The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Thaler is the best though. You get him in Novigrad from a barkeeper I think

But spy cards with frost? amazing combo. Often can fake the AI into passing early, dump spy cards, generate huge hand, play frost, win.

I play Gwent mostly with back row ballista and catapults, since it seems like few of my enemies really defend against them. I know that’s not going to last and I’ll need a better strategy, I haven’t used spies at all yet.

Problem is they don’t scale. Early game they;re among your best, but by mid to late game they don’t have the heroes to match. My Scoiatel deck has literally 0 siege cards.

Don’t need them when you’ve got 4 cards with 10s that are immune to status effects. And Yennifer is pretty amazing with a secondary ability as Medic.

Yeah I don’t have any 10s yet. Mostly playing with cards I’ve won off other folks, haven’t paid money for any so far. Some are pretty good but not amazingly so.

I just played Roche this morning, and he dropped a Ciri card on me.

15, immune to effects. Yowza!

By the time my deck was filled out it looked liked:

-AS MANY SPY CARDS AS POSSIBLE.
-all of the special/immune cards you can find
-A few decoys (for picking up enemy spy cards when they play them)
-A few trash cards (to fake out the enemy and use the decoys on if they don’t play spy cards)

So far about the only thing I don’t like in the game are the interludes where you play as Ciri. Who is Ciri? I’m guessing she’s the little kid you’re training with at the beginning of the game who’s now grown up. Why would I want to suddenly start playing as her in the game? I don’t know her from Adam. It seems like a very strange and off-putting gameplay decision on the developer’s part. I sure hope there aren’t any more of these switches through the rest of the game.

That’s weird. I didn’t read any of the books and I still found Ciri to be a fairly interesting character. The gameplay interludes were simplistic but pleasant.

Yeah, wow. Ciri is definitely one of the best parts of the game, and easily my favorite character in the universe besides Geralt.

Were you not paying attention in the prologue in White Orchard and just after White Orchard? Ciri, as setup in that training sequence, is your surrogate daughter. And the whole premise of the game is that you’re looking for Ciri. So you’re tracking down what happened to her and where she is and what’s she been up to.

How did you miss this?

And given that the whole point of the game is to track down Ciri, I found her interludes very relevant.

As for not knowing Ciri, that is the point of the interludes. You get to know her through those interludes.

There are, because she is the central character. Obviously you’ve seen the Emhyr? He has tasked you with finding Ciri, his daughter. Ciri is also the semi adopted daughter of Geralt, you saw him training her at the beginning.

So the entire plot of the game is that Ciri is hunted by the Wild Hunt, Ciri has been missing for years, and you are trying to find her before the hunt for reasons of apocalypse. So you are sent to pursue various sightings. Each time you have an interlude is basically when Geralt uncovers a major clue to her whereabouts and activities.

Yes, I saw all that, I understand he thinks of her as his daughter. I know that the plot of the story has him looking for her. But, I don’t know her at all beyond that bit of information. Why literally stick me in her shoes? I’m not interested in playing as a character I know nothing about and have nothing at all invested in. I just think it’s strange. I couldn’t wait for it to be over with so I could start playing the game again. It’s like reading a book written in first person and suddenly the author throws in another first person interlude from someone else entirely new. It just makes you think WTF.

So really?

  1. Who is Ciri? Well. Did you skip past the opening sequence in Kaer Morhen? Did you fast forward past the conversations with the older Witcher, Vesemir? Did you skip on the extended sequence with the Emperor? Did you miss all the conversations with Yennefer? I mean, if you missed all that, I dunno what to tell you, because I’m not sure how you figured out how to install the game or turn your computer on. ;)

  2. You start playing as Ciri because it gives you insight into her character. She’s not on-screen much, but she gets talked about a lot. Now that can work in a movie like The Third Man, where Harry Lyme is constantly discussed, but we don’t meet him until 2/3rds of the way through the film. That works there, because movies are short compared to this video game.

But by taking over and playing as Ciri, you get some insight into her as a character. Geralt and company clearly think she’s special, even beyond her underlying powers and ancestry. They love her and worry about her and fret over her, and by playing as her, you experience why that might be.

When you play as her, you realize that she kicks ass and is a formidable force in her own right. But then in that initial sequence when she kills the wolves and then sees the little girl lost in the forest, you get a more rounded sense of her. She’s kind. She’s compassionate. She’s a good person who cares about and for others.

And for me at least, playing as Geralt and understanding that Ciri is his ward and a daughter figure, I felt this weird little bit of pride. “Oh, look how good she turned out!” And feeling that way, when I’m switched back to Geralt mode, now I’ve got that whole protective parent thing going on in my mind, and I REALLY want to find her.

It’s a terrific use of player agency in game design.

[quote=“Coldsteel, post:7021, topic:71667, full:true”]
But, I don’t know her at all beyond that bit of information. [/quote]

Sure you do. You met her in the opening sequence. But you’ve also heard Geralt and others talk about her, especially to that point, Geralt and Vesemir and Yen. You don’t need to meet a character and spend time with a character to get to know that character.

Because that’s a fantastic way to learn about her and see her and hear her and watch her interact with her world and get to know her.

QED

Or it makes me think: "I’m reading Faulkner or Twain or Joyce or Hemingway…etc. ;)

I was not literally asking who she is. I meant who is she that I’d want to play as her. More rhetorical, I guess. In any case, I guess not many (if any) others here are bothered by the switching viewpoint. It does bug me though. I’m trying to find her. I don’t want to BE her.

Yeah, I found it jarring too—at least in terms of gameplay. In terms of getting to know the character, the shift to her perspective was worthwhile, but I wasn’t remotely interested in being dumped into a new play style, even if Ciri does have some neat tricks.

The first time, with the wolves etc. wasn’t so bad, but the later episode nearer the endgame… I muttered something uncharitable, switched to easy, and just mashed through it.

Fully agree Trig. Other than about 5-10 hours of Witcher 1, I have no experience with the series outside of this game. They have this potential for the kind of narrative failure so common to games, the kind where you, as a player, are asked to care about this person whom you have only met minutes before they get killed/ kidnapped. That they talk up about how special, powerful, kind, etc. they are, but you never get to see that in game. Tell, don’t show and all that.

But they did a good job of giving you time to breathe, to see their relationships with more than ‘I’m your wife/ child/ parent, you should care about me’ that so many other games do. Then they have you play as her, that way when you get told how skilled she is, you’ve felt that. That way when you find out she is fleeing for her life, you can sense this is no simple monster problem, it is far more sinister.

Plus think about the scenes, and what they convey. If you just talked to the Baron, it probably was running through the forest, and you found the little girl. Now consider that sequence otherwise. You have two options really. Do a big text info dump, listening to the Baron prattle on for 10 minutes about what happened, or you watch a cutscene for that story. Either way its a long stretch away from gameplay passively absorbing a story dump. Playing as Ciri conveys that story while also engaging you as the player.

I prefer that personally.

On Skellige? The redacted never ending spawn fight?

Didn’t have difficulty myself. Ciri is a cagey fighter. Her ‘blink’ ability makes it easy to avoid damage. I actually rather liked it.

[quote=“CraigM, post:7026, topic:71667”]
On Skellige? The redacted never ending spawn fight?[/quote]

No, this was a different one, altogether more irritating.

Neither did I, after I hit FF. :)

That’s my main beef with it. Plus, it really is just a long cutscene with very small illusion of control. You can’t make any real choices that matter. You can’t change gear (or even look at your inventory). You just follow the script like a robot. You can’t even die because it’s just a scripted scene from the past. They could have just made it a long cutscene to watch and I would be fine with that. I’d have gotten just as much insight into the character. Don’t make me dance to your script when it’s all preordained with no real choices for me to make anyway. Let me get back to playing the game.

I actually agree with Coldsteel on that point. I was never much of a fan of playing Ciri. It was sort of neat, but ultimately playing a flashback of a completely different character just felt off.