Something Ends, Something Begins: A Retrospective On The Witcher Saga (Part 22)

Welcome to the final official part of Kyle and Claudia’s The Witcher Retrospective. This is the Q&A between them about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Considering this was Kyle’s entry into The Witcher Saga, the different perspectives he has with Claudia will prove to be interesting.

If you want to read their previous parts of the retrospecive, you can find all 8 books, the first game, and the first season of the Netflix show here. For The Witcher 2, you can find them here and here.

If you missed the previous part, which is their analysis of The Witcher 3, you can find it here.

Convening The Conclave On The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Claudia: I got thoughts, especially because I will say the last third of the game is really good.

Kyle: Ok, interesting, I think that the last half of the game is a bit rushed, but we will discuss that I’m sure.

Claudia: We’ve both read the books, we’ve both consumed outside Witcher content, you more than me. But you know, I’ve watched the show I’ve been around. Yennefer not being in the first two games is a very big decision on CD Projekt Red’s part, but in the third game they chose to reintegrate her into the story, so there’s a lot of things here to think about. The first is how they handled that reintegration and whether or not you feel like that worked or didn’t work or was in character or was not in character, because you know they had to make some concessions for a fact they chose not to put her in the previous two games and how many of those concessions really make sense? And then just the general change in demeanor of Yennefer between the books and the game. Now, I will say this, I actually think the game does a pretty good job with getting her personality. There’s things she does where I go “Yeah, that checks out.” But I think you could make an argument for some things she does being slightly out of character, and you know that character and love that character more than I do, I’m definitely a Ciri person. So, I wanted to open with, you know, how are you feeling about book Yennefer versus game Yennefer? And how do you feel about the reintegration? I definitely think it was the right choice to bring her back into the story, and I’m sure you agree. But how they did that and what you might have preferred to see if they had chosen to do it differently?

Kyle: So, this was my introduction to Yen back in the day. So, my first initial impression of her was “Oh cool, I like her.” Little did I know how much I would grow to love her. How they integrated her from the books, I think is handled mildly ok. I stress mildly because there are some stuff in here that I don’t think quite works. She’s a bit too cold compared to where she was at the end of The Lady of the Lake, she’s far more her short story self before she grew as a character. Her distance with Ciri is very, very strange like outside of the one scene where she hugs Ciri at Kaer Morhen, I don’t think she ever interacts with Ciri afterwards like she’s just very blank with Ciri. It’s very confusing. But there’s even that scene where you go when you travel to Skellige, near the end of the game with everybody and Ciri and Geralt are like laughing and having fun, and Yen is just sitting off watching them and I’m like “Why is she not joining them? That’s her family. Who she loves dearly, and she literally sacrificed her life for?”

Claudia: I think it’s interesting you bring up that exact scene cause when I saw that scene, my interpretation of it was more along the lines of “Oh she’s enjoying seeing her family together again.” Right, I read warmth into that, but maybe wasn’t there perhaps? But like I 100% agree there aren’t that many scenes with her interacting with Ciri, but it’s just interesting to me that you bring up that moment cause I loved that moment.

Kyle: I mean fair enough if that’s your read on it. Like it’s a video game model, not an actor, so it’s not like we can read a whole lot into it. But, you know, I just read it is very cold and it just doesn’t seem like Yen to me, and especially because we pair this up later with when Ciri is in Novigrad with you, she has a line to Geralt saying that “…they have plans for me. It was the sorceresses of the Lodge once, now it’s my father, even Yennefer…Avallac’h is different.” So, you’re going to trust the eugenics obsessed Nazi over your own mother? I’m very confused.

Claudia: I feel like we should table Avallac’h a little bit because I’m sure that will come up later. 

Kyle: Yeah, fair enough, table the Nazi.

So, I don’t know like this was my introduction to Yen, this is what I knew of her for a long time until I read the books, which granted, I read the books the moment I finished the game. So, like that wasn’t actually a long time there was like 2 weeks. Her plot in Skellige is almost a repeat, just with additional things added to her scenes in Tower of Swallows. Where she steals a religious artifact from the Skelligers, fucks over their culture and fucks over an area of their land, all in the quest to go and find Ciri. You know, replace the mask with the gem she stole, replace the necromancy in the garden with the Sedna Abyss, and it’s just Tower of Swallows all over again. In the end it is a complicated thing in the fact that there are times that they nail her perfectly. And then there’s other times I don’t think it quite works. That opening dream sequence is technically followed by a continuity error with Geralt saying she’s never been to Kaer Morhen, which is false. She’s been to Kaer Morhen on several occasions. But like that’s very much early Yen. That was a good version of her.

But then as the game progresses, like her excuse for not finding Geralt in the interim because she gained her memory faster than him was “Well, I’m working with the emperor.” Which is incredibly out of character. She couldn’t give a flying fuck what Emhyr thinks, if you remember she insulted him directly to his face back in Lady of the Lake. Ah, so you know she couldn’t give a flying fuck about Emhyr, and neither do I. He’s an asshole and deserves death, which is what he potentially gets depending on your choices. So, that felt very strange to me. Her first appearance to Geralt where she refuses to hug him, remember in Stygga castle after you had just obliterated Vilgefortz and all of Geralt’s friends had been murdered and everybody is miserable and tired and covered in blood that you just went up and kissed him? Do you not remember this? This was like four years ago. I understand that the game says it’s eight, but it was four years ago. 

Claudia: I will say if you’re going to critique timelines, I think do treat the characters like they are acting as if the timelines of a game has established are real. Cause the writers of a game would have been writing as if the game’s timeline was the accurate one. Not defending all the choices here, but for that version of Yennefer it was eight years ago.

Kyle: I know, but that happened at 1268 and this is 1272.

Claudia: Right, but they’re making things up so and if that’s how the writers are writing and you’re going to judge them for a math error, that may have been enforced upon them by, you know, whatever they as a group had to decide was for timeline, right? I mean. Again, you can judge her for the eight-year gap, but I wouldn’t necessarily treat her like she’s ignoring a four-year gap when just that version of Yennefer believes eight years have passed. That’s how she was written. You can critique the writers for the time discrepancies in general, but I would at least throw that bone out there, you know. If you’re going to critique their behavior based on timelines that they’re not adhering to that’ll throw a wrench in it.

Kyle: Yeah, fair enough. I think the greatest issue I take with this version of Yennefer outside of her weird distance from Ciri and working with Emhyr is “The Last Wish” quest itself. I think that quest is interesting because I both hate it and love it at the same time. It’s a weird dichotomy. That it has some brilliant moments. I think the ending of that quest is beautiful, beautiful moment. Makes me tear up every time. But the impetus for it is very, very strange. Because it essentially is “I doubt this wish”, which had nothing to do with love in the first place. And if you remember her entire thing about the wish in the books is that no one ever cared about her, ever. She was a disabled woman and eventually became a sorceress. She had to fight for everything she’s ever had and so when Geralt makes a selfless sacrifice to make one final wish to ensure she survives the fallout of the Djinn, she feels eternally grateful because no one ever cared about her, her well being. No one ever cared and someone actually does. And so, the implication that the love is false and is of the wish is insulting to me and the character and the Netflix show did the same goddamned thing! I want to throttle whoever came up with that.

Claudia: I feel like we had this discussion back when we were talking about the short stories, but I understand where their interpretation of that wish comes from. It’s left very ambiguous in the book as to what that which actually entailed, and it’s implied that that wish did bind them together in some kind of fate, and I think that the interpretation is justified. First of all, I’d like to point out, you know it’s not an insult to you, they don’t know no one is trying to insult you. But I get where they got that impression from. I don’t think that’s a horrible misread. I think it was meant to be more subtle in Sapkowski’s version because fate is a really big theme in all of his work, but fate usually doesn’t work the way people think it does, right. The way Ciri and Geralt come together is all about fate. But I think it’s perfectly justified to say that wish accidentally or intentionally, actually, technically because it was intentional on Geralt’s part, bound their fates together, twisted them up into a knot that you know, regardless of the number of times they drifted apart and came back together over the years, it was their fate to eventually find themselves together. I think in the books the differences is they both kind of accept that right? They’re still able to have relationship problems, right? I mean their care for each other isn’t wholly generated by the wish necessarily, but their fates being twined together, does feel like, you know, an overt sort of implication of that story. So, I understand why the games and the show are taking it in the direction they have. It makes an amount of sense to me. Whenever you choose to bind two characters by fate, these sort of questions are going to kind of come up, so again, I get what your interpretation is of wish, I softly disagree. I don’t know that I wholly agree 100% with the direct interpretation that he wished for them to love each other, cause he? I clearly didn’t. He wished for her to survive, but I do think that wish bound them together in a way they weren’t necessarily expecting. I don’t think Geralt was thinking of it when he did that. When he made that wish, I don’t think he realized how tightly that would bind them together, but I do believe it did so I get that interpretation. And I think it’s justified and, in some ways, more romantic because if you allow them to sever that thread of fate and they come together anyways, which I’m sure is how we both played the game, that speaks volumes of their dedication to each other. Which, if you think about it in the context of the books right, they finally come together in like the first book right or second or whatever? At the fucking academy bombing bullshit that sets everything off.

Kyle: Thanedd Coup. They reunite at the Hoffmeier farm technically. 

Claudia: Right, but that public declaration they make together there. So, me it’s at that point where if I were Yennefer, I’d want to sever something like that just to prove that it was true. Like I get kind of the direction they went with that and there’s something romantic about them choosing each other first and then willingly cutting the thing that bound them together before they chose each other and then still choosing each other afterwards. I think it could have been framed better and that context that I just gave is so important for some of the romantic reading of that. Right, if they had brought some of that context in that mission would feel a little bit different. 

Kyle: I think your reading of that being more romantic is valid if and only if that was the only way the quest could play out. The quest can play out as Geralt literally saying “The magic is gone.” 

Claudia: Because it’s a choice-based game.

Kyle: He’s an authored character!

Claudia: Right, but they made the choice in the first game to make this an RPG with player-driven choice determining the outcome of the story, and so it doesn’t matter if he’s an authored character for the sake of these games, Geralt is driven by the player. 

Kyle: Shouldn’t be. 

Claudia: Right, that’s a whole other discussion, which I think that maybe almost too much for this analysis, because you and I have different preferences for games. I do not like authored characters for games. Part of what made it difficult for me to play The Witcher games is that he is a pre-authored character, and I didn’t enjoy him. I’ve never particularly been fond of Geralt as a character. My favorite character is Ciri, so I struck out the game because I wanted to finish this series out, but ultimately, him being Geralt weakens the game for me and weakens the story. 

Kyle: I play it and I choose the same choices every time because I’m playing Geralt, I’m not playing another character, I’m playing Geralt. So, there is no point in having choices to me at that point.

Claudia: Which is good, but also kinda undermines the thing that makes the game great, which is probably why I enjoyed the last third of the game more than you. While you felt like it was rushed for me, the last third of the game is where your decision-making and impacts really shine, and I was even getting like Dragon Age Origins vibes off of it. Which was crazy for me, I haven’t had that feeling in years.

Kyle: Just to go back to “The Last Wish” quest real quick. I do like how before you get the choice she does say “I thought you would be a stranger to me. But nothing’s changed.” I’m glad they didn’t have her change her feelings, because boy howdy, that would have pissed me off. But Yen, she’s in character for some of this game and then out of character for some of the others. I think that is the most concrete way I can say it. And most of that is revolving around the way she treats Geralt and Ciri, which is kind of odd because you know they’re supposed to be family. And I’m really not sure what’s with her being the court mage to Nilfgaard, that’s incredibly out of character. But I don’t know like this was my introduction to her, so I can’t be incredibly harsh on it simply because if it wasn’t for this, I wouldn’t have found the character that I deeply loved from the books. But also, this isn’t the character I love if that makes any sense at all. 

Claudia: Sure, I do think touching really briefly on her working with Nilfgaard. I do think they could have spun that and maybe they just didn’t convey it properly as we know for a fact Yennefer will do anything to get and help Ciri. I think where they kind of fumble a little bit there, is her attempting to grant the sorceresses some kind of sanctuary or political immunity via Emhyr and Nilfgaard, right? The problem being of course that I never interpreted Yen as being very fond of the Lodge.

Kyle: Nope, not at all.

Claudia: As long as she is safe, I don’t think she would stick her neck out, especially not for fucking Philippa. So that was interesting, but I can see her working for Nilfgaard if Emhyr came to her and said, “My daughter is in danger, and you must help.”

Kyle: I’m going to be straight with you. She wouldn’t accept it if he said, “my daughter” if he said, “your daughter”, she would have accepted.

Claudia: I think if Ciri’s life is in danger…I mean they were going to give Ciri up to him and kill themselves because that was the only way, right? She would do it, especially if she’s in a bad way and had lost her memory. I mean, again, I know this is not exactly how the games play out, but I can see her working with him. If she felt that was the only viable option to save her daughter. 

Kyle: But remember, she only accepts the suicide thing at the end The Lady of the Lake if Emhyr promises that her daughter is safe, not his, and that word choice is deliberate. 

Claudia: Right, she can say that all she wants that doesn’t change what he says.

Kyle: And he responds with “You may be certain that I shall not harm your and Witcher Geralt’s daughter.” 

Claudia: Right, he acknowledges her as their daughter. It does not mean that he wouldn’t use that term. He might appeal to her as “But Yennefer, it’s your daughter.” He might appeal to her that way. I don’t think though she is so stupid as to just not help him cause he won’t use the right words, right? I think he would use the right words, but to say that she wouldn’t help him because he refused to use the words “your daughter” when her daughter is in danger? Absolutely not. The woman has a lot of pride, but Ciri comes first. 

Kyle: Fair enough, I think she would have manipulated Emhyr into giving her the right words. She is petty and can be incredibly petty when she wants to be. But yeah, I think they should have dug more into her working with Nilfgaard. In The Witcher 2, Letho was working for Nilfgaard, and he found Yennefer. And so, one would assume, Yennefer was imprisoned by Emhyr, and he was using her for something. But instead, it comes out that she’s working with him willingly, and I can only buy that under certain circumstances, and especially because she keeps saying “We have to go update Emhyr. We have to go update the Emhyr.” She’s like “Hey we have to go take Ciri to Emhyr, we have to take Uma to Emhyr” and I’m like “What? That’s your daughter, you don’t give a flying fuck about him.”

Claudia: I do wonder, and this was a situation that a book Yennefer never came into, if book Yennefer knew that she could, with enough manipulation, eliminate Emhyr. And put Ciri in place as the Empress if she would be willing to attempt it. I know she’d put Ciri’s choice first. If Ciri said “I don’t want to do this” I do believe Yennefer 100% would stand behind that. But I wonder if she had been given those choices at some point in the books if she wouldn’t have made some decisions in that area, right? I don’t think her taking Ciri to Emhyr has anything to do with Emhyr so much as it does with her in the back of her head going “What’s the safest place for Ciri? Well, if she sits on this throne and I’m her advisor, that changes things.”

Kyle: I think their intention was to mirror The Lady of the Lake where in order to get the Lodge’s help, Yen agreed to bring Ciri to the Lodge. I think the big difference is that while Emhyr is the head of a massive empire, he’s not a sorcerer and all the sorceresses that used to work for him, he no longer trusts, and they don’t trust him. So, with the Lodge she knew she couldn’t outrun the Lodge, she can outrun Nilfgaard. So, in the books, she was painted into a corner, here. I don’t think that so much. 

Claudia: No, that’s fair, that’s fair. 

Kyle: I think their intention was to mirror her choice with Lodge. I just don’t think it works.

Evolution Of The Witcher Saga As A Game Franchise

Kyle: Now that we’ve played the three core The Witcher games, what is your opinion on the evolution of the games? How they have changed, how they’ve improved, how they’ve regressed, anything in between are and overall, what is your opinion on them being a primary cultural touchstone in the Western world for this franchise? 

Claudia: So, I’m going to touch on the second part first, because I think that’s a very much you biased question, in the sense that you know already that I don’t care. I actually think that The Witcher 3 by the end won me over. It being the primary cultural touchstone doesn’t bother me at all. Same way that you know, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man being the primary cultural touchstone for Spider-Man doesn’t really bother me. I of course am a person who enjoys arguing for the sake of arguing, there are characters I love, and I like getting into debates about their representations and meanings and theocraticals and story and theory, but that’s just because I enjoy it. It doesn’t bother me that when people think of a Witcher, they think of this game. I think this game captures a lot of The Witcher in ways that were surprising to me. The games are correctly grim and dark. The sexism, though, is probably the only problem I have with it. But to be fair, it is my opinion that the books have the same issue. I think the games exacerbate it a little bit more because it’s a visual medium and there’s player agency, but I consider the books sexist, I also consider the games sexist in a lot of ways. So, while it bothers me that the primary cultural touchstone for The Witcher is so overtly sexist, the advent of the Netflix show, which I think is trying to avert some of those things the best they can, is generally good because of that reason. So, it doesn’t bother me, but this is, you know, people’s primary avenue into The Witcher verse.

In terms of the games kind of overall evolution. I think I’ve mentioned the first game feels very much like a classical CRPG. It clearly borrows a lot from that, and there are things about it I like. I will say I’m speaking at a disadvantage here because it’s been so long since I’ve played the first two games, but there are things about both those games I enjoyed. Game two was a huge step up from game one. The decision-making was important in both. The factions were important in both. But The Witcher 3 really is like a night and day difference. The thing that got me by the end of The Witcher 3 is that I do believe in Witcher 1 and 2 you there’s a lot of decision making, those decisions are important, they’re meaningful, you know it’s a good RPG. The Witcher 3 gave me, I think I mentioned earlier gives me Dragon Age Origins vibes. And what I mean by that is there hit a point in the story where the depth of the decisions I made and the impact they had really started catching up with me and really started hitting me and I haven’t had a game do that in a very long time. I am a huge fan of RPGs of all kinds, so I was delighted to see how many little side quests tied together. How many small decisions bled up into bigger decisions. How many things came full circle. This game is big, it’s unwieldy. There is definitely a middle chunk that I find incredibly boring. But holy shit if you play through that middle chunk and you pay attention and then you finish out the game, they reward you for that. And I think that was just kind of phenomenal to see.

I completely understand why people list this as their favorite game, and I think if you’ve never played a choice-driven game before of that level, then this game can definitely open your eyes to the possibilities with this kind of storytelling. That it requires a lot of work on the writers’ part and a lot of work on the game designers’ part, I mean the way things had to interconnect, the systems they had to put in place for when you are finishing shit out of order or incorrectly. There’s weaknesses in some areas, but I really can’t understate just how well done The Witcher 3 turned out to be. And I’m glad I stuck it through to the end of this game, cause I was really, you know, I was struggling. And I thought about finishing it by just watching a Let’s Play, I’m glad I played it, that made such a huge difference. So really, really happy overall with the way the games changed over time.

Kyle: I think the way I always describe it to people of my feelings on the games, like if you’re going to ask me for a Witcher thing I’m going to hand you the eight books and I’m going say “to go read them, cherish them, love them, wish for more.” But, if I’m to say something else other than the books, the first game nails the tone. Everything is shit, everybody feels miserable, the primary color is grey, and it just feels incredibly like a cynical world built from a man who grew up in the Cold War-era Soviet-controlled Poland. That’s the tone of the books. The second game nails the story, the political intrigue, everything going on there, lots of fun. And if you know the books very well, there’s a lot of stuff coming back like Henselt constantly wanting to take Upper Aedirn, and I mean, that was actually an entire concession in the Peace of Cintra in the books. And then the third game has the characters. And I think that’s the way I describe the three games is each of them have their own pros and cons, it’s really what you’re looking for. Are you looking for tone? You looking for story? You looking for character? And as far as gameplay-wise, I think they evolve pretty well. I will say that I actually kind of prefer playing The Witcher 2, just from a playing standpoint, I don’t know how to describe it beyond that. I enjoy playing The Witcher 2 a little bit more. I find The Witcher 3 a little bit long in the tooth and I don’t find its combat nearly as interesting as The Witcher 2. Even though they’re roughly the same system there’s some changes that make it less interesting. 

Claudia: I think that’s interesting cause I like The Witcher 2, it was definitely an upgrade combat-wise from the first Witcher game. I feel like the Witcher combat in the third game has a couple of sour points for me, and one of those is the length of combat time. This is something I just personally with games have an issue with, if your fight, even your boss fight takes more than 30 minutes for me to do, fuck you. Basically, I don’t have time for that. As someone who is an adult trying to get through life. If I have to slot away two fucking hours and I might die in the middle of it to finish your boss fight, I can’t. It doesn’t matter how good the combat system is. The Witcher 3 though as we got deeper into the gameplay like, especially in the last third the combat really picked up for me and that could have just been the fights were more high stakes and so I was more invested in like finding strategies to work around my opponents. And I’m also shitty at reaction-based combat, so I think by the last third I’d had enough practice that I wasn’t like stumbling over myself all the time. I definitely felt like it was better than two, but again, speaking from a place of having not played two in a while. 

Kyle: Yeah, what fight took you 30 minutes in either The Witcher 2 or 3? There shouldn’t be one. 

Claudia: I don’t think any one fight took me 30 minutes. Two was alright. I mean like I said that was more of a flaw of three, but the combat wasn’t as deep for me in some ways, like I thought that may also just be a mastery issue, where like I said, I feel like I put more hours into three so by the end I was actually using strategy instead of just spamming the attack button, whereas with two it never really felt like I mastered anything. And again, that might be on me, and I didn’t enjoy a lot of the bigger fights as much as I enjoyed them in The Witcher 3 like some of the final fights just were fun for me.

Kyle: I think the biggest difference between their combat systems, there’s a lot more depth in here. I could get into and some of it I don’t even know because I don’t play certain builds, but I think the easiest way to explain the difference between The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3 combat system is fast and strong attack. So, in The Witcher 2, certain enemies were weak to fast attack, certain enemies were weak to strong attack, and you had to alternate between them. You had to, you know, be good at countering, you had to know what you were doing. In The Witcher 3, the differences between fast and strong at the very beginning is negligible. It’s 21 points of difference of damage and the fast attack can get off two attacks in the space strong attack can get in one, so effectively fast attack is the only one. And as you upgrade, it’s a waste of points to upgrade both. So, you end up focusing on one even the gear prioritizes one over the other, so you end up spamming one attack over and over, because that’s all that’s useful against everything. Nothing is weak against certain attack types anymore. It’s just spam, spam, spam, you know, whack whack, whack done. So, whereas The Witcher 2 required some thinking, some strategy, granted it was very surface-level strategy, didn’t require much, it at least was something. With The Witcher 3 I play on a controller so I’m spamming square for fast attack, and that’s all I do all combat. 

Claudia: Right, maybe I made more use of like parry/dodge and like alchemy and signs and stuff. But like I said, that’s like a mastery issue where I put more time into The Witcher 3. So, by the end I was really proud of myself for dodging attacks and shit, right. I’m a terrible game player, so the fact that I was using the dodge button at all was like insane. 

Kyle: You’re a witcher you’re supposed to be dodging. Those pirouettes, man, those pirouettes. I mean, fair I think you know you’re the game professional I’m sure you would agree that game feel and as far as gameplay-wise in depth is subjective.

Claudia: Oh sure, and I’m pretty sure I very much enjoyed The Witcher 2, as I recall, that was a huge upgrade feel wise from The Witcher 1, so not a knock against The Witcher 2 at all, but The Witcher 3 is at the top of my mind. And right now, Witcher 3 feels like the better game feel-wise, but you know that’s definitely subjective.

Kyle: Yeah, I will say in the positive side for The Witcher 3 combat system is they gave him the pirouette dodge instead of just the roll. Because in The Witcher 2 it looked really, really fucking silly to have Geralt rolling around everywhere. Especially cause witchers fight like they’re dancing and so you know it looked rather strange to have him just cartwheeling around. So, the addition of the small dodge pirouette dodge was a great addition. Makes Geralt feel more mobile, makes Geralt feel more like his book self when he fights, I wish that was in two.

Quests In The Witcher 3

Claudia: Ok, this question is mostly general, but that’s cause there’s a lot to talk about. Do you have a favorite side quest, mission, storyline, or thread? There’s a lot to pick from, so I wanted to at least throw a single bone out for like, you know, take your pick about what you want to talk about and then we can both talk about our opinions on that specific one. I do have a follow-up question that’s a little bit more specific and leading. It’s still general like pick a story that applies to this theme basically, but you know, figured we touch on the Baron at some point, so if you want to do that now, you can and I’ll give you my next question on top of that. But do you have a favorite? cause I have other favorites besides the Baron. 

Kyle: I have a similar question towards you, so that fits. I was thinking about this last night cause I figured this was going to be one of the questions because this game is famous for its side quests. So, I was thinking, and I haven’t played it in a year and a half, and I booted it up to do some monster contracts to refresh my memory. I think as far as core quest, main quest, the strongest section as far as act one/act two is concerned is the Bloody Baron. I think that is a given. It’s the most recognizable quest. Everybody loves it. It’s the one that is also very, very Sapkowski using this world using its characters using the rules of this world to explore very, very touchy subjects and explore them in a nuanced and interesting way in which every character is interesting and sympathetic, and we care. And it is not an easy quest by any means, and there is no happy ending. It’s just life. And I think that is the books to me, there are no easy answers. Life is life. It’s unfair, it’s shitty, we move on. 

Claudia: Right, so I’m going to throw my follow-up question in here because it was thinking about that because before we got into this today I did some research on what the general conversations around The Witcher were kind of about, mostly because I wanted to make sure I came in with prepared talking points and that we covered a lot of different ground. But the follow-up question to that was how do you feel the game handled more sensitive topics like abuse, abortion and infidelity such as in the Bloody Baron quest? So, seeing as you already touched on that, I’ll throw that second one out there so that you can keep going. Cause I do have my own thoughts here. I’d love to share in a minute. But I want to hear kinda everything first. 

Kyle: You know, this game touches upon a bunch of different subjects and not all of them are given equal screentime. Like I was talking about the Baron just a second ago, but I’m gonna transition to another side quest. I really like that actually touches on something that’s actually very close to me personally. Do you remember the side quest “Black Pearl”? 

Claudia: Vaguely, one of the many tragic lovers in the game.

Kyle: So that is a quest dealing with love and how to deal with love in the face of someone who cannot remember who you are. Dementia patients, Alzheimer’s patients. Alzheimer’s runs in my family. My grandmother currently has dementia. I have already dealt with in the past year walking into the house and my grandmother not recognizing me. So that quest I played it before that happened and it still hit home, but it hits home even harder now that I’ve experienced something like that. When you have someone that’s going through that you would do anything to try and get their memory back. And it hurts to be around them knowing that they barely even know who you are. And the simplicity of that quest you get it in Novigrad “Hey, I need your help go to Skellige.” You go to Skellige you know you go dive in and get the pearl. You fight some drowners then you go back to Novigrad and there is this expectation because of what the game has set up that even if you’re not familiar with this world, that this world is shitty, this world is full of people who are selfish and want to take advantage of you. It’s just like real life. So, you expect this old guy is just basically taking Geralt out on a ride and he’s like “You won’t get your payment till you see me in Novigrad” and you’re like “Ok, something is going to go down here.” Then you get there, and it subverts your expectation of a twist by making the twist that it has no twist. And is actually a very sentimental, very heartbreaking story about a husband who just wants his wife to remember who he is. And that hits hard.

That, along with the bloody Baron, I think, are some of the best explorations in this game of some very interesting topics. You know with the Bloody Baron we have alcoholism. We have domestic abuse. And we have abortion and that is three incredibly heavy topics, all to be lumped together. Just the flow of the quest and how you slowly find out how everybody in that situation was fucked. How no one was going to get out of that family life without some scars. And how everybody kept making the worst possible choices. And yet you completely understand why they made those choices and how that made the situation worse. I have never come from an abusive family. As we have discussed before, my family is a bit of a fairy tale, as you have made fun of it before. And it’s probably why I fell in love with the fairy tale romance of Yen and Geralt and you did not. But I have friends who have had abusive families and the Bloody Baron story touches on a lot of things they’ve told me. 

Claudia: Right, hi! So this is why I wanted to bring up this particular quest. My dad was physically abusive. He beat my brothers. He doesn’t have war PTSD but he himself was beaten by his own mother, who gives a shit. So, I want to preface this with the Bloody Baron is well written like the quest is good, but I feel like a lot of people, and this is like just a personal gripe, right? I’ve mentioned before I try not to get too invested or heated in what people are saying. But at the end of the day people talk about how the Baron is a sympathetic character and I just can’t relate because the truth of the matter is the only people who can afford to have sympathy for abusers are people who are not themselves being abused, right? It’s very tragic, but that sort of mindset that “Oh well, he’s doing it cause he has PTSD. He’s doing it because, you know, he himself. Has been fucked up” is what continues to keep people in cycles of abuse. So, while I think the quest is very well written and true to life right, I mean there’s nothing in those characters that screams inauthenticity. I do think the conversation around that quest is a little bit off. I would never participate in it because it’s something that, as you know, my dad was also an alcoholic and that there’s a lot of misconceptions about what causes abuse and violent behavior in people towards their families. And I don’t think the quest is in a place to be able to go into those misconceptions, and that’s fine. 

But that storyline I think I would have liked better had I not been coming in with that background. There were moments in it that were great, but it’s very hard for me when the game is clearly trying to get me to acknowledge the Baron as like a flawed human who is allowed to make mistakes, or rather did make mistakes and trying to evoke sympathy from me towards him when you know my life and my survival and the survival of my family has depended on not allowing myself to be drawn in to sob stories from people who are violently abusive towards those who are weaker than them, right? Like I just I can’t afford to do so, and so there’s a part of me that doesn’t quite connect on some level with that storyline, and I think that’s fine. Like I said, I think functionally as written, it works very, very well. But it’s part of why I want to bring that up, because I do feel like The Witcher tries to touch on a lot of complex topics and I don’t always agree with how they do it. I don’t always agree with the character decisions. I don’t always agree with their portrayal of these things. I think the Bloody Baron is well written. I think that’s a good portrayal, but I think the conversation around it with everyone being “oh everyone you know fucked up here” it’s like “I guess, but actually the Baron is more fucked up than the rest of them”, because ultimately, to me, he’s subjectively the villain there, right? Cheating is a bad thing to do but not as bad as beating your kids or your wife or whatever, he never beat his daughter whatever. But again, it’s all kind of very, very weird. I would say though, for the most part, 

I don’t remember any other quest that touches on things quite that hard. I mean the Crones part was a personal favorite of mine because I think the Crones are creepy as fuck right. Like they look great like great job. 10 out of 10. I would be scared if I saw that in a forest. And also, Ciri getting to kill them in the end is very cathartic. I love the tower of fyke, I think of it. 

Kyle: “Towerful of Mice” 

Claudia: Fucking love that one too.

Kyle: That felt like a Sapkowski short story, that’s fun. 

Claudia: Yeah! That one was that one was fucking amazing. There are a lot of hits in this game. I just think the Baron is the one that touches the most on like problematic attitudes, right? cause “Towerful of Mice” isn’t. Kind of, you know it does the love thing, which is like very classic trope, but it doesn’t really touch on sensitive topics like domestic violence, abuse, alcoholism, sexism, right? It’s really just a straightforward inversion kind of Romeo and Juliet, as well as like a play with like the sorceresses. Oh God, I could write essays about how I can never say her name, Keira Metz, is like a moron.

Kyle: She’s been a moron since the books. That’s part of her character. 

Claudia: In my playthrough, she tries to go to Radovid. I tried to stop her. I was like “That’s not going to work the way you think that’s going to work!” But she didn’t survive and then I found out later she could have gotten with Lambert, and I was like “Damn it, that would have been better for both of them.”

Kyle: Remember Keira Metz in the books she’s one of those sorceresses that’s drunk the Kool-Aid. She’s so fully into we’re better than everyone else we know what’s better for everyone else, she’s fully into the Lodge 100%. And so, like she’s naive and she’s an idiot. But that’s always been part of who she is. She is a fanatic. 

Claudia: Right, and I mean, yeah, there was a lot with that, but I mean, “Towerful of Mice” definitely was one of those moments were in the game where I was paying more attention. I guess cause you know how you can do some of these quests and you can kind of zone out and just kill the monsters. get the money, keep moving right? There’s moments where you tune back in. That was one, I actually love everything that happens on Skellige for the most part. Skellige is one of my favorite areas of the game.

Kyle: Well, except for all the goddamned sailing, the sailing takes for fucking forever.

Claudia: Right, the sailing is God awful. I will admit I did enable all my fast travel cheats, so that I could stop running everywhere, which honestly probably like if anyone is going to play this enable fast travel cheats. The game is not worth having to backtrack miles of continent.

Kyle: I really like “Carnal Sins” That’s a fun quest. Remember that one?

Claudia: Yeah, so I didn’t finish it because I’m a bad person. 

Kyle: Oh no!

Claudia: I was going to say, you know, another good one though. Uhm, the political bullshit with Dijkstra and Roche and stuff. 

Kyle: “Reasons of State”

Claudia: That I also didn’t finish but enjoyed what parts of it I got to because and then you know, regretted deeply because Radovid took over and you know, not so great. 

Kyle: The ultimatum at the end of that quest is asinine. I don’t know if you’ve read it?

Claudia: I have and that’s part of what dissuaded me from pursuing that quest to the end when I was also trying to stare down the timer and get this game done. But wish I had finished the Dandelion quest. Wish I had finished that one and I’m actually probably going to go back and actually finish them. Not gonna lie. But now that we’re not on the clock like there’s a couple of things I really wanted to wrap up and that was definitely one of them. 

Kyle: “Carnal Sins” is a fun murder mystery. I actually remember when I first played it because playing The Witcher 3 I had no context for the books or anything. I had played the first chapter of The Witcher 1, I got to Vizima and then I quit cause I just couldn’t stand the game back then and so I had no context for it. When Dandelion, as presented in this game is, you know, a dandy, a nobody just kind of an all-around comedic relief and I wish they presented more of his book character, where he’s actually a very intelligent poet, but that’s neither here nor there, the Netflix show treats him the same way, which is fine, whatever. But not really what I want from Dandelion, but it shall do. So, to suddenly go to such a serious section with him, was great tonal whiplash. Usually, tonal whiplash is a bad thing. But here it really kicked me into gear and I was playing it in the living room that I shared with all my friends cause we had co-rented a house for university and so my friend was watching me play and he had no context for Witcher either. He was like “This quest is really interesting” and so he looked up the answer to who the murderer, who the serial killer was so he could see me figure it out. It was quite funny. 

Claudia: This is one of those games where when you get into some of these quests, I mean, like I said, there are ones where you just kind of sit up and start paying attention more. It’s watchable. This is something I might buy for my brothers on our PlayStation. 

Kyle: I think Novigrad is within of itself the weakest zone if I’m going to be honest. 

Claudia: It’s a rough zone for sure, but I think a lot of cities suffer from that. 

Kyle: And I know the obvious thing is “You don’t like it just cause Triss is there.”

Claudia: It occurred to me, though, if that’s the reason then that’s, you know…

Kyle: No, it’s not the reason. But it is a negative in its corner though. I kid, of course!

Claudia: Novigrad to me is a lot of backtracking and it’s a cool environment, but there’s too much there and it’s unfortunate that I also am not a huge fan of quests that take you across the map over and over again. So, whenever I get there and then immediately get told I need to go to a different region. I get a little bit irritated.

Kyle: Yeah, the problem I have with Novigrad is that seeing Dijkstra is awesome, I love Dijkstra, always have, I’m super looking forward to him in the Netflix show because they cast Graham McTavish, an actor I fucking love. But I don’t really care about the criminal element and in Novigrad all the characters are criminal cliches. I read crime fiction, I love the inner workings of criminal organizations and mafias. That is a thing that I will eat up like crazy. I was not at all interested in Whoreson Junior, Cleaver, any of them, they’re all boring. 

Claudia: Oh, I didn’t mind Whoreson Junior specifically, but I think this cause he was such a monster, and it was fun to kill him. 

Kyle: Yeah, I mean fair enough. I just had no investment in it, and I think that is the problem with Novigrad as a zone is that outside of Dijkstra I don’t care. 

Claudia: Interesting, I do like Novigrad for having Dandelion, Dudu, Zoltan, and it has Priscilla who you do grow to adore.

Kyle: The game version of Little Eye, Essi Daven.

Claudia: A lot of the like fun little character things happen in Novigrad and those I like. My issue has more to do with the backtracking and the way quests are kind of spread out. I get lost in Novigrad a lot, so maybe it’s just me getting lost but kind of irritates me but that stuff kind of bores me. I don’t care as much for Dijkstra like I just really don’t like him.

Kyle: Roche is also fun even though you could have imported a save in which you helped Iorveth instead of him in The Witcher 2. Though he helps you on that route as well I suppose.

Claudia: He’s a pragmatic good guy in some ways so I have always had a soft spot for Roche from the games. 

Kyle: I mean, he’s not a book character, so it’s really easy to just go from the games. 

Claudia: Right, ok. 

Kyle: Sorry, I’m being pedantic, let me be pedantic.

Claudia: Listen right and you know all the quest names and you’ve got every single character listed in an index which I don’t. They all blur together after a while. 

Kyle: I don’t have a character index; I just memorize shit.

Claudia: Regardless, it’s hard to like Dijkstra when Roche is an option. 

Kyle: I mean fine. I just like Dijkstra because like he’s an ass but you gotta love him and he’s incredibly adaptive at political maneuverings and the kind of person he is would be, cause to be good at politics you have to be heartless. And so just watching him just casually manipulate everybody is a lot of fun. It was fun in the books and it’s fun here. But anyway, I did some searching to find out why Iorveth is not in this game because potentially you have an imported game where your Iorveth played a major role. Turns out he’s part of cut content. He’s actually supposed to be in Velen, the entire Bloody Baron storyline got rewritten as a result of cut content, apparently, the Catriona plague was supposed to be the big storyline of Velen. 

Claudia: That makes a lot of sense. 

Kyle: And there’s still remnants of it you can find. There’s a couple quests involving the Catriona plague that you find in Velen that don’t really go anywhere, they just kind of end. The Devil’s Pit where nothing happens but apparently was a major location in the original version, stuff like that. Iorveth was supposed to be there looking for a cure, but all of that got cut and as a result they had to rewrite Velen entirely. And that’s where Bloody Baron comes from. Bloody Baron was in the Catriona plot, but he wasn’t as a major or central role, nor did it touch on the sensitive topics that we already talked about. So that’s why Iorveth’s not there. I just found that interesting.

Which of the side quests or zones did you gravitate towards?

Claudia: Right, which I talked about a bit. I think “Towerful of Mice” definitely is really it for me, but I knew he was going to die. I knew no matter what I did, he would die. And I had to do it anyways. The good people in The Witcher really stick with you, and that was like a good person that you just condemned to death, so that’s unfortunate.

The Aen Elle And The White Frost

Kyle: Ok we said let’s table to Avallac’h for later, so let’s talk Avallac’h.

Claudia: Alrighty. 

Kyle: And the ending as a whole with Ciri. So, you know the changes Avallac’h, the changes to Ciri, the changes to the White Frost, the changes to the Elder Blood, what’s your opinion on it? 

Claudia: Ok, so my next question is actually are you satisfied with the way the main plot handles the final conflicts with the Aen Elle as the big bad and the White Frost being made literal? I once said that I believe the books erred on the side of a natural interpretation of the White Frost as opposed to a fantasy one, do you agree, and do you have a preference? So, I think these questions kind of tie together, so I’ll. Start.

With Avallac’h I’ll admit that one doesn’t make sense. I don’t see an in-game reason for him to side with Ciri. I don’t see where that character development came from or how he would have won over her trust. I think they could have very easily changed his name and made him a random faceless elf who had a change of heart and decided to help her while they were chasing her down and it would have been a lot more of a smooth transition. I think the decision there was driven mostly to tie in more book characters than by any sort of logic, just because of everything up till that point with that character wouldn’t indicate he would make those decisions. Moreover, wouldn’t indicate that he and the others were as concerned with saving any world, really not in the way they were going about it. When reading The Witcher, one of the things I did like is Sapkowski leaves a lot of room for interpretation with his prophecies and one of the larger implications of sort of the end of Lady of the Lake is that the White Frost is just climate change. It is a mini-ice age that it’s bound to happen because that’s how planets work. 

Kyle: Yep, absolutely.

Claudia: There may be some amount of magic there might be a real prophecy you know, whatever, but ultimately plagues happen, climate change happens, and it kind of feels more like the prophecy is predicting true events, if it’s a prophecy at all and less like a sort of omen of doom, like Ragnarök or whatever. Ciri. I have mixed feelings. I think the game did a good job with Ciri overall. She’s allowed to be openly bisexual, which is cool. She has a unique fighting style built on her Witcher training and her powers, which is cool. She’s the Lady of Time and Space, which is cool. She can become a Witcher in the end which is cool.

Kyle: All of which was from the books, yay!

Claudia: I mean, sure, but she also gets to step up into her role as the chosen one, more which I also think is cool. Something the books did that I feel like was a real disservice to the character is the emphasis really became on the children Ciri would bear. Everyone wanted her womb or her kids. No one really cared about her as a person except for Geralt and Yennefer.

Kyle: That’s the point.

Claudia: I know that’s a plot point, but it’s also, you know, one of the disappointing things in fiction is we don’t have that many female chosen ones. And even when we get female chosen ones, we tend to be robbed of those chosen ones. Because actually, it turns out it’s her blood and her kids, right that are going to be important to save the world or doom, the world or whatever. And even the elves were just trying to impregnate her. She herself was not as important as the children she would bear, and I never liked that about the books and so turning her into the actual hero of her own story felt nice in a way. They did it at the expense of something I liked about the books, which is the fact that the White Frost was not an actual entity you could fight, but I don’t think the decision to make her the chosen one was a bad one. I would have liked if they could have done that without this White Frost. If they instead could have turned this into Ciri’s journey to free herself of the Aen Elle. It kinda is what it is. The literal interpretation of the White Frost is also a little bit difficult cause it feels kind of out of left field for anyone coming from the books. It makes sense for anyone playing the games and interpreting the prophecy literally, which a lot of fantasy fans will. So, I think within the self-contained world of the games, it’s fine. Not how I would have interpreted it based on what I understood from the books. So yeah, mixed feelings all around. I do greatly like Ciri in the games. She finally feels like she’s getting to live out what the books implied she could live out, right? In fact, Ciri is probably what kept me playing the game up until that last third, and to me, the game improves the minute Geralt and Ciri are together again. As soon as Geralt and Ciri are together again I was all in on the game. I was like fucking agonizing over everything I said to her because that was my girl and I got to be a dad for the last third of that game and I thought that was really cool. 

Kyle: I’ll touch on Avallac’h first because it’s very simple. He’s one of the engineers of her bloodline and he was betrothed to Lara Dorren, and he can barely look Ciri in the eye because she reminds him so much of Lara. Ciri knows this, he blackmailed her into sleeping with Auberon!

Claudia: Yes, that is exactly what I’m referring to is I just don’t see him doing this. 

Kyle: So, like the entire bloody time I’m sitting there like “Why are you trusting him? Why are you trusting him? Why do you keep calling him your friend? What is going on?” And then when the big reveal quote-unquote reveal that he’s obsessed with her bloodline, I’m like “You already knew this. You already knew this! What are you doing?” I was so baffled. 

Claudia: I mean, I would have interpreted that as they’re implying that they went on a lot of offscreen adventures together. I think the issue for me comes in the switch in his characterization, not her characterization in the games because I think let’s take the games at face value, he did something so great it earned her trust. And she even knowing his past, is choosing to trust him. She’d be upset to find out he’s still, as you know, a eugenicist who dislikes her. And to be fair, to the end of the game, he continues to help her so even despite you know what he may or may not think behind closed doors and it’s kind of implied that that lady is just saying that to mess with him. I mean, she already knew, I guess her upsetness comes from a sense of betrayal from a friend and if you interpret their starting relationship in the game as friends, I think that’s perfectly understandable, especially given what a delicate place Ciri was in before she came back to Geralt and Yennefer. I mean she had no one. Especially, you know after the books she had no one! so I’m ok with that. I’m less ok with the changes made to him, again they should have just picked a random elf and run with it. 

Kyle: As far as the Aen Elle being the big bad. Well, in one-page Eredin has more lines of dialogue than he does in this entire game. So, he’s a nothing character in this game. I know what he wants in the books. He’s a very minor character in the books, but I know what he’s after, I know what he’s wanting. But in here “I want power! I’m evil villain generic man!”

Claudia: I thought the game explained that they wanted to be able to cross between worlds and kill people pretty well. 

Kyle: Yeah, but the thing is that he has no personality. In the books, he’s good at getting people to like him. He says the right things, he knows what to say and so even though he is essentially the head of the military arm of the Aen Elle he has wormed his way into Aen Elle politics, and Auberon especially is getting annoyed with him. So, this entire situation I understand where he is, what he’s doing, but in this game, having played it before I read the books, Eredin was a nothing character. He means nothing. He has nothing. He’s a generic villain in a very edgy skeletal costume, who says a bunch of meaningless platitudes that are generic villain monologues and then done. I have nothing of value from him. Reading the books, I understand his perspective, what he’s doing, don’t agree with him, he’s a villain, but it doesn’t matter, I at least understand him. Here he’s nothing and the Wild Hunt I think suffers as a result of they just become generic fantasy frost villains. They are the White Walkers, “Oh no evil generic fantasy villains that bring about frost!” I don’t care. 

Claudia: What do you think makes them less generic in the books? 

Kyle: Well, first of all you have the sudden realization when Ciri crosses over “That’s what this is all about? Ok.” because the Aen Seidhe and the Aen Elle are really essentially the same species. They just have split apart and became separate clans. The Aen Elle, they are the reflection, the dark reflection of the humans in the continent that you know the humans are these imperialist people, these colonizers. Granted, the elves were just like that too, but that’s actually part of the entire thing is that no one owns this land, it was no one’s, we are all intruders on this land, it belongs to no one. So, the Aen Elle are that taken to the extreme that they are Nazis. They believe in an Aryan race, which is them. Anybody born with canines, i.e., aII humans or half-elves or whatever must be killed because they are physically impure. 

Claudia: See, I feel like they conveyed all that in the game. Maybe not to the same level of nuance, but I got the gist that these were elf Nazis. I got the gist of their eugenics program. The gist of what they wanted to do. But keep going cause I’m wondering as your fellow person here to let you bounce things off of me, I’m trying to illuminate how much of your thought process is informed by just having read the books versus how much of it stands alone as critique. Cause I agree that he’s a shallow villain, but I was interested to see your critique of like the Wild Hunt as a whole. 

Kyle: Well, this was my reading before I’d even read the books. Cause remember I played this game before I read the books.

Claudia: I know, but you speak with a lot of references to the books. 

Kyle: Yeah, because that informs my opinion now, but I had this opinion even back then. I felt nothing for Eredin, the concept of the Wild Hunt meant nothing to me when I first played it. Generic fantasy frost villains is the way I described them to my friend who gave me the game. It’s the White Walkers all over again. I don’t care. I think also having Eredin kill Auberon is a big problem. First of all, he wasn’t there like he was off talking to Ciri when Auberon was assassinated. He didn’t personally assassinate him. And there’s hints that he knew it was going to happen, but he never outright admits to it, that he did it, or that he set it up. There’s enough implications that he did it or someone related to him did it. But you know “The king is dead! Long live the king!” that couldn’t have happened. He was off horse racing with Ciri when Auberon died. So, like I’m very confused on continuity. The big twist in the books is that we fear them as like some sort of ghosts. There’s these specters that keep showing up. And then the reveal at the end of Tower of Swallows and then into the beginning of Lady of the Lake is that they are dimension-hopping elves. Like the big twist with them has already been spoiled if you’ve read the books and it’s already spoiled to you pretty quickly in the games, so the big thing about them that they’re not ghosts but they are actually elves. That’s the interesting hook that gets you into them and you understand their ideology and realize they’re Nazis. And you’re like “Oh God, these people are crazy!” But without that, and with Eredin spouting a bunch of cliche villain dialogue, I feel nothing. Does that make any sense? 

Claudia: No, no, it does, and these characters are deeper in the books, part of that is just we get to be in their world for a short time through the eyes of Ciri. But yeah, I was just picking at that intentionally to make you go on a tangent to kind of elaborate further, so that’s perfect. 

Kyle: As far as Ciri and White Frost, I think the White Frost being like this generic fantasy entropy enveloping upon dimensions blah blah blah. It’s boring, it’s uninteresting. It’s cliched. I don’t like it. When I first played it, having no context for the books it came out of left field like the White Frost is only mentioned a handful of times and it was all about the Wild Hunt, Wild Hunt, Wild Hunt and then all of a sudden last-minute switched to White Frost and it meant nothing. I had no context for it. Reading the books, I’m like “This is climate change. What are they talking about?” It’s not some entity that encroaches on dimensions or some shit like that. It’s not generic fantasy, it’s just life. It’s what happens, an ice age, end of story. And also, how does Ciri stop it? Her ability is to teleport through time and space, how does that fight entropy? Like I know what it is in the book she’s supposed to give birth to someone who is more powerful than her and has enough power to eat to open up a portal to bring everybody into another world so that they don’t have to suffer through the ice age. I know what that prophecy is about. I know where that’s going. Here, making her the chosen one, I don’t agree with it. I think that ruins the entire deconstruction and reconstruction of the trope that Sapkowski was doing. But how does she fight it?

Claudia: Right, I mean to you it ruins it to me female giving birth to the chosen one is a trope and therefore of Ciri’s status as mother of the actual chosen one isn’t a deconstruction to me, but that’s a personal gripe and again kind of touches on weird sexist undertones that kind of exist in both the games and the books. I agree with the White Frost thing being handled poorly. I am glad that Ciri is the chosen one regardless. I wish they could have worked that out better. You know she didn’t need to go fight the White Frost, not even sure how you fight that? And there’s a reason they left that off-screen obviously, on top of just there being no way to build up to that in a proper manner, and it really being about Geralt’s relationship with her and that’s the important part. And that is one thing I do, like, right? But this kind of goes back to the fact I did actually enjoy the last third of the game immensely. Regardless of my issues with the White Frost and in your issue of Ciri being the chosen one, they allow the story to not be about that. The story is about you as Geralt and your relationship with her and those final moments aren’t really about whether or not she defeats for White Frost and whether or not she’s the chosen one but are about whether or not you supported and loved her and whether or not your relationship is strong enough to withstand the sort of stresses of fate and disaster. And I think that they’d nailed for sure. The fact that that’s what it comes down to, awesome, I’m very happy with that.

Kyle: Yeah, I agree that what I love about the ending, even though I think that that final section I would say Act Three is a bit rushed and has a lot of narrative cheats in it to get it where it’s going. At least it gets the theme right, the idea that this is about family.

Claudia: Right, and actually speaking of it being rushed to you, I disagree that it felt rushed. I think it would feel rushed if you get to that final third and then you just kind of steamroll through it to me. And also, if you maybe spent too long in the open world, then that last third doesn’t feel very long, but that’s as someone who played it all together that last third of the game is like fucking 10 hours. There’s a lot of content, so I don’t think it’s necessarily rushed. I just think compared to the open world, which you can easily pour hundreds of hours into. It feels relatively short, but it brings everything together. In a way that’s just kind of marvelous to me. So that’s just, I think, a difference of perspective there. 

Kyle: I will agree that I think it’s a bit long in the tooth and I know this sounds odd saying that, it feels rushed and long in the tooth, but what I mean by that is that there’s no room to breathe. I think that’s the best way to explain it. It is one plot point after the other after the other, after the other. I like to breathe in my fiction, and I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m drawn to The Witcher so much more than you is because a large portion of The Witcher is breathing room between major events. 

Claudia: Right, and I loved the ending because after spending most of the game making what felt like inconsequential decisions, the last third finally starts tying things together and then once it starts, it’s like “Alright, you’re. In for it now, doesn’t fucking stop!” So, I greatly enjoyed that last third cause it finally felt like everything was snowballing together so I didn’t mind the breakneck speed or the 10 hours. It needed to be that long, like the ending needed to be hours and hours long, but I’m glad it was hours and hours of just back-to-back content. That was fun. 

Kyle: Yeah, I just wanted a bit more breather room.

Claudia: You wanted to hang out with Yennefer and Ciri and go like have a picnic or something. You wanted a break. I didn’t care. I didn’t need one, but that is ok. 

Kyle: And I will say that when she goes in to fight the white frost, which however the fuck she does that be my guest to try to explain that, does she teleport the snow away? I dunno. Basically, I’m a bit annoyed and I know this from a game reason why it’s there and you can feel free to disagree with me and explain to me why I’m wrong. But it feels insincere that all the memories she has is specifically only of Geralt not of Yen, and only from this game. She doesn’t dream of anything, remember anything from the books, anything with Yen, it’s all Geralt, and it’s only events that happened in the past 10 hours. 

Claudia: Because they are not able to assume that people playing this game have any context for anything else that has happened. So first of all, I’m going to say this I get where your critique is coming from, but I think it’s a dumb critique, I think if you’re going to critique it, you do have to remember that they are building a story for people who have no context for the fact that there are books technically, so it makes sense to me that the memories are only of things in this game. I don’t think that should matter. So, here’s the thing, you can choose to not romance anyone. You can choose to not reunite the little family, and I know you view this as the impossible choice, but the truth is that might be how people are playing the game so well. 

Kyle: Sacrilege!

Claudia: The developers chose what they chose because those are the things you, the player, had direct impact on. If they added anything else in there it starts to lose your impact on the story. I agree with their decision by and large because I think in that moment in that one moment that was about Geralt and Ciri, and it’s ok, that wasn’t about Yennefer. Yennefer wasn’t there in that moment. If you had been playing as Yennefer and Yennefer had been the main character of the game sure, it might have been about Yennefer instead, but I don’t really see a flaw with what they did because you’re assuming a canon that just isn’t being assumed in the game, which is that Geralt is with Yennefer, Yennefer has a motherly with Ciri. Cause again, as you pointed out, Ciri and Yen don’t get a lot of time to bond before this happens. If they had chosen to implement a few side things where you, Yen or Triss depending on who you romanced –

Kyle: Yuck!

Claudia: –and Ciri get to bond together, then they might have shown something like that. But they chose to go a bit more lean and focus only on Geralt and Ciri which I think is fine. It did what it needed to do, and I was a very proud dad in this game so that doesn’t bother me in the least. 

Kyle: Yeah, I will say that the ending has a great line because it is Ciri’s arc. The entire arc of the books is her coming to realize that destiny and everyone else can go fuck right off. And that she should have the choice to do what she wants at the end of the day, that she has agency, she has purpose outside of what other people tell her. The reason she’s a princess at the start because there’s expectation outside of destiny of her. And then, she slowly grows to become truly her own person, and so that line where Geralt asks her “Please don’t go” and she’s like “This is my story, not yours. You must let me finish telling it.” That is her arc from the books! Her realizing that she has agency, that she has free will, that she has the right to exist.

Claudia: Right, honestly, the majority of their writing for Ciri is pretty great. Like they understood what that character was supposed to be about, and despite other changes made in the plot, they did stay true to the voice of that character in most areas. 

Kyle: I absolutely agree. Except for that one line about like, you know, “…they have plans for me. It was the sorceresses of the Lodge once, now it’s my father, even Yennefer…Avallac’h is different.” That implies a certain level of malice that I don’t understand, especially for a woman who declared that her name was going to be Cirilla of Vengerberg, you know after her mother. That implies a sense of trustworthiness to her mother that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. 

Claudia: Right, that is a little bit off, and I can tell that that’s something that’s stuck with you cause I don’t even remember that line.

Kyle: It’s after you go steal the horses with Ciri.

Claudia: Right, I remember the conversation. I remember the whole rest of the conversation. But the fact that line stuck with you so much, it’s definitely showing. 

Kyle: Ciri had an incredibly deep relationship with both Geralt and Yennefer because they’re a family and the entire point of the Saga is realizing the world does not give a shit about you. But if you can love just one person, maybe life has meaning. That’s the entire point of the Saga is finding your way through hell to find purpose in life. And they change it to be almost entirely Geralt, and that feels insincere to me. 

Claudia: I mean, again, I think I forgive that because they were working against not having you know this character in the previous two games and they wouldn’t have been able to just ask people new to the game to accept something, especially those coming in from just the games to accept a whole relationship being imported like that. You had to build your relationship with Ciri in this game to make it work and they just weren’t able to give all that screentime to one of the female leads as well. Because bear in mind if they had done that for Yennefer, they would have also had to have done that for Triss.

Kyle: I want to throw up thinking about that. 

Claudia: Right…bit of an overreaction. I get that you don’t like her, but it is just a fictional character.

Kyle: I’m allowed to be sarcastic; you know.

The Witcher 3 On A Mechanic Level

Claudia: My final question is actually about gameplay feel, which we talked about a lot. But let me ask it anyways. I know you’re not really a mechanics person, but how do you feel about some of like the different gameplay loops here? For example, we have the monster contracts, we have Gwent. You could technically make an argument for choice-based dialogue being its own gameplay loop. For the I won’t call them loyalty missions cause they don’t quite structure them that way, but the personal quests of all of your friends. The combat itself, alchemy, and crafting. There’s a bunch of little gameplay loops in The Witcher 3 that kind of come together, and if you had a favorite or one you particularly liked, I feel like you kind of addressed this a lot in when we were talking about the differences between the combats in the various games. So, there’s anything you wanted to add there, I’m happy to hear additional thoughts. 

Kyle: I think that there are two major things that I think are broken in this. One is more of a personal thing, and one is as far as mechanics-wise, it just doesn’t work. So, let’s do the one that is more objective, even though it’s still subjective, which is The Witcher gear in crafting and quest items. So, the only gear worth a damn in this game is The Witcher gear period. End of discussion. There is nothing better than them. There is no crafted item, no picked up item, no quest reward, anything that is as good as The Witcher gear that you can craft and you get those pretty early on and it’s staged out you know, to from basic all the way to grandmaster. And so, you can just keep building those and you never have to switch gear, which is a positive in the conversations cause there’s nothing that I hate more than a character with mismatching clothes in a dialogue-driven game. However, this leads to a disconnect when I say that final bit of the game when you’re preparing for the Battle of Kaer Morhen, Crach an Craite can give you like this very old sword. 

Claudia: Yep, yep, I know exactly what you’re talking about! It’s worthless.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s completely fucking worthless, so you just go and sell it and your like “That’s Crach an Craite, these guys have known each other for years!” Crach an Craite was at the feast where Geralt claimed the Law of Surprise, they’ve known each other for freaking years. It’s just like “Is this how I’m gonna respect my friend? Just go sell off his family heirloom.”

Claudia: Right, I literally just kept that in my inventory, cause I was like “Well, I can’t give this away. Cause I just can’t.” 

Kyle: Yeah, and like has this backstory that it’s forged Mahakam, which is like the best forge in the world. It was tempered in dragon fire and you’re like “Oh, this is going to be so awesome!” And then “Oh no. It’s worse than the sword I already have.”

Claudia: I think it’s especially cause of how late in the game you’re going to wind up getting that too like it’s kind of egregious. 

Kyle: Yeah, and also if you understand the gameplay systems, a quest item is always at minimum two levels below your current level in the required level section, which means the stats are always usually off. Unless you’re just running around with shit gear. Which, if you’re playing the game as sort of mechanics only, you would be just wearing Witcher gear because it’s the best gear in the game. I feel no reward from quests. I feel no obligation to craft outside of Witcher gear. And I don’t think that really works as a gameplay loop, and I think they fell into the trap they did with The Witcher 1. If you remember in The Witcher 1, you don’t get a normal upgrade until the very end, where you make the raven armor. In The Witcher 2 at least you had a progression. You were going through different gears, either from quest items, crafted items or bought items. They reverted back to The Witcher 1 style, which is who cares. Which is fine. It depends on the person playing what they like in their game. If you’re a big gear nut, then that’s going to be a problem and I don’t really necessarily see it as a problem. I see it as a broken mechanic in the game. I think they could have equalized the Witcher gear out a little bit more so that, like for instance when Crach an Craite gives you that family heirloom, it actually means something. 

As far as another system that I don’t like but I understand its value is the talent tree system. I do not like the idea of equipping talents. Because you’re limited to 12, you get a little bit more slots in the DLC’s. But in the base game you are limited to 12, and so there’s really no experimentation in your build. Because once you get to a certain level, leveling up becomes nothing. It’s just a thing that happens because you start dumping points because you have no room to equip a talent that you’ve bought so once you find a build that at least somewhat works, you don’t change. There’s no experimentation. There’s nothing there to really invite you to change, and I think that is a flaw because while I understand the idea of it’s a limited pool of resources, you’ve got to pick and choose, and I can understand the value in that. I just don’t think it works. If that makes any sense.

Claudia: No, I understand. I’m personally not like a loop person, so there are players and systems out there and games out there that are built around getting bigger and better gear, and I think Witcher and a lot of RPGs, want to do this and then the game really isn’t really about that, so those systems suffer for not being the primary focus. For abilities, mixed feelings. I don’t mind the limited equips as much, and maybe I just didn’t find a way to retrain my abilities in the game there might be a way that I didn’t get to. But I found as I got much later in the game because of the limited slots in the way I had spent things on my different talent points I’d actually spent not optimally and wanted the ability to retrain more so than I was worried about having the limited slots to begin with. To your point, right, investing in both strength and speed is stupid. But in the beginning, I didn’t know that, so I dumped some stuff into strength that I would have loved to have reallocated at a later point. There’s just stuff you don’t know till you play a little bit.

Kyle: I think the problem is that A) detailed system as it exists, encourages what I was talking about with the fast and strong attack of focusing on one and not the other.

Claudia: It does, you are meant to pick a build and kind of stick to it. 

Kyle: Yeah, and B) it also encourages it on the signs. You need to pick a sign and stick with it, because even though there is no level cap in this —

Claudia: You’re only going to get so far before you get to the end of the game. Like, even though there’s no level cap, there’s only so much XP. See, I like that because I’m coming from games where you can’t max out all your skill trees or whatnot, so I’m used to not having access to all my abilities. I don’t mind being locked to very specific builds or tactics. Like I said I need to probably look into this cause if I’m going to pick up some of the DLC I’m going to want to respec Geralt a little bit because I started with Aard and strong and fast attacks in equal measure, but towards the end I actually went Igni and then fast attacks and I’d love to switch that up and respec properly with the points I have. It’s an interesting note and a valid complaint. In most AAA games, you actually get access to wider parts of your skill tree, if you’re thinking about like Spider-Man, Horizon: Zero Dawn, you know recent stuff, I didn’t hate it. I think that’s its RPG roots showing for sure. 

Kyle: You actually brought up the Aard/Igni thing that’s interesting. Aard used to be the broken sign in the previous two games. Now Igni is the broken sign which I find interesting.

Claudia: Right, my big issue was getting around shields, and I wound up having an easier time dodging and Igni-ing than I did with getting Aard to work for me. 

Kyle: Yeah, so if you remember Aard from first two games basically gave you free kills. 

Claudia: Yeah, Aard was great!

Kyle: Yeah, it would stun-lock people and then you could just walk in and do a free execution no matter what health they were, no matter what level of enemy they were. You could do it to a boss. I did it to Berengar in the first game. It’s very easy, it’s broken. It shouldn’t be there just from a game balance perspective, but it works. In The Witcher 3 they got rid of that you can only stun-lock once you get to the later parts of the game, and even then, it’s not as useful as. It was in the previous games. But Igni, however, has the burning unlock, which effectively does the same thing Aard used to do in the previous two games. 

Claudia: Yeah, that is exactly why I switched. 

Kyle: So, I don’t think they really thought that through when they changed that. But as far as gameplay feel, it’s a fun game to play like what I have to complain about is nitpicking. It’s a fun game. It got me into the books, so that should say something, especially since I tried to play The Witcher 1 the year prior. But I do think it is not the most fun in the trilogy. I actually find The Witcher 2 the more fun, and that’s an entirely subjective thing and people will enjoy The Witcher 3 more are perfectly fine, I don’t care. But gameplay-wise I find that The Witcher 3 is just a little bit shallower than The Witcher 2 was, and I’m not much of a gameplay guy as you know, but I want enough there to be intrigued, you know? 

Claudia: No, I get you. Like I said, I think I think I got better at The Witcher 3 than I was ever at with The Witcher 2. So, I definitely started enjoying it more towards the end and there’s something to be said for once you put 50 hours into a game, you start getting ok at it.

The Witcher 3 Measured Against SImilar Games

Kyle: So, this game is considered one of the best of its generation and I wanted to know what’s your opinion of that is and does it live up to the hype? Additionally, how do you think it handles importing saves, because if it’s the best of its generation, I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment, but it’s in the same generation as Mass Effect and Mass Effect was really good about transferring choice between game, game and game? The Witcher 3 attempts that, but I don’t think it quite works, so I want your opinion. Does it live up to the hype and does your choices from previous games feel like they have impact or not? 

Claudia: When you say generation, I assume you’re talking about console generation. 

Kyle: I was talking more like the 2010’s, that decade or generation of games. 

Claudia: Right, so I consider The Witcher and Mass Effect first of all, to be far enough apart to have very different impacts. 

Kyle: But they are coming at the same time, though, they literally came out the same year. 

Claudia: That is not true. 

Kyle: 2007, The Witcher 1 and Mass Effect 1. 

Claudia: Except The Witcher 1 is not considered the greatest game ever. 

Kyle: Alright, fair enough, I was referring more to the franchises as a whole.

Claudia: So, The Witcher 3 is the game that’s lauded as the game of a generation. So, Mass Effect 3 came out in 2012, and The Witcher 3 came out in 2015, which means the Mass Effect series, which was a very good game series and may have been, you know, iconic for its generation ended and then a couple years later the game that would make which are the greatest game of its generation came out. So, I do consider them slightly off from each other and I wanted to just kind of clarify those timelines. Because I don’t think it’s fair because they didn’t directly compete with each other at all. Basically, the older Witcher games are too niche and we’re in too small a market. No one who played Mass Effect was also playing The Witcher 1 and 2, those games were not big enough to be a drop in the bucket competitively with Mass Effect 1 and 2, and the hit that those games were.

Kyle: Can I point out from a marketing point how ironic that statement is because BioWare helped promote the first Witcher game while they were promoting the first Mass Effect, even licensed their engine to them. I find that interesting.

Claudia: For sure, but The Witcher 1 is not nearly as culturally impactful as Mass Effect 1. I would not consider the series as wholes. I don’t think they’re directly competing in the same way. The individual games maybe, but even then, the trilogy for Mass Effect ends before the game that puts The Witcher on the map actually comes out, and that to me makes them not quite one to one. Moreover, Witcher probably has stronger competition with Dragon Age than it does Mass Effect, but Dragon Age has a very different cultural legacy.

So, is The Witcher 3 the greatest game of its generation? Definitely one of the greats. I would say The Witcher 3 alongside Dark Souls changed the way we make games and changed the types of games that were mainstream. And I think it definitely earned the title. My favorite game of all time is definitely Dragon Age Origins and in the last third of The Witcher 3 I was getting major Dragon Age Origins vibes. The fact that it took that long for the game to win me over is whatever, but the fact of the matter is, once I finished the game I understood why people loved it. And I do think it’s a great game and it did great things.

You talk about the story porting, something to kind of note on there is that the reason Dragon Age Origins had such deep, impactful decision making is because there was no story porting, and they didn’t think they were going to get a sequel. So, there was no anticipation of story porting. Now Dragon Age does let you port stories, but I personally think the stories of the later games suffer a little for having to adhere to decisions made in the first game and the first game was great because it didn’t have to worry about sequels or prequels, and I think The Witcher 3 is exactly the same. I think The Witcher 3 tells an awesome story and have awesome choice-driven narratives because it lacks that story porting, so that’s not a point of contention I really have with the game. And then finally kind of bringing it back to Mass Effect and story porting and the impact of Mass Effect. I love Mass Effect. Mass Effect has had a huge impact on games. It is the BioWare game. In a lot of ways, when people think about what the BioWare structure is and what a BioWare game is, they think about Mass Effect. However, I think Mass Effect 2 by and large is agreed to be where the series peaked. It is agreed to be the best of the three games you might disagree. That doesn’t matter. I’m talking about the cultural zeitgeist here. 

Kyle: I have no opinion actually. I actually like all three for various reasons. I have no preference. 

Claudia: Right, I personally like 2 the best for a lot of reasons, but they are just very different games. Mass Effect benefits from and I had was talking about this with a friend a while ago, structurally, these games are very different and structurally they’re very different from Dragon Age Origins. The Mass Effect games are very streamlined for telling a cohesive story, and even though there are lots of side quests, Mass Effect doesn’t waste too much time with such quests. It definitely has fetch quests, but not to the scale that The Witcher employs, sort of little side quests, fetch quests, contracts, etc. For the most part, a lot of your side quests in Mass Effect are either directly related to the main plot or directly related to your companions. The ones that aren’t oftentimes contain little easter eggs or pretty easy to do, such as you know, mine for this shit, answer this distress call and just generally speaking content-wise, most of what you’re doing at any given time is going to be a loyalty mission or a main mission and your decisions all matter, but they’re able to all matter because they’ve streamlined the narrative in such a way that allows that to happen.

Witcher went the opposite way. They went very wide. Then they had to tie everything together in the end and we’re able to do that because they didn’t have to worry about sequels. Mass Effect is just much more tightly put together. It makes them very different games and very hard to compare, even though they’re both choice-driven narratives, their choice-driven in very different ways. Though I do enjoy that both employ a sort of “your decisions determine who survives at the end.” I always love that, and I always love when it’s not telegraphed what decisions are going to make or break something. Mass Effect tends to telegraph itself a little bit more, but Mass Effect is also a much more optimistic world so it makes sense that they would do that. There’s a right and wrong and there’s a Paragon and Renegade, so you’re able to sort of make decisions that actually do result in the best of both worlds. I’m not sure there’s really much more to say on that topic, I I just don’t see much of a comparison to be drawn between the two. I think the Witcher’s impact has been wider. In part because of the timing, it was released on the new generation of consoles. It was a style of game that hadn’t been that commercially successful in a very long time by a company that is hugely commercially successful, in part cause of distribution and publishing and storefront. But like there’s lots that goes into making Witcher an impactful thing culturally from just like a games industry point of view. And that definitely hasn’t changed. I was not in the industry when Mass Effect was the big thing, so I can’t speak to how much Mass Effect might have changed the way people did things, but Witcher certainly has earned its place for sure.

Kyle: The reason I brought up the importing save thing and how I found it interesting, cause to me not an industry professional obviously, Mass Effect and The Witcher come out around the same time. They’re progressing in their trilogies at roughly the same time to me, you know so they had two different takes on the importing cause they both import saves, but I think it’s noticeable when you have continuity errors. For instance, I already brought up the lack of Iorveth, but the most egregious, the one that is most apparent to me every time I play, Is a good old wonderful Thaler. In The Witcher 1, he can be killed. In The Witcher 3, he’s still alive no matter what. 

Claudia: Yeah, and I remember reading about this as kind of prep for this talk. I mean the thing about that again, is that while you can compare the two, ultimately, I think this is a case where The Witcher 3 really stands alone and I’m judging it mostly on its own merit. They’re trying to tell an interconnected story in some ways, but it’s clear that they really hit the ground running and get their footing for The Witcher 3 versus Mass Effect, where they had their shit together in the first game. That’s the difference between when your game blows up in the third versus when your game blows up in the first. 

Kyle: It’s worth noting that they actually had a plan for an entire game that got scrapped and their plans for The Witcher 3 became The Witcher 2. So, like, even if they had plans for an overarching story, it got scrapped really early on. 

Claudia: Right, and I think they were trying to do something bold with The Witcher 3. Honestly, it’s Witcher again more closely resembles Dragon Age in the terms of like, there’s a loose continuity between the Dragon Age games and the Dragon Age games also, while you can import your saves, run into issues of characters who you can kill being alive, Leliana being one of the main problems, right? So, it’s like I see a lot more parallels between those franchises and the continuity errors and storytelling decisions they make, then I do Mass Effect, which to me even though I have issues with some things in Mass Effect, Mass Effect feels like a cohesive thing from beginning to end. It’s a full narrative, and it’s not contending with adapting books. It’s not contending with conflicting source material, right? It has things going for that The Witcher kind of had to struggle with from day one.

Kyle: Yeah, I mean that’s fair. I pulled the Mass Effect comparison because with Dragon Age, only one out of the three games made a massive impact on me, that being Dragon Age 2. The other ones are just serviceable. Mass Effect means a great deal to me, and so if I’m to choose between Dragon Age or Mass Effect to pull a comparison to a BioWare game I’m always going to go with Mass Effect because it’s the one that means more to me and I have more context for. 

Claudia: No, I completely understand. To me they definitely hold very different areas in kind of gaming history, so they don’t feel like conflict or overlap too much. But you know, it’s an interesting point with the continuity between games. And again, I actually think continuity between games hurts your ability to tell a choice-driven narrative and Mass Effect still tells s very good choice-driven narrative, but there are moments where you can see the pain points for even them, but they knew better going into that game what choice-driven narrative across multiple games would mean, cause they learned their lessons from Dragon Age Origins, where they didn’t realize they were going to get a sequel then they had to figure that shit out.

Kyle: And because trials and tribulations breeds creativity, Dragon Age 2 turned out to be fucking amazing. 

Claudia: It’s actually an awful game, but that’s ok. 

Kyle: Fuck off is all I can say.

Claudia: Uh, huh. 

Kyle: We just talked about how The Witcher 3 operates as an importing save RPG comparing to Mass Effect and Dragon Age. How do you think it works as an open-world game, cause this is the first of these to be open world?

Claudia: I don’t play a lot of open-world games actually, so that might not be something I can really speak to. Technically Dragon Age Inquisition has open-world areas and technically I’ve watched people play Red Dead Redemption which looks fucking amazing. 

Kyle: It is! Both of them are fucking amazing!

Claudia: Mafia 3 is technically open world and was fun. You know, I just don’t play that many open-world games because I don’t enjoy them. I think The Witcher 3 is serviceable as an open-world game and as the first of its kind, I completely understand why people were just smitten with it. I guess technically Skyrim is open-world, but Skyrim’s story is lackluster and The Witcher 3 really blows it out of the water with just the writing level on all of the quests, so you know, I think it does well. I’d like to get into more open-world games sort of. Gosh, I really need to lowkey pick up Dragon Age Inquisition again and just kind of grind away. 

Kyle: I can’t play that goddamn game; I find it so lacking in many areas. 

Claudia: I love that game, it’s ok. 

Kyle: Yeah, I know, I love Dragon Age 2. I’m completely smitten with that game. 

Claudia: Right, but you know that feeling in the back of your head where suddenly like “I really need to just pick up a game and grind away for hours.” Honestly, The Witcher 3 might become that for me. I might load one of my earlier saves and just start burning through all the side quests in some areas cause there is shit I didn’t see, and I want to see it. Anyways, I don’t think I can speak much to it being an open-world game, it was good. I enjoyed it. But I also am, you know, a 21st century game player, open-world kind of standard fare for me now. 

Kyle: Yeah, and the only thing I would add to it is I don’t play a whole lot of open-world games though, if you look at my game catalog, probably a large majority of it is open world. I just don’t treat them as such. I find open worlds uninteresting because I played MMO’s as a kid with my dad and those are open-world as much as you can go anywhere you know be a sandbox as it were. But The Witcher 3 feels like a static world to me. They have this rule, they mention it in a couple interviews, that every 30 seconds the player should be seeing something but none of it’s actually interesting to me. And all quest givers are pretty much static where they are, they don’t move around. They disappear at night and then return in the morning. It feels I think the best example is World of Warcraft, where it’s an open world you can go anywhere, but you know that quest giver is always going to be in Ironforge, and he’ll never move. So, like it feels artificial and the absolute insanity amount of points of interest they have on the map that are just recycled things. It’s monster nests, guarded treasure or bandit camps just recycled over and over and over and over, with nothing actually interested in them. And on top of that, the gear problem where you can’t actually get anything interesting from them. It feels like an artificial world. It doesn’t feel like a real breathing world, whereas you go to the other two that I consider the biggest best open-world games, both Red Dead Redemption’s, the first Red Dead coming out in 2010 and the most recent one coming out in 2018. Both of them, even though the first one is showing its age now being 11 years old, it still has enough in it where it feels like the world is actually alive. People are moving around, things happen. You can stumble upon a random tavern fight, stuff like that. That doesn’t happen in The Witcher 3, so it feels artificial. Granted, all open worlds are artificial, but the illusion of it in Red Dead Redemption I think, is much stronger than it is here in The Witcher 3

This Conclave On The Witcher Saga Has Ended, For Now…

And thus ends the official parts of The Witcher Retrospective here on The Daily Fandom. It has been a pleasure for both Kyle and Claudia to go through this wonderful franchise and share their discussions with you. But as we well know from The Witcher Saga, when something ends, something begins. This is not goodbye from Kyle and Claudia, instead, it is an end to the main section of their plans for this retrospective. The issues that caused the hiatus between The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3 to last well over a year are still present as such they can’t commit to a consistent release schedule. 

Instead, from time to time they will update the archive site set up to preserve this retrospective with new parts. These new addendums could be filling in the gaps from the analysis portions they dropped to save time in some entries in the retrospective or they could be covering other parts of the franchise they didn’t get to such as Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales or even new seasons of the Netflix show.

Please check the archive site occasionally to continue along with Kyle and Claudia on this journey that has lasted for years and probably will last for a few more. For now, we end this retrospective for reasons of state!