Recent content by robertbrockman2

This exactly. Imagine if he hadn't been the heir to Nilfgaard: he'd probably be much more like a normal guy. It's not as simple as "Emhyr is a bad guy" -- Emhyr has a bad job, and it's a particularly bad job for someone like him. He can't handle the Ring of Power at all, it's made him a...

I'm not sure, but I suspect the devs wanted to trick people into doing the "wrong" things sometimes so that the players can see all the work they put in to the drama of the "bad" outcomes. There's a lot of voice acting work and directing that would have gone to waste otherwise. We can see how...

Source attribution errors are very easy to induce in people. I also thought that Emhyr had said something like that and it wasn't until I typed out the dialogue for that particular post that I realized, "Wait, did that ever actually happen?" Sneaky devs strike again! Something else to think...

One of the things that probably annoys many people about this type of game is the nature of the dialogue tree system. The player chooses a general "response strategy" like "convince Ciri to visit Emhyr" or "press Yennefer on why she threw the bed out the window" and then the game comes up with...

Yep. To get Ciri to visit Emhyr, Geralt must first interrupt Ciri's "it's the crack of dawn, let's go kill Imlerith right now!" plan. Instead of saying "lead on" and going straight to Bald Mountain to avenge Vesemir, we have the following exchange: Geralt: Wait, something I gotta tell you...

Now we're finally getting to the really important stuff. One of the biggest mistakes people make is that they believe that they can sacrifice their own happiness to benefit other people, especially over a long period of time. THIS ALMOST NEVER WORKS. DON'T DO THIS. Truly effective people...

As far as rulers of empires go, he's not that bad, which is why the heroes do not go out of their way to dispose of him and actually do business with him when the situation warrants it. But that's the point. The bar for moral and ethical behavior for the political leadership is set so low that...

The attitude of the Nilfgaardian nobility has a certain Prussian military aristocratic feel to it, as opposed to a Nazi feel. Clearly Poland has been in a bad neighborhood for a very long time, lots of history for Sapkowski and CDPR to draw on. We don't have much history where I come from...

Only one character in the game ever has the opportunity to kill Letho, and that's Geralt. Everyone else who comes after Letho ends up in the morgue. The Emperor betrays him, and the net result is a huge pile of dead Imperial agents. When Geralt meets Letho in Velen it's clear Letho finds the...

YES. This is a big theme of the Witcher games, and parallels real life as well. Having that much power is a real problem, getting it and maintaining it in the way Emhyr does is even less healthy. Let's back up a bit. The historical references in the Witcher are not very subtle. Nilfgaard is...

Interestingly, the Geralt in the games is fundamentally a "fixer", not strictly a killer. He's a lot like another Wolf, the one from Pulp Fiction. "I'm Winston Wolf, I solve problems." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMbAANfUJhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU There's even a...

Been there, have the t-shirt. No fun at all. (In my case, the scar on her neck from the knife wound had healed to near-invisibility, but the wounds to her mind had not.) This makes the situation in the game story even more tragic: Geralt is not exactly the world's expert on attending to the...

Sigh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion Unfortunately, in the real world, when the young are abused and mistreated this makes them much more likely to later voluntarily go along with the manipulations of abusive people, even (or especially) the ones who originally abused...

Yes, and this is an important lesson. The White Frost is some sort of physical or magical phenomenon that can be overcome with simple skill or force. Emhyr and similar entities can subvert your mind and spirit, convince you to do things that you otherwise wouldn't. Even if Emhyr cannot...

Yep. Emhyr is many things but stupid is not one of them. There are two plausible scenarios, both of which occur in the game depending on the ending: 1. Ciri stops the White Frost and returns home. 2. Ciri dies trying to stop the White Frost and is never seen again. What is NOT plausible is...