T w e n t y S i d e d

Last week we ran into an enemy I couldn’t beat, and resolved to go back to Velen and knock out a few levels first. I ended up knocking out two, because I’d forgotten how slow leveling is in the early game. EXP is just hard to come by. I nip back to White Orchard, and the first quest I do is one where I help a Temerian guerilla recover medical supplies from an ambush site. My reward? Eight XP. Eight. If my calculations are correct, and I believe they are, that’s a single digit number. Even early on, it takes several hundred XP to level up. This might take longer than I thought.

So I traipse around White Orchard, hitting up every place of power for the free skill points, and do the “Devil by the Well” contract. Still only level four. Back to Velen, I do a fairly long and involved quest where I’m reunited with Letho of Gulet, one of the villains from the second game.I’m a sucker for callbacks to previous games in the series. Then, three horse races east of Crow’s Perch, then fist fights in three different villages, then the “Woodland Beast” contract, which requires me to kite Alghouls around a stand of trees for like ten minutes. Still only level four. At this point I’m wondering if figuring out the leveling curve was something of a last-minute scramble for CD Projekt.

Finally, out of ideas and with so much of my quest log way above me in level, I do the thing I’d resolved not to do: I start grinding out monster nests. When I started this series I promised to not just gush about the things I like but also to bellyache about the things I didn’t. Well, here’s some of me fulfilling the second half of that promise: combat has never been CD Projekt’s strong point.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Grinding and Griping”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.

Before we continue with the main quest, I’d like to take some steps to advance the game’s biggest and most elaborate side questI’ve decided to run this whole ‘Gwent is the main quest’ gag deep into the ground, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.: the search for Geralt’s adoptive daughter Ciri.

Now for an aside that concerns games and their presumed audience.

Without going into exhaustive detail, at some point in the eighties the game industry collectively decided that they were going to consider young boys to be their core audience. I’m quite familiar with this, since I was on the receiving end of it, and am pretty close to the bulls-eye consumer for this model. I played Super Mario Bros. and Zelda when I was in elementary school, Wolfenstein and Doom when I was in middle school, and Final Fantasy when I was in high school. At some point I played Fallout, which detoured me slightly (though permanently) off the beaten path, but broadly speaking their whole “market to young boys” thing definitely worked in my case.

This strategy was the product of an industry trying to find its legs again after a painful crash. But what started as a temporary tactical move calcified into habit, and the (AAA at least) games industry has kept making and marketing games mostly towards me and people like me ever since. Of course, now my generation is well into its thirties, so I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that starting around five years ago a new kind-of-genre has emerged that I’ve come to call the “Dad Game.”

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Dad Games”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.