T w e n t y S i d e d
The bad part is over. Now it’s time for the good part!
Two of my favorite quests in the game are in the second half of the Novigrad storyline, and they’re both ones I’d like to cover in at least some detail, because I personally consider them to be examples of how to do it right. I skip over a lot of things in these posts, mostly because The Witcher 3 is a very long game and to cover everything in detail would take forever. But I’m not going to skip over these two quests, because (in my opinion) they’re instructive. They’re examples of two types of quest that you don’t often see anymore. I’ve named them the “nailbiter” and the “soother” (I’ll explain the names).
First up, the nailbiter. Caleb Menge, high-ranking thug in the employ of the Church of the Eternal Fire, is in possession of two pieces of information crucial to us: Dandelion’s location, and the location of the treasure looted from Dijkstra’s vault. Triss comes up with a plan for Geralt to “capture” her and deliver her to Menge, in hopes that Geralt can wheedle out the information he needs as payment. This requires Geralt to pay a part: he has to make the Witch Hunters believe that he doesn’t care about Triss, or even actively dislikes her. Triss, for her part, knows she’s likely to be tortured once she’s in Menge’s clutches.
This leads to a situation that is unfortunately relatively rare in modern RPGs: one where there’s meaningful gameplay to be had through dialogue. Geralt has to be careful what he says, what he admits to, how he reacts to provocation, and what information he presses for, because being careless will give the hustle away. And keeping Menge’s con won’t be easy – at a glance he looks like a dumb goon, but by now we know that, in his own way, he’s a canny operator.
I say that this is rare because too often in RPGs (or any kind of story-driven game) dialogue and gameplay are kept at arm’s length. Generally speaking, nowadays you can’t fail a dialogue section – the player can either exhaust all the various options or skip them, and their decision to do either the one or the other doesn’t affect anything else. But when talking to Menge and the Witch Hunters there are a variety of different ways to screw the pooch.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Novigrad, Part Two”
