How / where do I start the free DLC quests?
Edit - found the Missing Miners on a notice board in the middle of Skellige.
ShivaX
4544
I’m not sure the quests are any better there. The freedom to do anything, however is above and beyond anything since Fallout 1&2.
Oh look it’s Major Character.
/shoots him in the head and kills him
/game allows it and continues
It has amazing freedom, but the quests aren’t any sort of amazing thing beyond that at any point you can pull out your Player Agency card and do whatever you want (and don’t get me wrong, it’s fucking amazing and one of the reasons F:NV was the ultimate open world RPG to me). It’s a very apples and oranges comparison. It’s also the reason that I feel TW3 raised the bar against Bethesda games. If you’re going to force a story, this is now the bar you have to clear. If you’re going to do a sandbox where you can write your own story and do anything, F:NV is still the bar (and probably always will be because Bethesda seems to love NPCs that you must have to do anything).
Cyrano
4545
I had my first pretty negative experience with this game last night. Instead of leaving an area via the exit the game wanted me to use, I left via a different exit, which looked just as good to me. A cutscene failed to trigger, and I broke the quest. I had a saved game, so I didn’t lose too much progress, but I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong on my own before looking it up online. I suppose any game of this size and complexity will have some broken quests, but now I’m paranoid about saving a lot.
A little data:
Witcher 3 is one of the most played (by median playtime) games in Steam, with 12 hours, 22 minutes. The only games that are more played are FF14, FM2015 and Dota2, and all of them were released in 2014 or before.
What the fuck, all this time Nick Diamon is Telefrog ?
WTF
Nice review btw.
Did Tom play the game? I remember he liked TW2 a lot.
Yeah, I didn’t know that either. Though I’m glad I know it now. ;)
Yeah, I feel like we had to roll a 20 in our perception checks to identify you, and it took a while. ;)
If only there was some sort of mnemonic device to remember Telefrog’s last name.
This might be my favorite review of the game. Just went up, courtesy New Statesman:
I’ve heard others, and made the comparison myself, to the game and film noir. Heck, in the first game of the series, you get an out-and-out deliberate homage to Ellroy’s L. A. Confidential (the main, long story quest is called “Vizima Confidential”, even.)
Still, this review not only notes it, but puts it forth as the main force behind the things Geralt does here. He compares him–not just his actions, but the setting, milieu of friends, and the like–to a character in a Chandler novel. Which of course, yes, very much so now that I think of it.
He had me at the subtitle: “This game is a masterpiece, and yet it still could have been so much better.”
(Side note: goodness, that is some meandering prose.)
I do hope it becomes a new standard, though obviously it won’t touch every game. We’ll always have the wannabe Hollywood action movies.
He’s absolutely right; there’s ample material in the game inspired by hardboiled fiction of the 30s-50s - as I noted upthread there’s an extended riff on Casablanca right smack in the middle of Novigrad.
He doesn’t mention some other, bigger fictional influences on the game than Chandler, though. Geralt is actually much closer to another famous fictional character than the more distantly related Marlowe, for example. (Hint: Who else tracks down grotesque beings, some of which are outright opponents and others who are more like frenemies? Who else had a tragic upbringing that cut him off from ordinary society but steeled him to be the hand of justice? Who else is both admired and feared as a semi-legendary being by the local population? Who else talks in that dry tone and husky voice? And who else has his clues get all glowy when he’s detecting things?)
More importantly, he doesn’t mention the biggest influence on the game, which is European folklore pure and simple. Much of the darkness in the Witcher isn’t the noir of 40s fiction, but rather the darkness of the Dark Ages, where death is always by your side, tiny villages are perched on the edge of brooding wildernesses, and parents are compelled to abandon their children in the forest because they can’t possibly feed them. The Witcher captures all that brilliantly, allowing us to see the lurking darkness of the fairy tales without the cruft of Disney cuteness or RPG gamefication. (Well, there is RPG gameification, of course. It is a game! But the key thing is you’re always more interested in the wraith’s background than its stats.)
I’m actually toying with this for a blog post, because I think it’s hugely important to The Witcher, and why the world is so fascinating to me and I think others. It seems like the medieval setting we think we know. But…it’s also very different. And there’s just enough similarity to hook us in to thinking we’re seeing the familiar that the stuff that is more outside our expected frame of reference makes the world seem consistently exotic for those of us who grew up on Tolkein.
My German grandmother gave me a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that had were barely removed from the sanitized translations. (A big hint for your Grimm’s version: go see how Rumpelstiltskin plays out.) It was a favorite of mine as a child, because it was gory and gruesome and death-filled and mean.
As someone with a longstanding fascination with Russian fairy tales (they could certainly give the Grimms a run for their money in the gruesome department…), I absolutely love the atmosphere in this game.
I strongly recommend Italo Calvino’s anthology of Italian folk tales, which is wonderfully annotated. Also, Robert Darnton is very good on how European folk tales in general (and especially French ones) came to be written down and to ever greater degrees bowdlerised during the 17th to 19th centuries, not just between editions of Grimm, but between Perrault and Grimm and from the oral tradition to Perrault.
Quick question for those who already finished the game…
Mildly spoilery question
I just did the “Brother in Arms” quests, and I’m about to do the “Isle in the Mists” quest. How close am I to the end (in hours to go) if I stick to main quest/story missions?
One of my favorite Russian fairy tales, which reminds me a lot of The Witcher in mood, is The Fox Physician. An old man is grieving for the death of his wife (he had dropped her while climbing up a Jack and the Beanstalk-like plant to heaven) when a fox comes along and tells the man he can heal the woman and raise her from the dead. To do so, the fox says he must take her body into the bathroom, along with all of the man’s butter and oatmeal, and left alone while he works. The old man agrees, and waits, and waits, and the fox bursts through the door and runs away. Inside, the man finds his wife’s bones have been picked clean and his food is gone, and he’s left to die alone, poor and hungry.
This little gem appears in the first few editions of Grimms. No really, it does. This is just a summarized version of what happens in it, for academic cites. The actual story is actually told in child-friendly fairy-tale language. So, yeah.
There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “you be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat.
Their mother was upstairs in a room bathing another child, and when she heard the cries of her son, she immediately ran downstairs. Upon seeing what had happened, she took the knife out of her son’s throat and was so enraged that she stabbed the heart of the other boy, who had been playing the butcher. Then she quickly ran back to the room to tend to her child in the bathtub, but while she was gone, he had drowned in the tub. Now the woman became so frightened and desperate that she did not allow the neighbors to comfort her and finally hung herself. When her husband came back from the fields and saw everything, he became so despondent that he died soon after.
That’s not even particularly, well, grim, by the standards of the time. Folk tales were nasty.
