I meant to finish this (this part, anyway) a lot earlier, but everything sort of ganged up on me and so I didn't go as quickly as I really wanted to in writing this. It's also... very disorganized, and I had envisioned doing much more with it--I mention later on in the essay that I had originally hoped to do this in even MOAR parts, with each major character getting full analysis, but let's be real here, there are so many characters in the game that doing that would take even longer and I'm stretched out as it is.
So here it is: the first part of my review of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. I don't think the next part will be out next weekend, but hopefully it won't take as long.
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PART I: STORY
My intention was to write a review for The Witcher III: Wild Hunt when I started it. But part of the problem with that is that it’s a massive game, so there’s quite a lot to talk about and it’s going to take a while to unpack. I’m splitting this up into sections, and those sections might be split into subsections. Before we get started a couple of disclaimers:
First: I have read only three of the books in the Witcher saga, and I have played neither of the previous two games. So while I often say you shouldn’t have to read/watch/play supplementary material to understand plot points, the previous entries in a series don’t fall under that category. So I may complain about how something is handled or explained, but if it’s covered better in previous media then consider my criticism with a grain of salt.
Second: I tend to lean away from dark fantasy as a subgenre. It’s not my thing most of the time. I didn hear a lot of good things about this game and found it on sale, so that’s why I got it, but while I did enjoy myself greatly, this isn’t the type of story I usually go for.
So! Let’s start by talking about the Plot of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt! In a slightly condensed way:
The story picks up after the end of The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings, where Geralt gets his memory back and has been searching for his love interest from the books, Yennefer. He’s also been having dreams about his adopted daughter Ciri, and thinks she’s in danger. He does find Yennefer quickly enough, and they’re drafted by Ciri’s biological father--the emperor of Nilfgaard, the invading nation bent on world domination--to find Ciri, as she’s been seen in the area.
So it’s up to Geralt to track down Ciri in the last known locations she’s been seen: the war-torn no man’s land called Velen, the cosmopolitan and corrupt city of Novigrad, and the rugged islands of Skellige. Along the way he runs into a LOT of old acquaintances, and new ones, and finds out that Ciri’s being chased by the Wild Hunt, an army of extradimensional elves that hope to use Ciri’s incredible powers to take over the multiverse, which would also kill her in the process.
Geralt eventually does find Ciri, and tries to gather all of his allies to make a stand against the Wild Hunt at the witcher fortress of Kaer Morhen. But while they do survive and Ciri doesn’t get taken, Geralt’s mentor Vesemir bites it and the Wild Hunt escapes to fight another day. Geralt and company then form a plan to lure the Wild Hunt somewhere in which they can’t escape, and cut off all of their backup from their home dimension, leading to a climactic battle in which Geralt fights and kills Eredin, the King of the Wild Hunt.
And then Ciri destroys the White Frost, this extradimensional winter force that goes around destroying worlds or something.
THE END!
Unless you get the expansions. The first one, Hearts of Stone, has Geralt get involved with a disgraced Redanian nobleman named Olgierd von Everec, who turns out to be unkillable because he made a deal for wealth and power with an unsavory being calling himself Gaunter O’Dimm. Gaunter helps Geralt, so Geralt has to in turn help Gaunter fulfill Olgierd’s contract: grant three impossible wishes, and then Gaunter gets to take Olgierd’s soul, for which Gaunter will grant Geralt any wish he likes. However, Geralt can interfere and try to save Olgierd instead, and defeat Gaunter in a game of wits.
The second expansion, Blood and Wine sees Geralt traveling south to the duchy of Touissant. The duchy’s being terrorized by a monster killing high-ranking knights, and the duchess has hired Geralt to investigate and kill it. Turns out that the creature’s a Higher Vampire named Dettlaff, and then Geralt’s old previously-thought-dead vampire friend Regis turns out to be Dettlaff’s friend and encourages him to investigate further to find out why Dettlaff has gone on a killing spree. It turns out to be about more than it seems--Dettlaff’s being blackmailed into killing knights, and the blackmailer has more than just killing aristocrats in mind, shaking up the entire duchy with the ambition of overthrowing the established order.
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Alright, so let’s talk a bit more about the game’s Plot and how it works. After the introductory section in White Orchard, you have the three main regions (it’s kind of two, as you don’t need to go to a different part of the map to go between Velen and Novigrad, but let’s just stick with what the game tells us): Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige. The investigations in all three regions can be done in any order. I did them in the order they’re levelled at, and they’re listed in the story, but the player doesn’t have to.
This first part, which is helpfully labelled ‘Act I’ by the game’s wiki, is also the majority of the game’s Plot. Most of the game will be spent exploring these areas and dealing with the tangle of subplots there. And so when Geralt finally does find Ciri, the story feels a bit… rushed? And of course, yeah, things should pick up after that happens, but it feels a lot like most of the game is slow build, and then it’s one major battle after another. Maybe it’s just because I also do quite a lot of the side content, but going from hours upon hours of Plot interwoven with deep and complex character arcs to straight battles felt a little jarring to me. There’s a scene between Plot sequences which is where you can tell Ciri that the Emperor wants to see her, and it’s so awkwardly sandwiched in between important cutscenes that I thought I missed something, or that it would come up again more organically later.
Again, that’s not too much of a complaint, because naturally the story picks up after a certain point. But it’s weird that it all comes rushing together at once when the beginning of the game is much slower paced. Then again, I did get annoyed at the slow beginning at first, because it felt as if as much fun as I was having, the story was barely progressing. I’m kind of thankful that it picks up.
I was worried that I would be lost when playing the game. I have some basic knowledge of the setting and the Witcher stories, having watched the series, and read the first three books. But that wasn’t really a problem? I suppose it couldn’t have been--this game being as popular as it is, I don’t think everyone that played it and enjoyed it had gone through all of the material. And I’m glad. I don’t know if it was easy to make a game that was a conclusion to the Witcher saga and yet still accessible to noobs, but I very much appreciated it.
Not everything is explained in a way that satisfied me--the White Frost for instance. It’s explained in-game, but it feels a bit hastily put in towards the end of the game, and if you didn’t read any of the in-game books it feels right the fudge out of nowhere. Pretty much everything about the Wild Hunt’s origins and backstory, including most information about the Aen Elle, felt as if it wasn’t given enough breathing room to be developed. The histories and relationships of countries that weren’t Redania or Nilfaard were all a bit hazy. Yes, there’s an in-game glossary and database, and that helps, but that mostly just gives you the gist of things, and there’s clearly a lot more going on. Again, I suspect that if I read all of the books and played the previous games this would have worked better, but as it was I just kind of nodded and hoped it would become clearer and only some of it did. Most of it wasn’t necessary to understanding the Plot, or the game, so it wasn’t a huge stumbling block, but it is a problem I had.
THEMES
Human Nature & Morality
I got very frustrated with this game’s very dim view of humanity and morality, but to its credit, it makes for a very interesting and unexpected experience. Most of the people you meet in the Northern Kingdoms are selfish jerkfaces, happily calling Geralt a freak to his face until they need his help killing a monster. Several times you are given a quest where even if you make the “Good” choices, a ton of people get horribly screwed over in ways you never could have foreseen.
It is… irritating, to say the least. The Church of the Eternal Fire embodies this the most for me--they somehow have an iron grip on the city of Novigrad, happily burning mages and nonhumans, and the common folk are happy to let them because humans are sheep unless they’re named characters. Novigrad is explicitly under the control of crime lords who think very little of the Eternal Fire, but somehow they still hold institutional power because they’re sponsored by Radovid (who also doesn’t have institutional power in Novigrad, we’re told).
The Bloody Baron questline embodies this writing at its best. The story involves Geralt’s interactions with a local warlord called the Bloody Baron who is, quite frankly, a horrible person. He is looking for his missing wife and daughter, and when he hires Geralt to look for them, he conveniently leaves out that he would frequently get drunk and beat his wife. Also his men frequently commit war crimes. He is not without noble qualities--when he never harms children, and he helps Ciri when she’s in trouble. And he does show genuine remorse for what he’s done to his family.
Is that enough? Does that mean he gets a pass? That’s up to you, the player. The game doesn’t depict him as a good guy. It doesn’t portray him as a completely evil guy. But it doesn’t whitewash what the man has done, or what he’s still allowing to be done in his name. How you react to him depends entirely on how the player feels about him as a person. I don’t know if you can decide to let him off the hook completely--and I don’t think you should. But whether or not you give some measure of understanding when he tells his side of the story, or whether you decide that he’s still the Worst, that’s on the player, and that’s great.
It helps that there are two different endings to his storyline, neither of them particularly good for the Baron. One of them has more hope for him redeeming himself, true, but not in a simple or clear-cut way.
So yes, I do get frustrated with the way the game is so much of a downer, thematically. But it leads to some very complex and interesting human interactions and I appreciate that the game is brave enough to go there.
The DLC Blood and Wine is a bit more optimistic in its depiction of human nature (along with a more colorful world), but it still has a lot of stories that rely on people being absolutely terrible to each other. The ending can also very easily be made a mess of without even trying because of how terrible people (mostly Syanna) can be.
I think it’s executed pretty clumsily at times though. The treatment of Nilfgaard by the story comes to mind. Nilfgaard, a massive invading empire happy to commit war crimes and that’s never happy with enough land or territory, in a video game developed by a Polish game studio, based on a series by a Polish author, practically screams Soviet and Nazi parallels. And yet while the game doesn’t depict them as nice, it kind of lightens their depiction from what I remember in the books. They’re depicted as not a good, but a better alternative than Radovid’s madness and extremism.
When a game makes a villain a genocidal religious extremist maniac turned up to eleven, and dials down the canon fascist/authoritarian traits of another villain, I feel like we run into a problem. Because it seems like they’re saying, “Yeah, it’s a brutal authoritarian dictatorship, but at least they’re not racist zealots!”
I don’t like that this dichotomy is even a question. And toning down the side of authoritarianism don’t sit right with me.
War
Part of the reason that everyone’s so horrible to each other and to you, the player, is because there’s a war going on. It brings out the worst in people. Part of that is because of sheer desperation--many of the resources are being commandeered by soldiers and people are getting killed right and left. And part of it is because there are nations and ways of life falling apart because of the war, and obviously that’s going to put a lot of stress on the citizens of the Continent.
War brings out the worst in people.
We don’t actually see any major battles in the war, but we see the aftermath. Velen is scattered about with ruined villages and battlefields littered with corpses and carrion-eaters feasting on what’s left. You’ll find bandits and deserters throughout that are picking through what’s left. Bodies are hanging from gibbets and trees of criminals and deserters. It’s a very bleak place and it adds to the atmosphere of a world that’s fallen so far from where it should be. It makes an oppressive atmosphere, one that’s suited for the story they’re trying to tell. Because this isn’t just high fantasy, it’s high fantasy with quite a lot of horror thrown in. And much of that horror isn’t monsters, or rather, it isn’t JUST monsters--it’s the conditions that allow monsters to thrive: the rampant death and destruction brought on by war.
Still, I think the war storyline leads to some really stupid moments? There’s a questline you can pursue about assassinating Radovid, the king of Redania, because he’s crazypants. And it’s fine, but at the end of the storyline, it’s revealed that the conspirators made a pact with the Emperor of Nilfgaard to kill Radovid, and that in return their country, Temeria, becomes a self-governed province of the Empire. And then one of the conspirators decides he’s going to kill your friends so that he can rule Redania and defeat Nilfgaard in the war, because he doesn’t want his country to be sold out just so Temeria can exist. Which is a fair point, but killing Geralt’s friends isn’t a smart plan; it hinges on Geralt walking away, when the reason he joined this assassination plot in the first place was so that he could help his friends. I can’t imagine why any player would just walk away unless they really wanted to know what happened. War brings out the worst in people sometimes, yeah, but not that much stupid.
Public Opinion
Public opinion has a lot of sway on what people do and how they interact with each other. The most prominent example of this is when we learn that the invasion of the Northern Kingdoms isn’t actually all that popular back home in Nilfgaard, and that one of the Emperor’s worst fears is that he’s deposed by his people once he gets back home. If you end the story in such a way that he loses the war, that’s exactly what happens--he gets assassinated as soon as he gets back.
There are plenty of people who hate Geralt on sight because he’s a witcher, and nobody likes witchers that much. And that’s fair--they only kill monsters for a price, and in a war zone not everyone can pay that price. Furthermore they had a habit once upon a time of taking children as payment, hoping to train future witchers, and most kids don’t survive the process. And the reason they stopped taking them was not because it’s bad, but because the process to make more has been lost.
In short, getting good PR is essential. There aren’t a lot of people who thrive despite having bad reputations. Building and keeping a good reputation, even if you’re a complete bastard, is a large part of how those in power stay in power. And having a bad reputation even if you’re very noble can get you in trouble, or even killed.
One thing that did kind of bug me is Geralt’s fame. There are times when it seems as if plenty of people know who he is--after all, Dandelion is his PR guy, and that man’s the most famous bard and troubadour on the Continent. Other times Geralt introduces himself and no one has a clue who he is. And I get that before widespread media not everyone everywhere will have heard of him, but even with that in mind it’s pretty inconsistent how famous he is. It tends to be “Geralt is as famous as the Plot needs him to be for this particular story/quest to work.”
Still, it’s a cool concept to explore in a fantasy story. Not a brand new one, of course, but one that fits perfectly with the world as it’s built.
Relationships
You can play Geralt as the most ruthless, heartless, inhuman bastard imaginable, and he’s still humanized by his relationship with Ciri. You can’t change the fact that he cares about his adopted daughter and wants to help her out. Sure, you can be a terrible father, but it doesn’t mean that Geralt doesn’t care, just that he’s bad at it.
There’s a running idea throughout the story that yes, people can be utterly terrible, but what brings them back, or gives them a shot at bringing them back to the light, is the love they have for others. Maybe it’s parental love, like Geralt and Yennerfer for Ciri, or Strenger for Tamara; maybe it’s Syanna’s twisted love for her sister Annarietta (if you play the cards right).
Heck, the Emperor of Nilfgaard is humanized (slightly) by the love for his daughter.
The characters who are irredeemable are the ones who aren’t connected to anyone; who can’t connect with anyone. Cyprian is a serial killer that gets his kicks murdering a different batch of prostitutes every night, and no one cries if he gets killed or if he’s a beggar in the street getting pelted with rocks by children. Caleb Menge is only interested in hurting people because he’s so paranoid of nonhumans and mages that he won’t connect with anyone.
When these connections are lost are when we risk losing our humanity. When Geralt thinks Cyprian might have killed Ciri, he gets pretty scary. And in the ending in which Ciri dies, he becomes a much colder killing machine. When Syanna is convinced that her sister doesn’t love her, she becomes a power-hungry murderer. When Detlaff finds out that he was never loved in the first place, he becomes omnicidal. And of course Olgierd can’t--what makes him monstrous is that his deal with Gaunter turned his heart to stone. And even though he knows that he should care about people, he can’t, so he gives up and just tries chasing thrills to try to feel something, being an absolute bastard.
Humans need other humans to be… human.
CHARACTERS
Okay so in my head, I told myself I’d do an in-depth profile on every major character. And then I started listing characters distinct and important enough to do profiles on and HOLY FATHER FRANCIS this game has a ton of characters and if I’m hoping to get anywhere at all with this review, we are not doing that.
I’ve talked a bit about how this game has complex characters and I like that, but also that the game sometimes goes into dark or morally complex places when it doesn’t need to in order to make it grimdarker (??) for the heck of it. For instance, Djikstra comes to mind--he’s an incredibly intelligent, if ruthless, former spymaster-turned-crime lord that decides to kill Radovid for turning the country to garbage. And he immediately turns on his allies the first opportunity he gets, not counting on Geralt interfering because… we need the Conflict Ball here, I guess. It makes his character arc in the game feel less than fulfilling.
For the most part though, even if I don’t like all the character writing decisions, I get that I’m not supposed to--and I can choose to make Geralt react in a way that somewhat reflects my own reactions. I very much enjoy that Geralt’s character arc is heavily determined by player choices. Geralt can be a hero of the downtrodden, and I think the game subtly steers you in this direction with the way that the story goes. But you don’t have to go that way at all. You can make Geralt the biggest jerkwad in the history of the Continent, ignoring when people are in trouble, or demanding more money from people who are offering their last pennies to you to kill a monster.
Yennefer is… alright let’s get straight to it: she’s kind of terrible. She’s aloof at first, and I get that because she’s concerned with finding Ciri and doesn’t have time to sit and reminisce with Geralt about old times, especially considering she’s still a bit upset about Geralt having a romance with Triss while she’s been out. And I think, after playing this game, I get what the romance between Geralt and Yennefer is supposed to be: these two very flawed individuals who nonetheless are trying to make a relationship work despite their own flaws, and making it work through all of the difficulties. Thing is that Yennefer has some incredibly unsympathetic moments of dickishness or pettiness that made me think, “Wow, you’re not someone I really want to be around.” Mind you, I still steered Geralt towards her because I’m a stickler for canon, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing.
The third point of this love triangle is Triss, who the game very much paints as a nice, sweet girl who just wants to help the downtrodden whenever she can and also happens to be an incredibly powerful sorceress and also is madly in love with Geralt even though they broke up a little while back. Which okay, makes her a very distinct option from Yennefer. But what this overlooks is that (from what I understand) Triss took advantage of Geralt while he had amnesia and couldn’t remember Yennefer. This is glossed over in a quick bit of dialogue and Geralt doesn’t hold it against her, but it’s still a thing that happened, and while complex characters are fine, it’s frustrating to ignore that complexity in order to make the love triangle a more conventional one to the audience.
Ciri is a good character, but like I said, it seems the game doesn’t develop her enough on its own. As a character she stands out, but she’s not in most of the story, and her powers are so vaguely-defined it sometimes feels like she’s exactly as powerful as the Plot needs her to be. The ending involves her fighting the White Frost by herself and destroying it, but I have no idea what that entails, why she’s the one to do it, and how she does it. This might be another one of those ‘I should have read all the books’ thing, but it seems like something that should have been given more details.
Given that she’s essentially Geralt’s daughter, and she’s the one the entire Plot of the saga hinges on, I figured she should have more. It’s not too egregious considering she’s given playable sequences, and once she’s physically in the story she takes up a large part of it. And the times when she’s not there are almost entirely about trying to find her. I just wish I had a better handle on her relevance to the setting. Mind you, her role as a character is very well defined--I was never at a loss as to what she meant to Geralt, Yen, or Triss. And I think it’s commendable that the writers managed to get that across even for people who aren’t superfans of the novels.
Eredin is… not a fantastic villain. Maybe he works better for book fans, but for me, most of his motivations and backstory are only referred to and not very well explained. So he’s just some generic bad guy that’s trying to get Ciri so he can take over the multiverse. I think? From what I can tell he’s also the de facto king of elves from his home dimension, which doesn’t sound right to me, but we’re only given one other elven politician there, Ge’els, and he seems more like a steward or chancellor than a king.
Baron Strenger is one of the best characters in the game. Not in that he’s necessarily fun to watch, or that he’s a cool guy (because he’s not), but he’s one of the most complex characters I’ve seen in a video game and the freedom with which the player gets to judge him is really interesting. It’s not pleasant, but I think his storyline is the best in the game? Yeah, he’s a garbage man, let’s not diminish that. But in the end he realizes that.
I wanted the other witchers to get more screen time than they did. They’re really cool characters! Even if Lambert’s a douchebag. They did get a fair amount, but once the siege of Kaer Morhen is over, they’re gone too. And that’s a shame because I would have liked to have seen Geralt interact with them more, or see a few other witchers. The idea presented in the early books that witchers don’t have emotions is clearly simply not there in this game because there isn’t really an attempt to have them be emotionless. Which is fine--most writers are very bad at writing supposedly emotionless characters.
I also desperately wished to see Geralt and Letho hang out more, though I don’t really think there’s any good reason for them to do so. Really, once I read up on this guy’s story I wondered why Geralt would even talk to him.
The Skellige characters are all right. I felt like they were a bit disconnected from the main story, and I’m still very unclear how they’re related to everything? I know that they know Ciri, but I don’t quite know how or why, even though I know she spent some time there when she was young. Why did she go to them? Why are they all cool with Geralt? I dunno. If it is explained in-game, I don’t remember it now. They’re all cool, interesting characters, and in some ways a more thoughtful look at the ‘viking warrior’ type of character and why that isn’t always great.
I thought about dedicating a different section to the DLC characters, but I’ve already dipped into a bit here. So I’ll talk about some of those characters; however, I should note that the villains in the expansions carry so much more depth than the main villains of the main game’s Plot. Which is impressive, considering that the expansions’ runtime is shorter.
Olgierd is an interesting case of a man who sold his soul, because he has no emotions, but he remembers what they felt like, so he keeps trying to feel them again. There’s the lovely bit of dialogue between the dog and cat:
“At least he loved his wife.”
“He didn’t. He only remembered that he should.”
Which is a thing I feel like a lot of writers don’t think about when they write characters who have lost emotions.
Gaunter O’Dim is a terrifying character that works (for me) precisely because most of what characterizes him is implied rather than outright said. It’s quite plain to the player that he’s the Devil, but it takes quite a while for Geralt to get there. He’s a fantastic villain, even if he doesn’t have anything against Geralt personally, because you know that you can’t trust him from the start and he’s so unimaginably powerful that he doesn’t have to actually use any of his offensive powers to be scary. But when he does use his powers, he’s one of the most horrific monsters I’ve ever seen in fiction.
Annarietta, Duchess of Toussaint, is a nice contrast to the nobles of Velen and Redania, as she’s someone that is actually apparently good for her country, and despite the fancy trappings of nobility isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty in the pursuit of her nation’s good. But her pride still sometimes gets the best of her, and the fact is that her nation puts her up on way too high of a pedestal. Which she sort of buys into sometimes? Like yes, it gets annoying, but it’s supposed to, and I don’t think it’s bad writing.
Regis is… another book character I don’t know. But I liked him. He’s a bit too apologetic on Detlaff’s part, but it’s clear theirs is a friendship that Geralt isn’t a part of and so of course from the outside it doesn’t make as much sense. He’s a likable enough vampire character, and one that thankfully isn’t an angsty douchebag. It’s way too common to see that kind of character, even in fiction that’s meant to be subversive.
Detlaff is a great villain because as his story goes on you find out that he’s not really that bad of a guy at the start. Yeah, he’s temperamental, and lashes out at people, and in a Higher Vampire that’s dangerous. By the end of the story he’s become a rabid animal that has to be put down--but you can find yourself hoping that there’s another way.
Syanna is a bit of a difficult character for me because she’s kind of a garbage person? And yes, as you interact with her throughout Blood & Wine you see why she’s a garbage person, but it seems very much like the “good” ending is letting her get away with a lot less punishment than you’d expect, and that’s… a bit frustrating. Not that I wanted Syanna to die horribly, but she caused quite a lot of suffering and I get that many players probably don’t think she deserves just being imprisoned for it, but that’s the only way for you to have a “good” ending for that storyline.
CONCLUSION
This is a game that I think would have been more rewarding in its story if I had a lot more familiarity with the source material--both in that I would have better ideas behind events and character motivations, and the themes might feel more familiar to me.
[Hearts of Stone didn’t really have that much of a problem in that regard, because it’s clear that the story of that mostly goes into new territory for Geralt as well.]
It is, however, extremely impressive how much of the story doesn’t feel confusing though. We’re about nine installments into the story, and I, someone who has only read three of those installments, didn’t feel completely lost in the world or the story. And clearly plenty of people agreed with me, because this game won tons of awards, acclaim, and sales. It makes me reflect on plenty of other long-running serieses, both in games and other mediums, that cut back on continuity and story in order to appeal to newer players at the expense of telling stories that make sense (coughAssassin’sCreedcough).
The story has some noticeable pitfalls, especially once you start digging into the details. I can chalk most of these up to the constraints of time and technology when building a video game. There’s clearly a lot that didn’t make it into the final game, but what is there is pretty astounding. Writing a game this complex, with this many outcomes and choices, is an amazing achievement and I think even if there were aspects that I didn’t like, overall it’s one of the greatest games, in terms of writing, that I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.
Next part will talk about gameplay.
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