Choices in The Witcher 3

I haven’t been as on the ball when it comes to writing these Notes on time, so I’m considering moving these to Sunday or something? I don’t know, you guys let me know. All I know is that I’m frantically writing them on Friday night and Saturday morning. Then again, there’s nothing that says they have to go up Saturday morning…

Anyhow I’m somewhat picking back up my reading schedule, but I can’t read as much during the day on weekdays so it is going pretty slowly.

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Choices in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Like many RPGs, The Witcher 3 has many different choices presented to the player that leads to different outcomes. It’s become infamous among players though, in that many times the choices you’re presented with give no way to win. Sometimes you make a choice that seems like the Good One, the nice choice that you do because you’re a good guy. And it backfires terribly because of something you had no way of knowing.

For instance, there are these three witches called the Ladies of the Wood. They’re evil crones; the Fates by way of Baba Yaga on her worst day. They eat children. They carry around body parts of people they’re presumably going to eat later. And they send you on a mission to go kill a spirit bound to a tree, a spirit that seemingly kills anyone that goes near the tree.

When you get to the spirit, after hacking through the wolves and werewolf guardians, the spirit tells you that it is not evil, that it was trapped here by the Ladies a long time ago. It tells you that it is not the cause of the killings. Furthermore, it turns out that the Ladies have kidnapped an orphanage full of children, and that this spirit has the only way of freeing them. And instead of killing this spirit, you can free it. And if you do that, the children will be saved!

And to be fair, the children will be saved. That’s not a lie on anyone’s part. But you find out later that the spirit in question will go around the countryside, spreading a Hate Plague that makes people start randomly killing each other for no reason, and at least one village has been wiped off the map by it.

There is no “Good” choice in this, that everyone comes away unscathed. 

There are a lot of choices in the game where you’re presented with two options, and neither of them sounds very good. And to be fair, most of them don’t involve a weird spirit bound to a tree. Some of them are a lot less sketch sounding. The good-sounding, helpful option is right there, but there’s a least something that feels off about it, like an itch. The guy begging you for help--there’s some part of his story that doesn’t quite add up, and if you don’t catch it you’ll end up enabling something very, very bad.

On the one hand, I kind of don’t like it, because I end up making a bunch of choices trying to help someone, and it ends up backfiring. On the other hand, I do kind of like this design choice?

I recall that when there were development videos being released for the game Rise of the Argonauts, the creative director would often make the point that in a lot of RPGs with dialogue trees, there is the Good choice, the Bad choice, and the middle one. His game attempted to do away with that by aligning the dialogue choices with the four patron gods and the philosophical ideals they represent; I don’t know if he succeeded, given that in Rise of the Argonauts none of the choices really make much of a difference (in truth, so much of that game got cut in the process of finishing it, which is a shame). There’s one bit where a guy starts an argument with you, and you have four dialogue choices, and ALL of them lead to Jason punching the other guy in the face. 

But The Witcher instead makes it so that there are no Good choices at all--you’re going to have to do harm to someone in order to move on. Sometimes you will do Good, in the long run, but in order to do that, you have to do something a little bit Bad, or at least mean. We could easily try to make this into a “Because that’s true about Life!” essay, but I hate those conversations so we’re not going to do that. But it shows situations that are morally complex. I don’t always like the way they’re structured, but I respect what they’re going for.

It’s a challenge to the player. Because many times players will try to take one way or the other. The Witcher 3 doesn’t remove that dichotomy, exactly, but it changes the way players have to approach situations. You can’t play it as an All Good Guy or All Bad Guy route. Well, you can actually play it as an All Bad Guy route, but the whole idea of “do all the Good Choices to get the Good Endings” way of thinking doesn’t work. Sure, you could follow a guide to see how to get particular endings that you want, but otherwise it’s not as if you can predict what’s going to happen based on what you choose.

You instead have to make decisions by paying close attention to the information you’ve been given. The player has to engage with the game much more closely in order to get the desired story outcomes, if those outcomes are even possible. It can be immensely frustrating, and I don’t always like how everything turns out, but I admire the approach and what the game is trying to do.

I just wish it didn’t keep ending up with me getting screwed over though.

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