Why the main narrative in the last third of the game is a bad hot mess [major spoilers!!!]

[ViperSchoolWitcher]

The Wild Hunt's world didn't look like it was dying and, bluntly, after seven years of chasing Ciri, I can't imagine they were under the impression they were any closer to stopping the White Frost.

That's kind of the thing with Ciri that she's not even the person who is supposed to stop the White Frost.

Her *KID* is and even then it's only to evacuate people to another world via Conjunction, not actually save the planet.

So yeah, that's a mess.

How do you know all of this? The books?

Not all of us have read the books (especially since not all the English versions are out), you know.

The game should have done a better job explaining things without requiring the book. Simple as that.

P.S. People should not spoil the books, as this forum is for in-game spoilers. Not book spoilers.

 

[CTPhipps]

How do you know all of this? The books?

Not all of us have read the books (especially since not all the English versions are out), you know.

The game should have done a better job explaining things without requiring the book. Simple as that.

P.S. People should not spoil the books, as this forum is for in-game spoilers. Not book spoilers.

Most of that is in the game. You, after all, visit Eredin's homeworld and it looks like Rivendell rather than a hellish ice world.

Likewise, Ciri explains that the Wild Hunt expects her to evacuate their people at Vesemir's funeral. It's just going to kill her in the process. They're also going to invade any world they're evacuated too and exterminate its peoples.

 

[nordelaire]

Thanks Scholdarr.452 you basically sums up all the tings I didn't like about the story but was to lazy to write.

Just a little thing ,when you said that Ciri does not have any magical abilities. She does recover her powers at the very end of the last book, that's how she is able to heal Geralt and Yennfer.

 

[ViperSchoolWitcher]

Most of that is in the game. You, after all, visit Eredin's homeworld and it looks like Rivendell rather than a hellish ice world.

Likewise, Ciri explains that the Wild Hunt expects her to evacuate their people at Vesemir's funeral. It's just going to kill her in the process. They're also going to invade any world they're evacuated too and exterminate its peoples.

"Most of that is in the game."

Ok - what about the part that isn't? Am I supposed to know it all of a sudden? Or go online and have it spoiled?

---------- Updated at 03:05 PM ----------

Thanks Scholdarr.452 you basically sums up all the tings I didn't like about the story but was to lazy to write.

Just a little thing ,when you said that Ciri does not have any magical abilities. She does recover her powers at the very end of the last book, that's how she is able to heal Geralt and Yennfer.

Do we really need to spoil the books too?

 

[CTPhipps]

"Most of that is in the game."

Ok - what about the part that isn't? Am I supposed to know it all of a sudden? Or go online and have it spoiled

That's not a spoiler any more than the One Ring needs to be thrown in Mount Doom or the Empire is evil.

But it's a pretty essential part of the Ciri and Emhyr relationship and if you don't know about it then you're missing out for Wild Hunt.

 

[ViperSchoolWitcher]

That's not a spoiler any more than the One Ring needs to be thrown in Mount Doom or the Empire is evil.

But it's a pretty essential part of the Ciri and Emhyr relationship and if you don't know about it then you're missing out for Wild Hunt.

Blame the game. Don't blame me. It was CDPR's job to explain these concepts.

 

[inanimate_object]

You're right that it's harder to get it right with a predefined character but I disagree at least to a certain extend with your note that choices are a priori doomed to fail in that case. I think it depends very much on how you stage choice situations. First, there are different motivations or principles for chocies. There can be moral choices, psychological choices or factual choices. Witcher 3 relies heavily on the second category which is the most hardest one to get right and it shows. Moral choices are much easier to pull off because you can base them on known concepts like law, societal pressures or certain personal rules (like a personal codex or whatever). In choices like that it's not really important if you play a predefined character or a blank page character you created yourself. Same is true for factual choices which mean choices that just lead to different outcomes and consequences without involving morality or psychology. For example, if you kill bandit leader X at point Y he won't appear later in the game. These choices are almost exclusively dependent on the will of the writer anyway, so it doesn't matter whom you play. The psychological choices Witcher 3 uses are naturally hard to get right because the human mind is multi-leveled and complex and games by their very nature are prone to simplification. While in books or to a lesser extend movies you have time and space to establish the proper information basis for extensive characterization, games are much more simplified, in medias res experiences in terms of character design and exploration. So the biggest problem with these psychological choices is not necessarily the predefined character you play but the lacking information about the mindset and emotional and mental state of the people you communicate with - and (on a second layer) the mindset of the person who wrote the situation and its consequences. The biggest issue here is that for a well done and comprehensive psychological choice situation you would need much more subtle and complex information about characters than games can usually provide as it is the case in Witcher 3 as well - and you would ave to need the certainty that every choice in the game is solely based on ingame characters and their way of thinking and not on some externally imposed overall psychological scheme.

Imho psychological choice situation sound promising but I wouldn't used them too much in practice in a game because they have prerequirements game usually just cannot provide in the given limits. There is a reason why in most games of that kind choice situations are either based on terms of morality or just factual choices. Both are much easier to be made comprehensible for the player and the chance to avoid players to feel cheated or unfairly treated is much lower. Of course, they appear to be "simpler" than those high-level psychological choices but that's not always a bad thing...

I don't agree. The problem of choices regarding the character's psyche rests entirely on the pre-existence of said psyche and its independence from the player. There is no barrier to emulate and simulate the character's feelings and motivations when the player chooses the character's name, race, simplistic backstory and all defining qualities about the character. In this situation the character has no feelings and no psychological disposition beyond what the player will allow. Witcher 3's problem is that the player has not spawned Geralt of Rivia. He exists independently of the player and so the player will never truly be able to empathize and simulate the psychologically consistent behaviour of Geralt.

You have set up choices in the following categories:
"What is right?"
"What is the logical outcome of this choice?"
"What would I do?"

The game asks the player: "What would Geralt do?" and not "What would you do?" In most games, this question is one and the same. I would point you to masterful storytelling games such as Catherine and the Walking Dead (the latter which I don't think is a particularly good game, but has very satisfying choice mechanics).

Well, I concentrated only on the last third of the main narrative because I think it's the obviously most flawed element in the overall narrative approach - and the most important one. Following the theory of good pacing schemes and proper story structure a dry beginning is still excusable if the ending or the later parts are gook. The engagement curve should in general always rise until the very end. It doesn't have to be that high at the beginning but it should of course be high enough to keep the player at least motivated to continue. But in the end the final few bits of the game decide how you remember the game and its narrative. It's much harder to keep a game in good memory for its narrative if only the first parts of the story were good but the ending was tragically bad than if the ending was awesome but the start and middle part were a bit dry. Bottom line, the more you progress in story the more important it gets that it sticks to what it promised.

But I do indeed think that the first two acts (or thirds) of the main story are at least servicable, sometimes quite good. They don't have much pace but I don't have a big problem with that. Of course much of that depends on how you play in an open world game and when you do side quests, exploration and all that stuff. You have a quite different pacing depending on whether you frontload or backload the side stuff or on whether how much you do of that stuff in general. After all, open world and in general the very concept of "story freedom" is in some ways the natural enemy of proper story pacing and tension. The question is how you deal with that once you decided for it. I think the somewhat much slower pace at the beginning of the game actually serves the goal of combining open world with at least some kind of story pacing. By slowing the main narrative down you give the player space and freedom to explore the world and do the open world stuff. If you ask me the game is very much meant to be "frontloaded", at least to a certain extend. Open world exploration fits bet to the story structure in the first two thirds before the real tension of the story really starts and before it really (should) take(s) off because the concept of the search for Ciri fits rather well with just roaming the world and doing some side stuff while being somewhere.

The problem is that the story never really takes off after the battle of Kaer Morhen. Even if you accepted that the game was quite "slow" before in terms of the main narrative (mainly to serve and offer open world exploration) it doesn't change much in the last third, at least not how you would expect it to do following the optimal pacing structure. I mean, in games we just have to accept that the narative and the gameplay have to work hand in hand and that each element has some limitations imposed by the respective other one. My biggest problem with the last third of the main narrative is that the limitations imposed by gameplay are rather weak here and that the main narrative suffers mostly from imho lacking execution and design in the very field of the narrative itself.

One of my favourite quotes regarding narrative storytelling is: "If you have a bad ending, people will remember. If you have a bad start, people won't even get there."
The story doesn't take off after the battle of Kaer Morhen, or any time previously. I have a theory that in the midst of the deveopment of the game, CDPR realized they were not invested in the story, but rather in the open world. There is a clear disconnect between the first two acts and the final act in this regard. The beginning is typical of open-world games. Poor pacing, meandering storyline, and quests which serve the world, not the plot. The end suffers an entirely different set of faults. Realizing that, for better or worse, this game is story-driven, CDPR is forced to try and conclude the story, when in the first two acts they were perfectly willing to let the story take a firm backseat. There has to be an impetus for the story to begin. You need to entice people into the story. I have only found slow-burning beginnings to work in situations where the tension slowly builds without retreat - either psychologically (see In Bruges or Lost in Translation) or in the plot (see David Fincher). This is not the goal of Witcher 3, and so I think it's indefensible that the first two acts are so empty. I'll watch a car-wreck and at least appreciate that they decided to go for it. But I won't excuse a drag race that never begins.

 

[Scholdarr.452]

Just a little thing ,when you said that Ciri does not have any magical abilities. She does recover her powers at the very end of the last book, that's how she is able to heal Geralt and Yennfer.

BEWARE OF BOOK SPOILERS (but honestly, that can't be avoided in a spoiler discussion about the storytelling, and much of it got revealed during TW2 anyway, at least CDPR's interpretation of it):

Wow, wait. The end of the books can be interpreted in many ways. We don't even know if Geralt or Yen were really saved. And we don't know if Ciri got back any powers for good. We know that Ihuarraquax enabled her to do something with Geralt, maybe saving him. But she had to touch his horn while doing so, so in my interpretation it's the unicorn's powers Ciri is chanelling here, not her own ones. But I agree that you could interpret that in other ways as well.

After all, the end is pretty much open. In the last passage of the book we learn that it was actually Ciri's tale. She told Galahad about the events in Rivia and about Geralt's and Yen's supposed. We can only speculate how much of that tale is actually true or not or just the ending Ciri wished to be. Galahad noticed that she cried while telling him the story so it's quite possible that the ending isn't all that happy. I'd say at least the passage on the isle in which Geralt and Yennefer talk (the 2nd last passage of the book) is more of a fairy tale than the truth. And then again we have to ask ourselves why Ciri had to drive them away in the boat if she just had regained the powers to heal them.

I think there is much to debate and discuss about the ending of The Lady of the Lake and making solid statements is a bit hard here. That's actually one of the reasons why I love this open but still conclusive end so much - it gives you space to interpret and to adapt it to your liking.

 

[moonknightgog]

The game asks the player: "What would Geralt do?" and not "What would you do?" In most games, this question is one and the same. I would point you to masterful storytelling games such as Catherine and the Walking Dead (the latter which I don't think is a particularly good game, but has very satisfying choice mechanics).

But this is not an issue, because an RPG is based on you playing as a character.
The role-playing in the RPGs is not based on what you would do in a certain situation, but on what your character would do.

 

[inanimate_object]

But this is not an issue, because an RPG is based on you playing as a character.
The role-playing in the RPGs is not based on what you would do in a certain situation, but on what your character would do.

I think you misunderstand me.

The role-playing in the RPGs is not based on what you would do in a certain situation, but on what your character would do.

I'm saying that the statement above is an equivalency in games where the character does not exist independently of the player. This is not what happens in the Witcher 3. You cannot truly know what Geralt would do because you can't empathize with a character that exists without you.

 

[moonknightgog]

I think you misunderstand me.

The role-playing in the RPGs is not based on what you would do in a certain situation, but on what your character would do.

I'm saying that the statement above is an equivalency in games where the character does not exist independently of the player. This is not what happens in the Witcher 3. You cannot truly know what Geralt would do because you can't empathize with a character that exists without you.

I understand, but all character in RPGs exist without you. Revan, Meetra Surik, The Nameless One, JC Denton, Adam Jenses etc....

 

[Rawls]

I am curious about your views on the Wild Hunt.

Did you think their characters were underdeveloped? I sure as hell thought so. There simply wasn't information about the "big bad guy" in Act 3 and in the game in general. I found very limited to zero satisfaction fighting and killing the commanders of the Hunt.

While Ge'els seemed to be the most powerful member, I find it hard to believe he agreed to help Geralt & co. when his world was being engulfed by the White Frost (the White Frost was also underdeveloped). Act 3 was linear/simple not only due to the gameplay, but also due to lack of plot twists and interesting events. This is augmented by the fact that the Wild Hunt did not seem like the "big bad guys" the trailers made them to be, as I stated above.

Thoughts?

I completely agree about the Characters in the Wild Hunt being under developed. It's difficult to develop characters whom the POV characters (Ciri and Geralt) run from or kill on sight. I think the best way to do it would be from Ciri telling Geralt about the hunt. The game would have benefited from a flashback linear mission from Ciri's POV when she was younger in Tir na Lia. I think I mentioned it a couple posts ago. It would have been best done during the moments after the Battle of Kaer Morhen (maybe right after the snowball fight/drinking session). She recounts her experience to Geralt (I think she already did this in the books, but what the hell) and in true game form you play the story as she tells it. It would show the motivations of the hunt and the conflicts within the members of the hunt. It would probably add another 30 minutes to the game though. As far as Ge'el goes, yes he also could have been given clearer motivations. But he served his purpose in the story (depriving Eredin of an endless stream of warriors to follow him). I agree it was under developed. But I think if they had taken the time to explain it all, it may have slowed down the third act too much. It's a tough balance CDPR had to strike. I think they streamlined it a little too much and should have fleshed out most of the parts we have been discussing here. But again, I am satisfied with the ending as is. It is flawed, but still really good for me.

 

[Nazafyn]

Very well written, I honestly have very little to add to the discussion in this thread, other than that I felt the side objectives were a lot stronger than the main quest, the (practically) self contained story of the Bloody Baron for example, was absolutely brilliant. Same could be said about Keira Metz and the Fyke Isle storyline, short but sweet.

The Wild Hunt on the other hand were written as the bad guys, Radovid was written as a bad guy (almost feels like a retcon considering his portrayal in TW1 and TW2) and a lot of the ''choices'' (moral or psychological) are very cut and dry. It felt like the morally gray element of the previous two games, especially TW2, was almost entirely missing during TW3 while the psychological choices are either wrong or right, nowhere in between. You can't argue for any of the other psychological choices to be right because they directly cause Ciri to be killed.

 

[nordelaire]

Spoiler

BEWARE OF BOOK SPOILERS (but honestly, that can't be avoided in a spoiler discussion about the storytelling, and much of it got revealed during TW2 anyway, at least CDPR's interpretation of it):

Wow, wait. The end of the books can be interpreted in many ways. We don't even know if Geralt or Yen were really saved. And we don't know if Ciri got back any powers for good. We know that Ihuarraquax enabled her to do something with Geralt, maybe saving him. But she had to touch his horn while doing so, so in my interpretation it's the unicorn's powers Ciri is chanelling here, not her own ones. But I agree that you could interpret that in other ways as well.

After all, the end is pretty much open. In the last passage of the book we learn that it was actually Ciri's tale. She told Galahad about the events in Rivia and about Geralt's and Yen's supposed. We can only speculate how much of that tale is actually true or not or just the ending Ciri wished to be. Galahad noticed that she cried while telling him the story so it's quite possible that the ending isn't all that happy. I'd say at least the passage on the isle in which Geralt and Yennefer talk (the 2nd last passage of the book) is more of a fairy tale than the truth. And then again we have to ask ourselves why Ciri had to drive them away in the boat if she just had regained the powers to heal them.

I think there is much to debate and discuss about the ending of The Lady of the Lake and making solid statements is a bit hard here. That's actually one of the reasons why I love this open but still conclusive end so much - it gives you space to interpret and to adapt it to your liking.

That's right, the ending is open to interpretation but for CDPr the end was very clear, both yen and Geralt survived. I was just trying to say that for me Ciri magical abilities aren't juste made up by the reds for the sake of the plot of the game but are just another CDPR's interpretation of the ending.

 

[inanimate_object]

I understand, but all character in RPGs exist without you. Revan, Meetra Surik, The Nameless One, JC Denton, Adam Jenses etc....

None of them have the historical baggage of Geralt, nor do the games CALL upon their history in order to frame their decision-making process. Deus Ex asked you to choose what you thought was right, not what you thought was most consistent with the character of JC Denton. This is what the OP has chosen to call "psychological choices" which depend on empathizing and understanding the personal psyche of your character. This doesn't happen when the character has experiences that the player is not privy to.

 

[CTPhipps]

None of them have the historical baggage of Geralt, nor do the games CALL upon their history in order to frame their decision-making process. Deus Ex asked you to choose what you thought was right, not what you thought was most consistent with the character of JC Denton. This is what the OP has chosen to call "psychological choices" which depend on empathizing and understanding the personal psyche of your character. This doesn't happen when the character has experiences that the player is not privy to.

The weird thing is that Geralt is no more defined or less defined than Adam Jensen from Deus Ex: Human Revolutions and no one wants to do a faceless replacement for him.

 

[dzbrown]

Speaking of Act 3, did anyone else find it absolutely bizarre that you spend so much time rounding up Sorceresses and then have little to zero dialogue with them? I guess other than the Philippa scene in the elven ruin, the entirety of Act 3 simply from a character interaction standpoint was laughable at best.

It's as if in the events leading up to Act 2, you round up all your friends, strike bargains, enlist aid, and then they all stand in a corner while you face the onslaught yourself...that's how I felt about the Act 3 treatment. And this doesn't even go into the rest of the mess. The Eredin fight was easily one of the most anti-climatic moments in the entire game for me. He felt like an Act 1 sub-boss. I'll leave it there because we have already discussed what happens after ad nauseam.

 

[inanimate_object]

The weird thing is that Geralt is no more defined or less defined than Adam Jensen from Deus Ex: Human Revolutions and no one wants to do a faceless replacement for him.

Geralt is orders of magnitude more defined than Adam Jensen. The player SEES and EXPERIENCES everything that is important to the character of Adam Jensen. Moreover, the choices in Deus Ex HR never ask you to simulate the character's feelings to make a decision - it is presented to you in a setting of moral paradigms. Whereas in the Witcher 3, many choices are exceedingly personal and rely on the player's understanding of Geralt's mind to choose. But the player can't know Geralt's mind because the character knows more than the player. The player doesn't see or experience the necessary impetus that frame Geralt's decision-making, therefore they can't understand or sympathize with his psyche. This makes choices that rely on this, unavoidably arbitrary and flawed.

 

[CTPhipps]

Geralt is orders of magnitude more defined than Adam Jensen. The player SEES and EXPERIENCES everything that is important to the character of Adam Jensen. Moreover, the choices in Deus Ex HR never ask you to simulate the character's feelings to make a decision - it is presented to you in a setting of moral paradigms. Whereas in the Witcher 3, many choices are exceedingly personal and rely on the player's understanding of Geralt's mind to choose. But the player can't know Geralt's mind because the character knows more than the player. The player doesn't see or experience the necessary impetus that frame Geralt's decision-making, therefore they can't understand or sympathize with his psyche. This makes choices that rely on this, unavoidably arbitrary and flawed.

I disagree and think most players have a very good understanding of Geralt's mindset and can define large parts of it themselves.

 

[inanimate_object]

I disagree and think most players have a very good understanding of Geralt's mindset and can define large parts of it themselves.

*Sigh

Ever the apologist. I can't begin to understand how the majority of players (who certainly have not read the books) can simulate Geralt's decision-making process and the history and relationships that structure it given that it took 5 novels and several short stories to make that conceptually clear, none of which can be presented to Geralt succinctly. You seem to be making way too many excuses for this game and/or are pathologically incapable of admitting serious faults.