T w e n t y S i d e d

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.

This is a first of a many-part series on The Witcher 3, which I’m writing out of fear.

My fear – and I think this fear is well-justified – is that CD Projekt will eventually disappoint us. So far, they’ve been on a startling upward trajectory: the first Witcher was rough but promising, the second was excellent, and the third is one of the most critically acclaimed games ever made. Now they’re working on Cyberpunk 2077, which is in a genre that’s a personal favorite of mine, and all indications are that it’s CDP’s most ambitious game yet.

The last time a developer had this much credibility with me personally was probably Valve right after the release of the Orange Box. Oof, there’s a kick right in the ol’ anxiety. Now, more than ten years later, Half-Life is dead, I would not at all be surprised if we never saw another Portal again, and Team Fortress 2 is more hat than game at this point. Of course, there’s no reason to think that will happen to CD Projekt. Valve created a digital distribution service that made so much money they kind of don’t even need to make games anymore… oh no.

So, like I said, I’m writing this out of fear. Really, it’s a precautionary measure: let some of the air out of my own personal hype balloon as a hedge against future disappointment. It won’t be easy – The Witcher 3 was, in fact, a very good game. But that’s not particularly reassuring. Mass Effect 2 was (in my opinion) a very good game too, but you could still see the seeds of Bioware’s decline in it if you knew how to look. I’m going to flatter myself that I know how to spot the worrying parts of The Witcher 3. And, for the sake of not appearing to be a crank, I’ll also point out the good parts.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3”

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.