T w e n t y S i d e d

When I left off last week my plan was to get some XP by doing quests that had little to no combat. I did the one where you find out who burned down the dwarf’s smithy, the one where you make a potion for a victim of a griffin attack, the one where you get the old lady’s pan, and advanced the griffin contract a few steps (which only requires you to fight a few wild dogs, with Mislav’s help). I won’t cover them in too much detail. For one, if I cover every quest in detail this series will be a thousand entries long, and for two, I think many of you reading this have already played the game anyway.

Instead I want to write a bit about what they all add up to. White Orchard is a setting with a very focused hook – the tension between the Temerian locals and the Nilgaardian occupiers – and pretty much everything that happens here explores that tension in some way, and how it intersects with people’s everyday lives. At no point during my time in White Orchard did I feel like I played through a quest that was just there as filler. (I’m talking about actual quests here, not bandit camps/monster nests/etc) Seeing it from a critical perspective, it’s startling how easy the developers make it all look.

It’s also unique in that it explores the aftermath of a military conflict rather than the conflict itself. Were the Witcher license to be acquired by, say, Activision, I can pretty much guarantee you that the dramatic opening battle cutscene would have been the part you played, and the state of the countryside afterwards likely wouldn’t have been mentioned at all. CD Projekt does it the other way round, which is a good illustration of how – for lack of a better phrase – Sapkowski-ish they are.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: White Orchard, Part Two”

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.

I’m going to start by listing the initial ground rules of the playthrough.

1. No equipment, meaning no weapons or armor. Geralt will be wearing his classy white boxer shorts the whole way.
2. The only thing Geralt can keep on his person is booze. Since Witcher potions are made with alcohol as a base, I consider potions to be a type of booze, so they’re acceptable. This will obviously require us to occasionally have alchemy ingredients in our inventory as well (I think of them as being something like cocktail mixers), so those are acceptable. Gwent cards are not actually stored in your inventory itself, so they’re all right too.
3. No HUD. I actually recommend making very limited use of the HUD even for a non-crazy person playthrough, as I and others have found that it causes you play the game in a very different – and arguably more immersive – way.
4. Geralt must never turn down an offer of either alcohol or gwent.
5. Combat should be as punching-oriented as possible, meaning minimize the use of signs. Rule 5 is, of necessity, going to be one of the more flexible ones, since there are some enemies that you simply can’t defeat with punches alone (that, or it would be painfully boring to do so).

I may add more rules as we go on, but those are the basics. This is obviously going to make the game more difficult, but based on my experimentation so far I believe it’ll still be doable. I have a relationship with game difficulty that’s kind of the opposite of the usual. Usually it’s the young whippersnappers, with their mongoose-on-adderal reaction times, who like the hard stuff. But for me, I always used to play games on normal (or the equivalent) and it wasn’t until later that I started routinely cranking up the difficulty.

To me a higher difficulty is a way of savoring a game. Of necessity you play it a bit slower, and it also makes you really learn the mechanics. I play fewer games than I used to, so I want to savor the ones that I do play. In the Witcher 3, the highest difficulty (death march) is not really that hard, at least not compared to, say, a Fromsoft game, or even earlier entries in the series. Plus, I always enjoy playing what I call “punchmages.” Hence, the five rules.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: White Orchard, Part One”

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.