Open World RPG

Wild Speculation and Witchers

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[UPDATE – 3/24] – It has apparently been confirmed by CDPR that the medallion is in fact a Lynx.

Good morning friends! We are about to go on a journey of wild speculation. On this journey I am going to talk about a lot of events that happen in the Witcher video game series, namely the third outing. If you have not played this game and are spoiler sensitive, then today’s post might not be for you. If you have played the game or simply don’t care… then join me on this ride. On March 21st, CD Projekt Red released this teaser image on twitter along with a link to a blog post outlining a few bits of information. Firstly this is the official confirmation of what pretty much everyone assumed… that there is another Witcher game in the works. Secondly it announces that effectively after Cyberpunk, all future development will be abandoning their custom REDengine in favor of Unreal Engine 5.

This is probably a good call honestly. Let’s talk about this piece first because it is maybe the least speculative. Based on past experience with studios that insist on building their own engine… the track record is pretty spotty. For example a good number of the problems associated with both Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem came down to them struggling to master the Frostbite engine produced by DICE and originally designed for first person shooters. Similarly the REDengine itself is known for more than a little bit of jank associated with it. Companies roll their own engines largely in an effort to avoid having to pay a license fee on each copy sold of the game. However it is starting to seem like maybe having a highly optimized engine right out of the box is worth the fees associated with it. I personally think this is a great move.

Next up we have the sigil/talisman being shown. It is very clearly from the School of the Wolf or any of the “known” schools that are either from book or game canon. What I thought immediately was that it seemed like it was maybe a Lynx with the way the ears were shaped. While there does not exist a canon “School of the Lynx” there is one in fan fiction. Now I have some personal problems with the way this school is described, so I highly doubt that CD Projekt Red is borrowing a note from “fic” directly. Per the wiki page, this school is said to have been formed by Lambert and Keira Metz. At the end of Witcher 3, the School of the Wolf is in shambles and the remaining Witchers all go their own ways abandoning Kaer Morhen.

Lambert specifically does in deed couple up with Kiera Metz as she talks about some plans for which she would need a Witcher. It is assumed that the two of them go off together, but to the best of my knowledge there is no specific place that they were said to be going. In the “fic” the author sees them going south and forming a new Witcher school. So this is entirely probable because it seems like it is easy enough for any sorceress to recreate the reagents needed for the Witcher process. However why I find this deeply unlikely is that it goes against every fiber of Lambert’s being. In the books, the games, and even the Netflix series he is characterized as being severely scarred by the “Trial of the Grasses” and is vehemently set against the creation of new Witchers. I just cannot see him willfully founding another Witcher school period, regardless of how cool the Lynx sigil is.

The only other thing we have to go on from the teaser image is that there is a lot of snow. In what I consider to be the best ending of the Witcher 3, Geralt and Triss Merigold retire to Kovir. In the plot thread of helping the various magic users escape Novigrad, they boarded a ship bound for Kovir where Triss had secured their safety. Even before this image I assumed that the next game would be set in Kovir given that it is an area of the world we have yet to explore in the games. While Yennifer is the “book canon” lover of Geralt, the games have always favored Triss so I feel like the “official” ending of the third game is going to be way more likely to follow that path.

The other part of the “best” ending for me personally is when Ciri follows in Geralt’s footsteps and officially becomes a Witcher. While she has never undergone the trial, her natural magical aptitude more than makes up for any of the “official” Witcher abilities. So if Geralt ended up in Kovir, I find it highly likely that Ciri would head that way as well. With the effective death of the School of the Wolf, it does make me wonder if together they form their own School that follows a different path allowing men and women both to become Witchers. I think Geralt will have a very minimal role in this new saga because effectively the “child surprise” saga has been wrapped up neatly. I wonder even if they might go so far as to kill of Geralt and use his death as a call to action.

Ultimately I think we are headed down a path that is going to give us a game that starts somewhat similar to Cyberpunk. I feel like we are going to take the role of an enigmatic character that allows us to effectively “design a Witcher”. Representation is super important and giving folks the ability to play someone other than a very specific Male archetype would go a long way to making folks feel more comfortable in the setting. For awhile I thought that maybe the next game would simply give us a choice of playing as Geralt or playing as Ciri, however post Cyberpunk I think this path is going to be more likely. My only hope is that they leave the genitalia choices out of this character creator because they just ended up being super creepy.

One of my big concerns however is that it seems like CD Projekt Red is not learning from their own mistakes. In 2013 we saw the very first teaser trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, and it was December of 2020 before we saw the release of the game. In those seven years a toxic amount of hype was allowed to build for this game, and it would not have mattered what was released… it never would have been able to live up to expectations. I figure the best case scenario is that we are at least three years out from being able to download and play the next Witcher game. That is still a very long time for excitement to build… and I fear we are going to have a repeat of the same doom cycle that followed Cyberpunk 2077. I personally loved the game and had a great experience, but I also played the game on a beefy PC. I think the expectations are even going to be higher for the next Witcher game, and I think it is a bit of a mistake to throw out a teaser image so early when we all know the game is still MANY years away.

That said… it is somewhat fun to speculate and it allows me to write a post like this.

Legacy of the MMO

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Good Morning Friends! I am still very much enshrined in my current play-through of Horizon Forbidden West. At this point I am somewhere between 40 and 50 hours into the game and still have so many little side objectives to finish. There are some that I don’t really look forward to like the hunting grounds… largely because I hate gimmick fights. Then there are others like the Tallnecks that I have just been avoiding because it slows down the action as I try and figure out how to jump up on top of them. I need to focus on completing those however because generally speaking a whole slew of things that I didn’t even know about open up. The story continues to be super interesting and while on some level it mostly just feels like I am playing Zero Dawn, there are so many general quality of life improvements.

It was one of these that started a twitter thread yesterday. Something that Horizon Forbidden West does that I adore is that it puts a little thought bubble exclamation mark over the head of any of your companions that have new dialog options. Something that I have always found exhausting about RPGs in general… and most specifically Bioware RPGs, is the need to keep checking in with your crew to determine if you can make any forward story progress with them. Essentially the old adage is that after every single quest you need to run around and talk to everyone, just to make sure nothing has opened up because you certainly do not want to miss it. With Horizon Forbidden West not only do you get an indicator that there is something new, but you also get an indicator on the specific dialog tree you can find the new information.

I had a friend try and share his frustrations with this style of mechanic twice, only to end up deleting the messages. Essentially it went down to something like this… that he hated to see MMORPGs bleeding over into single player games. So it made me think, is the lasting impact of the MMO the quest giver? Since the advent of World of Warcraft it has become ubiquitous to see an exclamation point over something and immediately translate that into “they have a quest for me”. Personally I adore this because it gives a universal language that makes it easier and more efficient to navigate the world. However I think it largely comes down to which side of a discussion you are on. I am very much on team “Efficiency and Better Communication” with the player.

Then I think there is the opposite side of that coin which is team “Mystery and Immersion”. This team tends to dislike obvious quest markers out in the world because they draw them away from the immersion of living in the game world that they are playing. This is also the team that loves Diegetic Interfaces in games, where when you click on a screen the menu options appear on the in game screen and not some popup that happens in your heads up display. A lot of times this sort of player might prefer to turn off the HUD entirely to allow for only in world queues to guide them. Based on the two deleted attempts at a comment, I am guessing my friend falls in that camp, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play the game. Personally in truth… I think both options should exist and often times when a game does not support them… I install mods that give me back my better visualization elements.

This however got me thinking, and I firmly believe that the true legacy of the MMO is not the quest giver system, but instead the codification of color coded loot systems. In 2020 I wrote a piece attempting to divine the origins of these systems. While there has been quite a lot of shifting over the years as to what color means what rarity, we have more or less stabilized on a specific standard moving forward. The more games that I find myself playing, the more I am seeing this exact scale repeated over and over. Currently I am playing Horizon Forbidden West, Dying Light 2, and Lost Ark and in all cases the scale is alive and well.

  • Grey – Junk
  • White – Base Rarity
  • Green – Common
  • Blue – Rare
  • Purple – Epic
  • Yellow/Orange – Legendary

It truly is staggering just how common this loot system ends up being in modern games. This sort of thing has happened over the years with different systems and arriving at a “solved” state. Prior to the early 2000s for example, there were some wildly different solutions to how to do three dimensional movement in a video game. Then almost as if at once, we coalesced upon a standard for how third person movement in a video game should function. Similarly over the years we have arrived at what appears to be the best solution to easily giving the player visualization that an item you just picked up, might be better than the item you were previously using. I personally think this is a positive thing, but poor team immersions is going to ultimately find the walls closing in on them as we get better visualizations.

The other lasting impact of the MMO that I have seen starting to trickle into other sorts of experiences is that of the Item Level. Ultimately every single item created in a game has some sort of item budget, that denotes how many attribute points are granted by using it. For years this was an opaque system, but that did not mean it was not there. World of Warcraft, and more specifically the modding community created a way to transparently visualize this number and give a reference that this item had a larger item budget which was quantifiable. That did not necessarily make that item better, because some stats mean more than other stats, but it did assign some numbers to an obtuse system. It is very weird to see this same concept being applied to otherwise single player experiences. It is not necessarily a system I would have carried forward, because it can be the source of bullying, but I guess anything that helps a player better interpret the value of gear is not completely awful.

So I am now curious. What other systems have you seen trickling out of the MMO space into Single Player games? Drop me a line below and lets talk about whether or not you find them good changes.

A Night of Second Choices

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I’ve talked about this before, but some weeks back I moved my two main consoles… the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 downstairs. The theory being when I finish working from home for the day, I need a shift in my surroundings which is why I have been spending so much more time downstairs. Now I get this is how almost everyone plays console games already, but the primary reason why this was never the case is because for me… I never felt like I could monopolize the television. Yesterday was the first real negative ramification of my decision, and reminded me of why I kept them in my office up until this point.

My wife has been a follower of Grey’s Anatomy since the show first went on the air in 2005, and is religious enough of a viewer that she used to have post show calls with friends to talk about the episode. So if I am downstairs on a Thursday, then the television is going to be tuned to ABC for a block of watching the Seattle Fire Department show and then Grey’s Anatomy immediately following it. All I really wanted to do last night was pick up where I left off the previous evening with Horizon Forbidden West, but alas for sake of marital bliss… I had to be in the same room as the very loud and obnoxious musical score of a show that loves to kill off its doctors. Granted this is completely fair play given that I have subjected her to the Walking Dead for a similar amount of time.

Since yesterday was Elden Ring day and it is apparently the new hotness… I figured maybe this was a sign for me to dip my toes into it. I played about an hour last night and I am not sure if it is really a game for me or not yet. I’ve never really attached to a Dark Souls game, and so far Elden Ring is no exception. There was also something weird going on performance wise. I am playing on PC, and I had more than a few moments of the game freezing on me. If this happens at the wrong moment… like on a boss or mini boss… it pretty much spells your doom. I might wait a bit for a patch before diving in further because apparently I am not the only one with more than enough system to handle the game experiencing similar freezing.

Instead I spent my night returning to Dying Light 2, which I am still enjoying greatly. One of the things that I do not love about the game however is that you can’t just pick a single faction. You are forced in the story to keep dealing with both. I do not love the Peacekeepers at all, and I very much do not like Renegades. However there is no real way to flip certain territories to your faction of choice. There will always been certain territories that are claimed by one faction or another. I would prefer to paint the entire map yellow, but that does not appear to be in the cards. There are certain territories that are neutral by default, and those you can flip in a specific direction. This is not stopping me from handing every power plant over to the survivors however. I have a feeling that I am just about to be forced into a situation of doing something awful… in order to save my own skin. We will see how it plays out in the end though.

Curse of Too Many Games

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Morning Friends! I am going to give you fair warning that the next little bit is likely going to lead to some fairly boring morning posts. I am very much in a head down mode working my way through two very large open world games… both of which I am trying to be extremely spoiler sensitive. Example I took this screenshot and then realized that the quest dialog might be a bit spoilery and used the mosaic tool to blur it. I spent most of last night playing Horizon Zero Dawn and I’ve started moving the main story forward again. I’ve not gotten anywhere near finished with the first part of the game, but there are certain objectives I have to be in the right mood in order to enjoy. For example Cauldrons and exploring ruins are a very specific mindset, and if I want to just kill things with my bow I am going to shy away from both.

Last night was very much a night for murder as I entered the desert and had my very first experiences with the Tenakth tribe. To be honest I expected this region to be way more hostile than I have found it to be. It is not at all that different from the desert band on the other side of Meridian in the first game. There are way more dangerous dinobots roaming around but in general I know the basics of hunting them and can successfully take them down. The flyers though are always going to be the bane of my existence and ultimately I need to become more proficient with a sling in order to help drop them. I have a bad habit of never wanting to use anything other than the Hunter bow. I go through most of the game without ever swapping weapons unless I am completely desperate.

However not being a controller native player anymore… I need to rest my hands from time to time and return to my significantly more familiar mouse and keyboard gameplay. When this occurs right now my game if choice is Dying Light 2. One of the rough things about February is just how packed it has been with interesting games. In another year any one of these games might have been my sole focus for much of the month. Over the course of this month we have had:

  • Dying Light 2 – 2/8
  • Lost Ark – 2/11
  • Cyberpunk 2077 Next Gen 1.5 Patch – 2/15
  • Horizon Forbidden West – 2/18
  • Destiny 2: The Witch Queen – 2/22
  • Elden Ring – 2/25
  • Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons – 2/28

Now Lost Ark I threw on the list largely because it is eating up a lot of time of folks in the internet zeitgeist. For whatever reason it didn’t really click with me. Elden Ring seems to be the game that the internet is waiting for… and I am deeply interested in it but uncertain it would be a day one play. However the rest of that list are all games that are firmly placed in my wheelhouse and that I want to play… just not sure when I will get around to playing them. Destiny 2 is full of FOMO, but I am going to have to learn to play it on my schedule rather than let it dictate a schedule for me in order to reach a happy place with it. Guild Wars 2… me and this game have struggled for years and I am still trying to figure out how to play it and enjoy it but I am very interested in Cantha.

My prime non-Horizon game right now is Dying Light 2, and I am really enjoying it. It is ultimately my fear that this game is going to get missed in the mix. Essentially if you enjoyed Fallout 4, you are going to enjoy Dying Light 2. The games feel very similar in your interactions with the world and other people in it… but instead of irradiated monsters and questionable nuclear powered tech you have zombies and parkour. The world is chunked up in different zones and I have crossed the river finally into the central loop/downtown area. It also means I finally have access to a bow and the glider…. which is way the hell harder to control than the breath of the wild style glider from Horizon Forbidden West. I might need to change the keybinds because for now the process of popping it open and then stabilizing it feels cumbersome.

What has surprised me the most about this game is just how much I have enjoyed the side stories. I enjoyed Dying Light 1 quite a bit, and the main story while enjoyable was nothing really to write home about. This time around the world seems way more vibrant and while a lot of what you are doing is fetch quests, the story woven around them makes them feel like so much more. For example this is Maya and she had some bandits steal a music box from her… which is the only thing she had left from her mother. There is no way I was not going to go out into the world and retrieve it for her, even though it was quite an ordeal to actually make that happen.

In a perfect world Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West would have been spaced out far enough apart to feel like I had all the time in the world to enjoy both. Also in a perfect world Forbidden West would have launched on the PC so I didn’t need to take controller breaks. We however have what we have and are cursed with an overabundance of excellent new games. As I said for the next bit you are probably going to hear me talking about Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West as I move my way through both games. I fully expect that both are going to be upwards of hundred hour games for me to explore.