Game.”

The Dad Game is very much like any other game, except the male protagonist is more likely to have a beard and probably has an adorable little tyke to take care of in between shooting zombies or whatever. The Last of Us was probably the first major example, but there’s also Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and now even the upcoming God of War is getting in on the dad action. There are multiple other games that aren’t explicit Dad Games but nonetheless foreground some kind of protector/vulnerable one relationship. Sometimes it’s with a relative (this was the case with the first Watch Dogs), and sometimes it’s the player who’s the presumptive “dad,” and the (often female) protagonist is the offspring to be protected (I personally suspect this is the dynamic – conscious or not – that led Lara Croft to take so much physical punishment in the 2013 Tomb Raider).

Now what exactly the emergence of the Dad Game says about the games industry or even society as a whole isn’t a question I’m going to tackle at the moment, but I think it’s safe to say that The Witcher 3 has a fair bit of the Dad Game in its DNA. It’s also, in my opinion, the best of the Dad Games, and in some ways a deconstruction of the concept (with apologies for using the overused d-word). We’ll come back to this later – for now, that’s enough theory. It’s time to get down to business. Geralt has grown a beard, the adorable little tyke we met in the prologue is in danger, and we have to find her.

The Emperor only gave us one lead – one of his spies in Velen, a man named Hendrik, has been gathering clues as to Ciri’s possible whereabouts. Upon arriving, a local inkeep directs us towards a town called Heatherton, which is deserted and mysteriously (unlike the surrounding countryside) covered in snow. There is one survivor, though we have to fight off some wild dogs to get to him. Having to fight more than one enemy at a time in our current state is always tricky, but kiting the dogs around the well in the middle of town works after a couple of tries, and the town’s sole survivor recounts the unsettling story of a Wild Hunt attack.

Our first glimpse of our foe: the King of the Wild Hunt. If this playthrough goes right, I will eventually punch him to death.

(As an aside, I’m currently out of town, and don’t have access to my own screenshots. The ones used in this post I pulled off Google.)

If there’s one type of scene CD Projekt has mastered, it’s the “terrified peasant recounts supernatural calamity” scene. I personally very much got a sense of the menace of the Wild Hunt from the villager’s tale – I especially liked the detail about how the frogs went silent before the attack. So the Wild Hunt shows up out of nowhere, and is accompanied by a mysterious sudden frost, and they seem to be after Ciri for some reason. After talking to the villager, we search Hendrik’s house. The man himself has been tortured to death, but the Wild Hunt’s tradecraft seems to be lacking – they never checked for the old key-hidden-in-the-boot trick. Geralt finds the key and uses to open a hidden basement containing Henrik’s notes, including his leads on Ciri.

The notes open up three quests directing us to three different places: Velen (the war-ravaged countryside we’re currently in), Novigrad (the as-yet-untouched wealthy city to the north), and Skellige (the Scandanavian-flavored islands to the west). In theory, you can do these quests in any order. In practice, the game’s leveling curve clearly encourages you to do Velen first, Novigrad second, and Skellige third. Since I want this playthrough to be weird, I resolve to do Skellige first, leveling mechanics be damned.

First I have to get past the Pontar river to the north. All the crossings are controlled by the Redanians, and you need a pass to get past their blockades. Fortunately I’ve leveled up my Axii and can use it to hoodwink a local black marketeer into giving me a discount on a counterfeit one, and I’m on my way to Novigrad.

Novigrad is one of this game's many triumphs. I've personally never seen a more visually convincing fantasy city.

In Novigrad, you can buy passage to Skellige for a thousand crowns. The only hiccup is that I’m broke. I personally forgot about the cost of the journey, and since I haven’t been looting gear to sell but have been spending what few coins I’ve scrounged on Gwent cards, passage to Skellige is not going to happen until Geralt makes a little scratch. So, I decide to futz around in Novigrad for a bit.

Novigrad is a piece of work. It’s the city I’ve been waiting for my whole RPG career, I think. So many cities in games are billed as a metropoli but populated like ghost towns, or their placement makes no sense, or they look nice but are ultimately shallow, or something. Not Novigrad – instead, CD Projekt is the first to give a city like this the same sense of life and reality that Ubisoft has in the Assassin’s Creed series.

What’s more, there’s something to be found in almost every nook and cranny. I’ve already played through this game two times, but within twenty minutes of entering the city I stumble across a quest I’ve never done before – a quick but interesting search through a library to find a book left for me by Jacques de Aldersberg, the villain from the first game. I’m continually impressed that the developers found time to put touches like that in while also making a great honking big AAA RPG.

You “start” Novigrad’s questline by wandering into Heierarch Square in the center of the city. This triggers a cutscene where Caleb Menge, chief legbreaker for the Church of the Eternal Fire, is burning undesirables at the stake. By the time you get to this part of the game, you’ve almost certainly come across the Church of the Eternal fire before. I didn’t cover it earlier, but after arriving at Hanged Man’s Tree in Velen I knocked out a quick quest where Geralt is manipulated into destroying evidence for a Priest of the Eternal Fire who has a side business peddling Skooma (a fictional addictive drug that I guess is something like Opium). EDIT: Oh posh and bother, it’s fisstech, not skooma. I got my pretend fantasy drugs mixed up. Skooma is from the Elder Scrolls series.

They’re an unpleasant bunch who dislike Witchers and other nonhumans and rarely have any redeeming characteristics. I also think they’re a setting hook that never quite lives up to its potential. For now, they’ve run afoul of my Geralt, who is not only a Witcher but also a volunteer fire code inspector.

Any pyres of this size are supposed to have at least fifty feet of setback from any wooden buildings or market stalls!

This was a point at which my “naked punchman” build started to run into cold hard reality. I did advance Novigrad’s main questline a few steps, but at one point I had to fight a level 10 drowner and I just plain could not kill it. Punches do negligible damage to monsters, and I knew that. But I was counting on Igni to get me through. Igni sometimes makes monsters catch fire, which does ticking damage based (I believe) on a percentage of their health, perfect for stuff that’s higher level than I am. But something about the way sign intensity and sign resistance works seems to reduce the chances that I’ll set a higher-level mob on fire. I must have hit that slimy little brat with twenty or thirty Ignis and I never once got the ticking damage effect.

I don’t mind a weird playthrough in terms of the order I do things in, but I also don’t want to be janking around from quest to quest in a way that makes the playthrough disorienting, so I reload an earlier save before the drowner fight. I’m still only level 3, and I think I have to knock out at least one or two more levels before I can win those sewer fights. I do want to advance the Novigrad questline a bit early, for reasons I’ll reveal later. For now, though, we’re going to at least temporarily play the game as it was meant to be played and head back to Velen. We’ll pick up there next week.

Enough futzing around trying to find Yennewhatshername. It’s time to start the main quest.

The Witcher’s 3’s main quest is called “Collect ’em all” (to complete it, you must collect one of every Gwent card in the game) and your first opportunity to start it is by talking to traveling Oxenfurt Professor Aldert Geert at the tavern in White Orchard. He’ll give you your first Gwent deck (of the Northern Realms faction) and play you in a pretty easy match.

This probably won’t surprise you much given the playthrough’s ground rules, but I’m a Gwent man. I got less satisfaction defeating the game’s various villains than I do when I scorch the everloving bejeezus out of an overpowered monster deck. It’s the only card game to successfully make me cackle.

Now I understand that not all of you reading this are into Gwent as much as I am, so I will also spend considerable time covering the game’s various side quests, like the one where you help Ciri save the world from a magical-entropic apocalypse. And from here on in I’ll warn you when there’s a “Gwent part” coming up, so you can skip it if you’re so inclined.

Now that's a round of Gwent.

Today’s Gwent part is gonna be pretty short, because there’s not much to say yet. Gwent is a game where you deploy cards in three rows (melee, ranged, and siege) with the aim of outscoring your opponent in two out of three rounds. The twist is that you keep the same set of cards for all three rounds, so it can be advantageous to strategically throw a round if it leaves you better cards to win the following ones. The professor gives you a barebones deck and plays you in a match that mostly serves as a tutorial.

Part of my fascination with the game comes from its audacity. CD Projekt was already in the middle of making an absurdly ambitious game, and they decided – fairly late in its development if my understanding is correct – to include a dense, elaborate, and entirely optional card game on the side just for kicks. It’s definitely a step up from dice poker. The only thing I can think of to compare it to is Final Fantasy VIII’s triple triad.

That’ll do it for today’s Gwent part, but there’ll be more to come once we can find some more worthy opponents. When I last played the game, the Gwent difficulty level option wasn’t yet in, so there may be some surprises for me in store. Not to mention I’ve barely used the new Skellige deck at all.

Back in the world where fights are won with fists instead of cards, Geralt delivers the griffin head to the Nilfgaardian captain, who reveals that Yennefer is in the nearby city of Vizima. Geralt heads back to the tavern to reunite with Vesemir and blow this popsicle stand, but then everything goes wrong. A woman, angry over the loss of a family member to the Nilfgaardians, picks a fight over the Temerian lily shield that was taken down in the last cutscene here. A bunch of drunken rowdies join in, Vesemir can’t manage to talk them down, and next thing you know there are human heads all over the floor.

I survived this fight using what has become my default White Orchard method – by running away and letting Vesemir do all the work. I do discover something encouraging: certain armed human opponents (which I haven’t fought many of yet) can be interrupted by punches. The Nilfgaardian soldiers with the big halberds no, but a drunken goon with a blackjack yes. I retreat into a chokepoint and pop the guy trying to get through with a good stiff jab every time he tries to whack me. Since I don’t have to dodge, I don’t interrupt stamina regen, and a couple Ignis later the fight is won, mostly thanks to Vesemir. By now I imagine he’s considering just cutting me out of his life. I’m sure he feels loyalty to his fellow Witchers, but at some point you have to take care of yourself.

The tavern fight scene is a good example of CD Projekt’s strengths, but also one of their weaknesses. The strength is the ability to weave the various threads of White Orchard together in a natural way, and to show how the Nilfgaardian invasion can turn everything around it into a tinderbox. The weakness, in my opinion, is that they occasionally mistake nastiness for profundity.

Yes, war is awful, and at times, so are people. But there’s a few too many scenes in this game where almost everyone involved except Geralt and his friends is just an awful lunk of a jerkface meanyhead. It’s a pattern that worries me going forward, since their next slated game is Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk is not exactly the cheeriest of genres, and Mike Pondsmith’s version is no exception.

Maybe I shouldn’t worry. After all, I had a similar criticism of Game of Thrones (the show), so maybe the issue is on my end and not theirs. We’ll be returning to this observation at a couple points later in the story, so maybe just let it marinate until then. In any case, it’s time to finally meet Yennefer, and to part ways with Vesemir.

Vesemir claimed he was returning to Kaer Morhen to hide trails from the Nilfgaardians, but I think he's really doing it as an act of self-care. He must have noticed that even now, Geralt is so blasted he impaled his own foot on a stirrup.

On their way to Vizima, Yen and Geralt barely escape the Wild Hunt – the first time we see them outside of the dream sequence in the beginning – and then, once in the city, meet Nilfgaard’s Emperor. I imagine that someone new to the series might feel a bit confused at this point, with another main character and the main villain being introduced with relatively little in the way of introduction. I knew what was going on, because I’d read the books and followed the game’s promotion closely, but I can see how someone who hadn’t could be overwhelmed.

I personally think Geralt is too built in this game. The guy in this bathtub would play strong safety in the NFL, possibly even weakside linebacker. I preferred the leaner build in the second installment.

My other thought about this section is that I can’t remember a time when I thought a big-name voice actor really added to a game. Emperor Emhyr var Emreis is voiced by Charles Dance, the guy who plays Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones. It was weird hearing Tywin Lannister’s voice come of out someone who is not Tywin Lannister, just as it was weird hearing Sir Patrick Stewart’s voice come out of a Bethesda-vintage potato face in Oblivion.

It’s not that I think he gives a bad performance. But all of my favorite voice acting performances in games have been by relative unknowns. And I can’t shake the suspicion (which I have no evidence to support) that whatever money was used to secure the big-name talent could have been better spent elsewhere.

Geralt has actually been to the palace in Vizima before, in the first game in the series, and the layout and art of the place will be recognizable to anyone who’s played it – a nice touch of continuity. And we have our next goal: find Ciri, with the help of one of the Emperor’s spies in Velen.

I couldn't not include this painting of Ciri. It's one of my favorite things in the entire game.

So now we’re off to Velen, for the start of the game proper. Until now, we’ve been at least partly on rails, and now is the time when the game finally opens up for real. Let me know in the comments if you have any preferences about what order I do things in.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The latest reboot of the film version of the oft-rebooted video game hit theaters this weekend. Read on to find out if you should take the kids or find a babysitter.

1. What’s it about?

In this incarnation, Lara Croft (Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander) is a young woman growing up alone in London. Her father, Lord Croft, disappeared seven years ago while searching for the tomb of a mythical Japanese witch, but Lara refuses to accept that he’s gone and sign the papers that would give her access to his wealth. Instead, she’s working as a bike messenger, kickboxing, and otherwise trying to ignore her feelings. That is, until she gets arrested and bailed out by her father’s assistant, Anna (Academy Award winner Kristin Scott Thomas), who cajoles Lara into accepting the inheritance. But when Lara shows up at her dad’s business to sign the papers, the lawyer (Derek Jacobi, who shockingly has never even been nominated for an Oscar) gives her a puzzle box, which provides her with the first of a series of clues on the location of the island her father disappeared on. And so, rather than take the money, Lara sets off on a quest to find her father (and maybe a tomb she can raid.)

2. Will I like it?

I certainly did. It really felt like a throw-back to older action films like Raiders of the Lost Ark that rely more on an interesting story and good acting than on explosions and special effects. There are certainly parts of it that don’t make a lot of logical sense, but if you choose to see a movie called Tomb Raider you should expect that anyway.

3. Will the kids like it?

Teens of almost all ages probably will. It’s not too long–just under two hours–and moves at a good pace throughout. Younger kids may have trouble following the story, and there is a lot of violence (more on that in a bit), so I’d hesitate to recommend it to younger audiences, but I am considering taking my 12-year-old son to see it.

4. How is Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft?

I thought she was pretty perfectly cast. She has a sense of vulnerability about her that gives the character some depth, but at the same time she looks and acts strong enough (both mentally and physically) to be believable as a young woman who would throw herself into danger to try to save someone she loves, and who would be able to possibly survive said danger. And it definitely helps that they cast someone with such strong acting chops.

5. Is this just a setup for a sequel?

It isn’t “just” a setup: the movie tells a complete, self-contained story. But, they definitely lay the groundwork for more to come. There are a lot of hints throughout at a shadowy organization pulling the bad guys’ strings that will clearly become the main antagonist if future films happen, and there’s a scene at the very end of the movie (see below) that is very clearly setting up another movie. But in case this doesn’t make enough money to justify that, it can end up standing alone and be fine.

6. What’s it rated? Why?

The MPAA awarded the movie a PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, and for some language.” As I mentioned above, the action is basically non-stop, from a bike chase through the streets of London to a foot chase in Hong Kong to the titular raiding of the tomb. And while there is a lot of violence–bad guys spend most of the movie shooting at Lara, and she spends a good amount of time shooting back (albeit with a bow and arrow, rather than her signature pistols)–none of it felt over-the-top. And when people get shot, there is some blood, but again, it isn’t at all gratuitous.

I recall one instance of Lara using the “s” word. There may have been other cases of characters uttering words you’d rather not have your kids say, but there’s not much of it.

7. When can I go to the restroom?

The movie clocks in at 1 hour, 58 minutes, but assume the last 8 or so of those minutes are credits. So hopefully you can last, because there really are very few breaks in the action. Perhaps the best one is when Lara encounters the castaway and follows him to his cave. The scene lasts around 5 minutes or so, and while there’s some character development in it, there’s nothing you won’t be able to figure out as the movie progresses.

8. Is it worth seeing in 3D?

I saw a 2D showing because I hate 3D, and because MoviePass won’t pay for anything else, but this was a rare film where I noticed the scenes that were intended to be 3D and actually thought, “maybe this would have been worth it.” An example, and it’s something that’s been in every trailer and isn’t vital to the plot, so I don’t really consider it a spoiler: there’s a sequence where Lara is being pulled down a river, and manages to grab on to the wing of an old, rusted WWII bomber to keep from being pulled over a waterfall. It’s a pretty cool scene, but I suspect that the real height of the falls would have been even better in 3D. I mentioned above that I am thinking of taking my son, and when if I do that, I may have to consider 3D.

9. Is there anything after the credits?

No. There’s a moment where the movie seems to end–the Tomb Raider logo comes up on the screen–that is followed by another scene, but the logo is only up for a few seconds so no one is going to have time to leave. And once that scene is done, it’s all credits from then on.

10. So, just to be clear: a tomb does get raided at some point, right?

Yes.

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When I left off last week my plan was to get some XP by doing quests that had little to no combat. I did the one where you find out who burned down the dwarf’s smithy, the one where you make a potion for a victim of a griffin attack, the one where you get the old lady’s pan, and advanced the griffin contract a few steps (which only requires you to fight a few wild dogs, with Mislav’s help). I won’t cover them in too much detail. For one, if I cover every quest in detail this series will be a thousand entries long, and for two, I think many of you reading this have already played the game anyway.

Instead I want to write a bit about what they all add up to. White Orchard is a setting with a very focused hook – the tension between the Temerian locals and the Nilgaardian occupiers – and pretty much everything that happens here explores that tension in some way, and how it intersects with people’s everyday lives. At no point during my time in White Orchard did I feel like I played through a quest that was just there as filler. (I’m talking about actual quests here, not bandit camps/monster nests/etc) Seeing it from a critical perspective, it’s startling how easy the developers make it all look.

I include this for nostalgia's sake. It was a promotional screenshot that I used as my desktop background for like six months.

It’s also unique in that it explores the aftermath of a military conflict rather than the conflict itself. Were the Witcher license to be acquired by, say, Activision, I can pretty much guarantee you that the dramatic opening battle cutscene would have been the part you played, and the state of the countryside afterwards likely wouldn’t have been mentioned at all. CD Projekt does it the other way round, which is a good illustration of how – for lack of a better phrase – Sapkowski-ish they are.

Andrzej Sapkowski, if you didn’t already know, is the guy who wrote the Witcher books. And if you know that, you likely know that the first Witcher books were collections of short stories, and to this day the short stories are my favorites moreso than the novels. A good Witcher short story typically takes a familiar (to an Eastern European, anyway) bit of folklore or a well-worn fantasy trope and somehow turns it on its head in an interesting way. In my opinion, Sapkowski’s main gift as a writer (along with his imagination) is his ability to find the pathos in even the strangest situations. It’s just the sort of quality that you would expect to be lost in the transition from one person writing a story to several different people writing a video game.

And yet I consider the Witcher games to be faithful reproductions of the spirit of the written works. I wish I had some theory as to how exactly they pulled this off, so I could recommend the method to other developers. How exactly do you make a well-written game from a management standpoint? The obvious answer is just to hire good writers and then let them write (I believe the second part is the hurdle that fewer companies clear than the first), but that’s too pat an answer to be satisfying for me. We’ll be returning to my thoughts on the good (and occasional average/bad) bits of the series’ writing as we move forward, but that’s enough hoity-toity book learnin’ for now. We’ve got a griffin to kill.

Geralt and Vesemir use a particularly stinky herb called buckthorn to lure the big feathered grump out, and it’s punching time. Or more accurately, setting-on-fire-with-Igni time, as this fella is too many weight classes above me to make a KO a likely outcome. I was worried that the griffin might be able to one-shot an unarmored Geralt, but that’s not the case. However, he does do some damage, which means I’m gonna need some stiff drinks to get through this.

If you think fighting a Royal Griffin is hard, try fighting two and a half of them at once while unarmed, half naked, and shitfaced.

Surprisingly, this fight only took me two tries, though the second one was a close call (I was down to my last bottle of Erveluce). Once again it’s Vesemir doing most of the work, as I make a habit of running behind him and letting him draw aggro whenever I don’t have Quen up. Even though I mostly use Igni for damage, I do actually punch the griffin a few times, just so I can say I punched a griffin.

Stop them! They're getting away!

I do have the crossbow equipped for this fight, as Vesemir gives it to you in a cutscene right before and you can’t unequip things in combat. And I admit that in my weakness I shot it with the crossbow a couple times, though you don’t actually have to. Even when it takes off, it will eventually land again on its own if you’re patient enough. This is the game’s first “boss fight,” so to speak, and I have to say it showcases what the Witcher 3 can do pretty well. It’s an enemy that’s essentially a giant bird, which has gotta be awkward to design, but it has several distinct attacks with fair hitboxes and it periodically gets up and flies around. It also looks great. In fact, pretty much all the monsters in this game look great.

There are certainly complaints to be made about the Witcher 3’s combat, but I’m not going to make them right at this moment. This fight was fun, and I got a griffin head trophy out of it.

With a fresh griffin head hanging from Roach’s saddle, I can now collect my reward for the Nilfgaardian Captain, who says he knows where Yennefer is.

Next week we’ll get down to business and start the game’s main quest. I’ve left a lot of things undone in White Orchard, including the “Devil by the Well” contract, which I may come back for. I have to say, for a guy with a bad completionist bug, not feeling like you have to do everything is super relaxing. At one point a guy by the side of the road said “Witcher! I could use your help!” and I just kept riding. This must be what freedom feels like.

If you’re curious about build stuff, the first thing I took was the talent that makes food regenerate health for 20 minutes, which on death march is useful to point of being borderline OP. Then I took two points (so far) in Axii, since it makes Axii more effective in dialogues. I hate missing out on special dialogue options. I also have a vague plan to specialize in Axii, since of all the signs it has the most comedic potential.

I’ve also discovered something encouraging: while punching hardly does any damage to monsters, it does sometimes poise break them. There’s a lv7 wraith – which is a decently tough opponent in the early game – by a place of power near the mill, and I can interrupt its standard (ie, non-teleporting) attack by punching it. Which means while punching may not be an effective offensive weapon against monsters, it could be useful for defense. It’s like the old saying says: “the best defense is punching.”

Anyhoo, like I said: next week we start the game’s main quest. See you then.

I’m going to start by listing the initial ground rules of the playthrough.

1. No equipment, meaning no weapons or armor. Geralt will be wearing his classy white boxer shorts the whole way.
2. The only thing Geralt can keep on his person is booze. Since Witcher potions are made with alcohol as a base, I consider potions to be a type of booze, so they’re acceptable. This will obviously require us to occasionally have alchemy ingredients in our inventory as well (I think of them as being something like cocktail mixers), so those are acceptable. Gwent cards are not actually stored in your inventory itself, so they’re all right too.
3. No HUD. I actually recommend making very limited use of the HUD even for a non-crazy person playthrough, as I and others have found that it causes you play the game in a very different – and arguably more immersive – way.
4. Geralt must never turn down an offer of either alcohol or gwent.
5. Combat should be as punching-oriented as possible, meaning minimize the use of signs. Rule 5 is, of necessity, going to be one of the more flexible ones, since there are some enemies that you simply can’t defeat with punches alone (that, or it would be painfully boring to do so).

I may add more rules as we go on, but those are the basics. This is obviously going to make the game more difficult, but based on my experimentation so far I believe it’ll still be doable. I have a relationship with game difficulty that’s kind of the opposite of the usual. Usually it’s the young whippersnappers, with their mongoose-on-adderal reaction times, who like the hard stuff. But for me, I always used to play games on normal (or the equivalent) and it wasn’t until later that I started routinely cranking up the difficulty.

No. No, I admit you do not.

To me a higher difficulty is a way of savoring a game. Of necessity you play it a bit slower, and it also makes you really learn the mechanics. I play fewer games than I used to, so I want to savor the ones that I do play. In the Witcher 3, the highest difficulty (death march) is not really that hard, at least not compared to, say, a Fromsoft game, or even earlier entries in the series. Plus, I always enjoy playing what I call “punchmages.” Hence, the five rules.

First up is the tutorial. I had to break the rules here, as there’s several things the game doesn’t let you do yet (like access the inventory screen). My only complaints about the tutorial are that it’s too long and it’s not skippable. If you’re like me, and you start way more playthroughs than you finish, you’re probably a bit sick of it by now. That said, it does its job. It introduces you to the major players (Yennefer, Vesemir, Ciri, the Wild Hunt), teaches the basics of combat succinctly, and then dumps you into the game.

Geralt and Vesemir have a short conversation that covers the plot’s initial setup: you were supposed to meet Yennefer at a village named Willoughby. Problem is, Willoughby’s in a war zone and was razed before you arrived. There’s a nice clear early goal: find Yen. After the cutscene you’re immediately attacked by ghouls. Here is where I have to reveal a disappointing truth: punches do almost no damage to monsters, probably because Geralt’s hands aren’t made of silver. This means that Igni is basically your only source of damage against them – hence the flexibility of rule five above.

I died a lot in this fight before finding a workable way of cheesing it. Basically, you go far away from Vesemir and draw one ghoul away at a time. Then you Igni it and kite it with dodges and positioning until you can Igni it again. At this point I’m already having doubts about this whole no-equipment thing, but the secret to being an obnoxious contrarian is persistence, so I persist. Vesemir, fortunately, is a good sport and cheerfully does most of the work in this fight. He doesn’t do much damage but he does draw a lot of aggro and periodically knocks enemies down with Aard.

We proceed to the village and witness a traveling merchant being attacked by a Griffin. The game does something clever in this cutscene: Vesemir gets hurt. Not badly, but it does introduce a note of vulnerability to his character, and probably draws a note of concern out of most players, which pays dividends later. You could say that CD Projekt does the small things well – you could also say that every thing, taken individually, is a small thing. Saying a developer does the small things well is kind of like saying they do everything well.

On to the first town. The first stop is obviously the tavern, where another short but well-done cutscene plays. We learn that the village of White Orchard, once part of Temeria, has recently been annexed by the Empire of Nilfgaard, and the locals are none too happy about it. This conflict is the setting hook for this first part of the game. I’ll cover this a bit more later, but suffice it to say that TW3’s nuanced take on war and its various unpleasant realities is a strong point.

Geralt, it turns out, is a lightweight. This is what ONE Redanian Lager does to him. I know it's on an empty stomach, but still. The blurry thing next to his feet is a lv1 wild dog, which is an opponent that must be treated with respect in these conditions.

After all this, you’re finally detached from Vesemir’s hip and allowed to play the game proper. First order of business: find some hooch. This proves surprisingly difficult! Apparently, the good citizens of White Orchard prefer the hard stuff, and the only alcohol for sale in the tavern is the likes of alcohest and dwarven spirit. Problem is, the game considers these things to be alchemy ingredients, not food, meaning you can’t drink them (unless you make them into a potion first, which I don’t have the ingredients to do yet) and they don’t restore health. Since we’re playing on death march, my health doesn’t regenerate unless I eat, and it’s already low after occasionally getting hit while watching Vesemir solo a group of ghouls earlier.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: good old fashioned RPG-style home invasion. Geralt, still humiliatingly sober after almost two hours of total gameplay, methodically enters and ransacks every house in White Orchard, often while their owners look on just a few feet away. Of course, this isn’t unusual in RPGs, and people often complain that it’s unrealistic. In this case, however, I find it perfectly plausible. I can tell you that if a nearly naked stranger entered my apartment in broad daylight and started rummaging around for alcohol, I would probably just let him. “Nothing good will come of getting involved in this,” I would say to myself. “Just don’t make eye contact and wait for him to leave on his own.”

Seven or eight burgled houses later, I’m beginning to doubt the patriotism of White Orchard’s inhabitants. Their houses are chock-full of Redanian Lager and Erveluce (which I believe is a type of snooty elven wine), but there’s not a single Temerian Stout to be found. This is why you lost the war, fellas.

I punched this drowner so hard his brain came out - you can see it lying there next to the path. Which is fortunate, because you need a drowner brain to make your first HP-regenerating swallow potion.

At this point I should cover a few mechanical things about playing with no equipment or HUD. One is that fights are longer. I did in fact kill the drowner above by punching it, but not before I whittled its health down with Igni first, and even then it took forever. If I’ve learned nothing else from this experience, it’s that Witchers don’t get paid enough. Drowners are tough. This guy took as many clean hits to the jaw as Ali did in all three Frazier fights put together, and that was after I set him on fire multiple times.

Another is something that’s true of many aspects of HUD-less play: you’re immersed more. Since you can’t see your own health bar, you have to gauge Geralt’s chances by how much blood is on his character model, and you never quite know if the next hit is going to kill you or not. It makes things tense, if nothing else.

One obstacle is that I’m still level one, and recovering from just one fight requires me to drink several beers – this is unsustainable, as I’m drinking them faster than I can steal them. I’ve decided to use a tried-and-true RPG cheese method: do as many quests as possible that don’t require combat, to build up my XP a bit. We’ll cover that in next week’s installment of The Puncher 3. Stay tuned.

<Rob1992> ...oh wow i think for the first time in years we might have jehova's at our door
<CO2_work> reminder: if you are extremely offensive to them they might put you on a blacklist
<mie> is being put on a blacklist good or bad thing in this context?
<Cheez> we had some come to our place once when i was living with friends. we were in the middle of stripping wallpaper, so wearing protective gear and had sheets down, we saw them coming so duct taped one of our guys to a chair in the hallway and gagged him (he was a willing participant) my housemate then opened the door to them and from their perspective it looked like some sort of execution or
<Cheez> something, two guys in those disposable white protective suits, plastic sheeting everywhere and a guy tied to a chair and gagged.
<Cheez> they said something along the lines of "oh, we will come back when you're not busy" and ran

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