How to start this post other than an apology for not posting in a while. I had been fairly active in my Youtube and Twitch stuff, but if this is your main digest for what I've been doing I've been sorely neglecting you. For that I do sincerely apologize.
Aside from that I guess I have to say that yes, I've still been playing games, though the attention I've given this blog would not indicate that. With all that said I've fallen into a Witcher hole...
If you've been following me on Twitch or YouTube you would have noticed that I had started playing The Witcher in preparation for this game, "The Witcher Three: The Wild Hunt." Which (get it? no that was too easy) I've been super psyched about for quite a while, as I alluded to in my top 10 from last year, which I think is like two posts ago...
I promise I have a point and I'm heading towards it. Perhaps I'm taking about the most 'round about way to say that I'm loving the Witcher Three. Though I'm still not sure if I should be Witchering 3 or Witchering Three. The style guides I'm used to would say Witcher Three which I will use from here but I'll try to avoid it if at all possible...
The world of The Witcher was created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski it can be a confusing world but if I'm to make my short understanding of the long story short... The world of the Witcher has had a "conjunction of the spheres" or whatever the original Polish that was translated from. Basically it means that various universes have crossed over in some sort of cataclysmic event that brought monsters and magic and humans into this world. So we see things from our fairy tales to apparently pop culture bleeding into this world in weird ways. Were they real stories from another universe shaded away by years of history or just something someone made up? At what point did the bleed-through happen? Witcher 3 has references to stories old and new. I've run into references to at least Cinderella and Kill Bill. The whole Witcher universe has these kind of references, I remember that some happened in the books, but I can't quite place my finger on which stories repeated themselves. The most important story that I've read in the series with regards is "The Last Wish" which is the title story for the first short story compilation. This story binds Yennefer and Geralt together by means of a Genie.
In any case if you don't know about the world of the Witcher, it's your fantasy world, magic is really powerful but magic users don't go around creating weapons and armor that have been enchanted etc, they use their magic to become influential figures in the political climate. Why wouldn't you? Part of what I like about this world is something might interpret as a dark/gritty interpretation of fantasy world. The reasoning is more that people have realistic motivations rather than just bad guy want's to destroy the world because "reasons" or the villain kills people because he's the bad guy. The Witcher games (I haven't read all the books) seem to try to give realistic motivations to people for their crazy actions, even if those reasons are that they are crazy (in include totalitarian political ambition in this umbrella).
With open world games I always worry about the point at which the "work" portion of them will overcome the enjoyment of the process. I'll at some point want to go beyond slaying random monsters and save the princess, world, or universe. That's how these things are set up lest you substitute a word in for princess, world or universe. There should be some sort of turn of phrase that should be universally understood as a sigh. I'm quite a way into the game, I like exploring it. Man, I have a lot of other stuff going on too, and now Fallout 4 another one of these huge games is poking it's head around the corner.
All this said Witcher 3 seems like it's trying to do a better job of being a giant world than what the Elder Scrolls did, however I do believe it does a better job. Seemingly benign sidequests start to head down weird paths. An example from semi-early on in the game is a monster-hunt quest I took early in the game that ostensibly would have had me head to a manor and clear out a monster. I ended up meeting up with a character from the previous game who may or not have made it to this game depending on my choices in the previous game. I went on a little adventure with him and added him apparently to my Kaer Morhen (Witcher Stronghold) crew Mass Effect style presumably, I haven't gotten that far yet.
This game doesn't seem to treat NPCs the same way that Bethseda games do. With letting them do their own thing and interact with each other. They can occasionally die and fall through the world with this kind of system, The Witcher seems to lock people into places and times which while less organic, when done well, seems that way. However crazy things can happen.
Like this.
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| The many headed horse-hydras of Temeria. |
Or I can accidentally make my pants too high a level to wear. Yes, that is a thing I accidentally had happen because I thought I had hit the level for the pants diagram I had got but I was actually a level short. It lead to some funny cut-scenes.
In any case I'm still going to play through Witcher 1, eventually and you can see my progress here.
I'll also be occasionally playing the Witcher 3 on live stream and posting stuff to YouTube here.
