Games

Last night I finished my first play through of Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings and I have to say I rather enjoyed myself. As compared to the Witcher 3 it was a vastly different sort of game, and as a result any direct comparison is somewhat difficult. Witcher 3 is this gigantic open world experience that has you tackle tasks in whatever order you want, with significant freedom to keep going back and revisiting areas without never truly feeling you are done there. Witcher 2 on the other hand in comparison is super linear and is comprised of Prologue, 3 Acts, and an Epilogue each effectively containing a boxed area that once you have passed can no longer be explored.

Each one of these “gates” when crossed forces the player to make some rather world changing decisions, in that you are effectively going down a very different path because of them. As a result I am deeply considering seeing what the other major path structure would look like, because at the end of Act 1 you are asked to choose someone to ally with and as I understand it this kicks off a very different Act 2 and Act 3 depending on the choice. I enjoyed the act greatly because it was deeply focused on the plight of the non-humans, but the other path also involves some characters that I greatly enjoyed interacting with in Witcher 3. To be honest when I did the “simulate choices” option at the beginning of the third game I was mostly just making decisions without knowing what they meant.

I mostly just powered through the main story, because there is a not insignificant amount of tedium in doing the side quests for Witcher 2. Now had I played this game at the appropriate time when it represented one of the best possible experiences I could be playing… I would have probably gobbled up every side adventure. Playing it now and seeing how much better Witcher 3 does at presenting a world with interesting side stories, it more or less ruined the experience for me. The game however is still very much worth playing to present you with the story behind events that will ultimately resolve in the third game.

I made another attempt last night to get into the original Witcher game and even after installing a pack that supposedly fixes and tweaks a bunch of stuff I found the experience miserable. There is another mod out there that re-balances combat, but it does so in a manner I have no interest in trying. My hope was that it would take away the weird hold to attack and then play whack-a-mole system, but instead it just appears to make everything harder. Again this is a situation of if I had managed to play this around the time it was released, I might have been able to get used to it. Now however it just feels bad and my brain rebels against it every time I try and force myself to experience it.

I am guessing that CD Project Red understands how frustrating the first game is because at some point they released the above video as a recap. I guess I will accept that this is the only version of the original game that I will be experiencing. One of my favorite parts of Witcher 2 is when they show one of Geralt’s memories rendered in this same art style. So I am perfectly okay with watching that same animation style summarize the original game. The second game however is perfectly playable and I am really wishing I had started there instead of just picking up with the 3rd game. So were I to update my advice on how best to get into this series…

1. Watch the Netflix Series – while this deviates from the novels a bit based on my experience so far, it does give you a pretty good primer into the world of The Witcher and will at least allow you to understand some of the core conflicts.
2. Watch the Above Recap of Witcher 1 – you may not be as turned off by the original game, but the above recap video gives you enough detail to understand the events at the beginning of Witcher 2.
3. Play Witcher 2 – while it feels like an older style of game experience it is still very much a good game. There are UI quirks that I wrote about in another post, but if you can get past them the game and story and world are rich enough to keep you engaged. Also it is fairly easy to golden path this game and only care about the main story beats.
4. Play Witcher 3 – then of course import your Witcher 2 save into Witcher 3 and have a continuation of the world state you left in the second game. Once I determine which path I like better I am probably going to do this and play through the 3rd game again.

I’m also still working my way through the novels. I finished Last Wish last night and made it about three chapters into Sword of Destiny last night. I believe I am following the suggested reading order as Last Wish and Sword of Destiny are both effectively a bunch of short stories about Geralt’s adventures and also appear to be what the Netflix series is heavily drawing upon. Blood of Elves follows up next and begins the first of the proper novels. I am not entirely sure why I am seemingly so obsessed right now, but I am enjoying myself and am just going to roll with it for the time being.

I continue to slowly prod my way through the Witcher 2. This was probably an excellent game when it came out in 2011, but it has not aged terribly well. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the ways that the original Mass Effect just felt outdated and a little cludgy. The prime example of this is that too many things are tied to left clicking on objects, and often times your intent gets lost in the shuffle. Left and right click are both attacks in this game, and when you are in combat that takes precedence over anything else as it probably should. However lighting torches, opening doors, and looting bodies are all also tied to the left click action meaning that you can’t do ANY of these things while in combat. In practice this also means that more or less items don’t show up as lootable until you have been out of combat for a bit, meaning you have to keep retracing your steps to make sure you didn’t miss something interesting.

A lot of these problems can be summed up as this game being built before we had somewhat agreed upon what the ideal user interface was for this sort of game. We had some of these same problems upon playing Tron 2.0 for the AggroChat game club because it had a bunch of non-standard controls from an era before “FPS Game Controls” had effectively been codified and universalized between all games. The thing that kills me the most is the absense of a standard “confirm” button or options for selecting dialog choices with number keys. This means I am constantly moving between keyboard and mouse in a deeply uncomfortable way. While you can hit Spacebar to loot all items, you can’t hit the space bar to accept a crafting prompt for example and have to instead hit the enter key, but not the one on the numpad.

Another oddity is that you can see all of your patterns that you can craft in the inventory system, but can’t actually do anything with them there. Instead there is a completely different UI that is accessed by holding down the control key and shown two screenshots above… then you have to click the center symbol to go into another menu with no hotkey available. From there you have to go into yet another menu for Alchemy which finally allows you to brew a potion or make a bomb. There is no reason why this functionality could not have been accessed off of the inventory screen since that is already loaded with a bunch of other information.

All of this just drives home how important user interface and user experience design is in a video game. We have evolved to the point of having a pretty standard template, and when a game doesn’t follow that logic it feels bad to play it. This is ultimately the biggest challenge about dipping too deeply into the back catalog of games that came out in the 2000-2012 era of games, because we were still sorta figuring out how these games should work on the PC without a controller. For all I know this might all go away and end up as a very smooth experience with a controller equipped, but that is not my default method of play and not something I naturally gravitate towards.

I am super thankful that by the time Witcher 3 rolled around all of these user experience problems had been ironed out. Yet again it is a scenario where I am hoping that eventually, much like they have started to do for Elder Scrolls Games… that someone will come through and do a mod that effectively recreates the first two games in the Witcher 3 engine. Erxv1 recreated the entire Witcher 1 Prologue for the Witcher 3 engine and it is available over on Nexus Mods. Unfortunately I am certain this took a massive amount of work, and came together largely because all of the needed assets were readily available in Witcher 3. It would take a lot more effort to recreate entire games, but god I would love to see it.

Today is the last day of my holiday break, and it is around this point that I realize I did nothing but play games, or in this case one specific game. I am not sure if I care that this was the case since I spent most of the break fighting some sort of bronchitis nonsense. Holiday break has been one of those times when I dive into particular long games. During one such break I replayed all of Mass Effect starting from the first game carrying the save forward to the third game. This time around after having watched and loved the Netflix series, I dove headlong into playing The Witcher 3. I realize I probably should have started with the second game, but I also don’t think I would have stuck with it had I done so.

Witcher 3 is a weird game that seems to give no care what soever for you being confused about the setting. It is a game that more or less expects you to have either played the first two games or have read some of the novels. This makes it deeply enjoyable for those who have, but also extremely obtuse for someone who has not. I remember the first time I played the game some years back I bounced pretty heavily because it felt like I had no investment in the setting and was immediately being told that I love this woman enough to try and jump through a bunch of hoops to go find her, The Netflix series however gave me enough of a grounding in the setting to be able to start to care about how intricately crafted this world is.

To date I have spent 77 hours wandering the backwoods of the northern kingdoms, and I am completely hooked on the world. The Witcher 3 is among the most interesting and intricately crafted roleplaying game experiences I have ever participated in. I even tried my best to go back and get a foothold into the original Witcher game, but again didn’t make it super far thanks to the awful interface. I do however think I will be able to play the second game now, since I remember my key problem with it has been it did not like alt tabbing and I have other solutions to work around that. I’m even contemplating starting on the novels because I want to know more about this rich setting and the characters within it.

I don’t want to go into anything even vaguely close to spoiler territory because this is a game that I feel everyone should experience for themselves. I will say however that for a game that released in 2015, the game still looks phenomenal. Like I am not sure if I have another game that looks anywhere near as good as this one does in 4k. All of this gives me extreme hope for what Cyperpunk might end up being like to play, but really… I just want CD Project Red to get that game finished so they can create another epic set in the Witcher universe.