An Analysis of The Witcher 3's Setting: Skellige

[Aleczandxr]

An Analysis of The Witcher 3's Setting: Skellige

Hey all! I have just completed a location analysis of Skellige. I dive into a bit of politics, the themes, atmosphere and tone of the setting. Most of all, I talked about how wonderful Skellige was and why it appealed to me on an emotional level. Hopefully some of you are interested - if so, give it a watch! My analyses of both Novigrad and Velen both got decent responses.

 

[TaigaZa]

Skellige is rather lackluster as to how it presents itself.
On one side, people and interior details (clothes, armor, buildings, mentality) are rather close to historical analogs (I mean ancient Scandinavia) in Skellige, and everything is done in excellent graphics - it is a very significant advantage in comparison with Skyrim, for instance. On the other side, this part of the world seems to me least elaborated.
The main problem of Skellige is that it looks like a half-empty decoration, in which the witcher was placed for some unexplainable reason. Seriously, during the game, I always felt that Skellige was just a place designed to create a contrast to Velen. Geralt looks somewhat inappropriate in such circumstances.
In addition, if you pay attention to the details, you will find many shortcomings that make the world of Skellige even less substantial:

1. The design of gravestones and notice boards exactly matches those of the continent.
2. Albeit Skellige having it's own unique wide array of alcoholic brews (for instance, local beer, mead etc.), the game doesn't so much as mention them anywhere on the islands, let alone sell them through merchants, who have just the same stock as the rest of the continent.
3. Runestones and glyphs don't differ from the continental ones. Runestones and glyphs on the continent are named after the Slavic deities (Veles, Chernobog, Perun etc), thus it would be logical to assume that those on Skellige islands will be named after the characters of higher Scandinavian mythology (Odin, Thor, Loki etc), however, this is not so.
4. In addition to this, there's something else I want to comment on – monsters. This is the biggest disappointment. Where are my hulders, skogsrås, draugs, necks and ten types of trolls? I've discovered just two completely new monsters – sirens and cyclopes.
5. Even the music performed at the feast and in taverns does not differ much from that in the repertoire of Novigrad musicians.

 

[Pasnius]

Skellige is rather lackluster as to how it presents itself.

Pretty sure Skellige was one of the first areas they designed for TW3, there were all these super alpha screenshots that looked like they were made on the TW2 engine with disgusting post processing and they were all stuff from Skellige.

 

[sv3672]

Pretty sure Skellige was one of the first areas they designed for TW3, there were all these super alpha screenshots that looked like they were made on the TW2 engine with disgusting post processing and they were all stuff from Skellige.

Skellige might have had some of the locations (like those important to the main story) done early, but it does feel like this is the region that is least finished with the relatively empty areas and repetitive POIs.

 

[lessthanjake123]

I liked Skellige. The music there is incredibly good. Skellige is also such a visual and thematic shift from the rest of the game, which is really cool. And there's certainly some memorable stuff that happens there.

At the same time, I do have a few gripes with it:

- I think my biggest issue with it is just that it's a pain to get around.

The prevalence of mountains makes getting around on land very difficult and sometimes frustrating. This is an issue Skyrim had as well when it dealt with a similar type of setting. For gameplay purposes, I think it would be nice if games with these sorts of settings had roads go through the mountains with tunnels, or perhaps had more prevalent traversable paths over the mountains. It's just frustrating to run around a mountain trying to find a spot you can possibly go over it, and then basically end up bunny hopping up for a bit only to realize you can't actually get to the top that way.

To add to that, there are also tons of islands that you need to get to by boat. Hypothetically, I don't mind sailing to another island. It can be atmospheric to sail with the Skellige music playing. And honestly, I don't even mind the siren attacks while you're on the boats. It probably could've been done better, but I thought it was fine. My problem with it is that the boats just aren't very fast and there aren't that many of them. So it's not that uncommon for you to want to get to an island but have there be no boat on the coastline opposite it. So in order to get to this island, you either have to swim all the way across, or take a boat a really long distance. Either option is tedious. I think there should've been three things done: (1) boat travel in Skellige could've been faster (or just have the islands be slightly closer I suppose); (2) there could've been more boats and/or boats that respawned at various docks; and (3) I think there could've been someone at Kaer Trolde that would take you to the different islands for a fee (maybe that already exists and I missed it?).

Overall, the tedium of travel in Skellige made me basically just fast travel almost everywhere, which took away a lot of the immersion and feeling of exploration.

- Skellige seemed generally less filled with quests than Velen or Novigrad. The game is huge, so I realize it's a bit crazy to complain about a lack of content, especially when there still is quite a bit to do in Skellige. But compared to Velen or Novigrad, there was definitely less.

- I think the amount of underwater treasure was probably a negative. Yes, Skellige should have some shipwrecks you can explore and find loot in. But the sheer amount of this stuff was overwhelming. I'm actually fairly certain there's a few quests in Skellige I missed (particularly on the small islands that don't have towns) because I just gave up going to the question marks in Skellige. They just seemed like they had a really high chance of being straightforward treasure hunt content, and, as explained above, it is tedious to get to them, so I just gave up.