AgentBlue said:
The trailer is one-sided to the extreme in the way it portrays the Nilfgaardian soldiers as the clean-cut personification of Evil
I see it in this way (banal and simplified maybe):
it's just a promotional trailer. The rest are all "ours" pure speculations. A promotional trailer is meant to be pretty immediate for potential customers and first-time players. We gotta consider that many future players will play only TW3 (and perhaps later Tw1-2). So the trailer is just showing a badass hero badassing a bunch of foes, coz for those who doesn't know the game series and Sapkowski's work, there is one side black and one white.
The rest of what it is implied in the trailer (grey zones, lesser evil...) are all food for us-long time fans, who have played both the games and read the books. The real beauty of The Witcher series, I think, will come with the very game, not with promotional videos. And this is my first reason to really not understand all the fuss and buzz about "who might be that poor girl and why they're abusing her".
There si another trailer, where we witness a peasant been hit and the pillaging of a village, by the same Nilfgaardian invaders, but I haven't read all the rumours I'm reading now (as it naturally should be):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud5NIT6ULVE
(see Nilfgaard sun at 1:17, 1:20 and 2:17)
I mean, it may sounds banal, but a lot of people (even among us) do rather see only black and white, so it's the poor girl(villagers) vs evil soldiers, and Geralt is the hero who save the girl.
I don't think it's so necessary to read all that far in that trailer. And don't think that it's necessary to speak about all the atrocities of war (not in this thread I mean).
But, for those smartasses of us who know the series and have played TW2, we know all those grey zones and war atrocities, when we witness Temerian and kaedweni raping, impaling, brutalizing mages. Even is those victims are in fact manipulators and in some case killers themselves (think about the Black Sun curse, Dethmold, Master Irion, Vilgefortz, the Lodge and so on).
So... yes, war is full of horror. Yes, some soldiers are not white knights, it happened to be nilfgaardian soldiers in that video.
I expect to see more cruelty, lesser evil, killing monsters, difficult moral decisions to be taken in the game, more than in just one mere trailer.
My opinion of course, free to disagree.