I love that Geralt is like “I was beaten and starved” when talking about his childhood training, and is constantly trying to get Ciri to rest, eat, and feel good about herself. Geralt says the cycle of violence ends with me; meanwhile, Ciri’s over here:
The Witcher III was about the manfeels of a sexy grouchy dad who’s grumpy about being an immortal demigod
putting up with having to show up kings and gods and transdimensional elves and the tedium of testing his magic vasectomy on various whores and all his eternally-youthful femdom second-wife witches
it’s the most male-Boomer-fantasy stuff ever but even the deepest Discourser respects it ‘cause that’s the power of doing things well
this, about re-enchanting the world and the darkness of original fairytales, got me thinking, I’ve been playing through the Witcher DLC the
other day and it really is one of the best games-as-narratives I’ve ever
seen
like the gameplay itself isn’t that deep tbh. dialogue
choices and a third-person melee system that’s pretty sparse by
prevailing Dynasties May Creed standards
and
part of it is that there’s this interesting high/low distinction where
the common village people live lives full of curses and magic and
wondrous beasts
on top of which are layered these grand sweeping
epics of military conquest that are just incredibly mundane, when you
get down to it it’s a bunch of unremarkable people doing tedious
logistics as a way to manipulate resource flows in a way that doesn’t at all affect lived meaning
like
great kings and nobility might tangentially encounter magic as a
macguffin on the way to resolving an incredibly petty dispute with
significant bloodshed; to the extent it touches on their lives it’s
often to the extent that they aren’t any different from the rabble
like
there are flying humanoid monsters and the possibility of using them in
war is lampshaded specifically to be mocked, battles are fought with
armies full of village bullies slapped into cheap armor
(and there
is an absurd amount of attention paid to material logistics as an
aesthetic element, if an army is in the field there will be beachheads
and depots not as a particular mission setting but just because it makes
sense; every settlement, in environment designs that have no attached
mechanics, serves a discernable economic purpose; there are pollarded trees)
but a nobleman’s unhappy marriage or thwarted youthful romance will manifest as like, actual monsters, presented with a backstory so psychologically real it’s not til halfway through the questline you realize you’re playing a riff on a famous fairytaile
drives home the point that a lot of folk tales were #relatable by virtue of being about human suffering
The Witcher III is not the first CRPG-derived 3d ARPG I’ve played where a questline’s big twist was “actually the guys who seem weird but pleasant in the middle of nowhere *aren’t* cannibals”
Mechanically, it hits the sweet spot between Dark Souls and Dragon Age.
Thematically, it is Polish as hell, holy shit. Most of our RPGs derive their worldbuilding from a British tradition, we actually get a bit of German by way of Japan (lancers, dragoons, 2h knights, one-city realms and threatening emperors and conniving chancellors), Dragon Age was bidding for novelty by doing French.
But this is definitely Eastern European. It’s not just the questlines and bestiary out of Grimm’s and Slavic legend. Part of it is the peasant’s-eye view. There may be great wars and cosmic forces at play but to a significant extent they just account for why a questgiver is in a particular location.
The more common viewpoint expressed is of a peasant - not even in a castle keep! in scattered villages and hamlets! varying from squalor to bucolic! according to their economic position! as you can tell from the actual productive activity the environment and animation design dramatizes! - who just desires that as few of his fellows suffer and die as possible.
Witcher got some knocks for having such a monoethnic world, especially by comparison to DA, because of course it did. But I think both routes *work*, creatively - DA only showed you a thimbleful of villages and two blocks of a capital city and called it a great civilization, venue for ageless deeds, and the range of accents and skin tones and styles helped sell that.
In contrast, just the *sameness* of Witcher, these dirty poor farmers and THESE dirty poor farmers, you can have a much bigger world but it still leaves the machinations of kings coming off as detached and pompous, and the dirt where you work as the *real* world.
And you want to talk races, human/nonhuman racism is the in thematic in “gritty” fantasy these days, but a lot of games play that as a supercharged version of the refugee/immigrant experience - you live in the REALLY bad quarter of town, and people stand around in public having conversations about how TERRIBLE you are, or walk through your streets for the SOLE purpose of calling you names.
Because I suppose even the most branched multi-release choice-consequence tree has a hard time making a dramatic antagonist out of a guy being polite and charming in working with you and then going home and spending three decades NOT spending energy on your behalf to upset a settled order that has already been mythologized as proper and on which he and worthy institutions he values materially depend.
But the Witcher, yeah, this clearly comes from a culture that KNOWS a thing or two about how ethnic conflict in a feudal society works. There’s a bit in the playroom zone with a dwarven blacksmith that does it great. People will know you’re different, but they’ll accept you as part of the community. But know you’re different.
And when things get stressful they might link you to the stresses. And want to take it out on you. And convince other people they gain from your loss.
But wait, there WILL be people that value you. Authorities that will protect you, put your contribution to the community above petty bigotry.
But authority - whether established or upstart-aspirant - has enemies, and if those enemies either win, or the authority ever needs to buy their favor cheap…
Other than that, I like the pulpiness of it all - it clearly comes from the kind of book that could be described as “rollicking”. A ridiculously OP protagonist - magical Han Solo Batman, basically - threading a plot advanced by femme fatale teases, with eventual consummation… James Bond was pulp.
Pulp - stories that just exist as off-the-shelf daydreams, no higher pretensions - I dig pulp.
