I've written a lot on the main narrative of the game but I always thought that I missed something. I couldn't really explain why I feel so disappointed after the ending of TW3. I tried to find reasons why I thought the main narrative especially in the last third of the game was so lacking in my opinion and I think I find some good points. But at the same time, I felt that I didn't explain it thoroughly enough, maybe because I lacked the the proper insight or because I lacked the right words on maybe because I haven't gotten to the core of the problem yet. Well, in short: I never stopped thinking about it. I read a lot of other opinions from different people and - probably most important - I reconsidered why I love story-driven RPGs in the first place and what caused satisfaction in similar games. And I think I've found a big issue that hasn't been addressed in depth so far: it's an issue with choice mechanics in the game and how they relate to the concept of player agency. I've talked about choices (and consequence) before but I want to add this chapter to my assessment because I think it looks at the issue from a quite different angle and makes the problems with choices perhaps more comprehensible.
6.) Choice re-evaluated: where is the player agency?
Like always, I want to start with a bit of theory about choice in video games in order to get a proper foundation for the analysis. Choice is actually at the heart of video games as an interaction medium. Interactions in games are arguably either actions or choices. So, what's the difference? An action is basically everything the player can do in the game. Shooting enemies in an action game is simply an action. The most striking example for a purely action-driven game is a simple shooting gallery. It's your task to shoot at things. Either that or you don't progress. Either that or you die. There is no choice. Kill everything on the screen that moves or be killed. So what's the difference to choices? A choice is basically always a trade off between different possibilities, may it be a trade off between a long and a short term goal, a trade off between weapons or abilities you can use ora trade off between ingame goals and the player's desires on the outside. To put it simple: in a choice situation there is no simple right or wrong. A choice situation is no calculation that can be solved by pure reason and logic. At least that's what the player has to feel or think in the moment. The player has to think that he has an actual choice between two or more valid and comprehensible actions.
Basically there can be two different spheres of narratives in video games, especially RPGs: choices in terms of gameplay and narrative choices. Let's have a look at the former one first. Choices in gameplay means that you have different tools and abilities at your proposal to solve situations. Think of a tactical RPG. There usually are many options to solve a situation by using different strategies or tactics. Or think of Dark Souls. You try again and again to kill a certain enemy, trying different things to get it done. You continue to do so because you have the feeling that with a different approach or strategy you could do it someday. That's true choice, in a gameplay perspective. It's much what makes these games based on gameplay choices so satisfactiory. But then there is also the second category, choices which determine the storytelling and narrative. These are choices that decide how a story will continue. Almost every great (story-driven) RPG builds on both of these choice aspect, but RPGs are together with (point and click) adventures pretty much the only genre which usually offers extensive narrative choice (most action games offer a purely linear story that can't be changed or influenced by the player on a significant level). So it's perhaps no exaggeration to say that narrative choices are pretty much at the heart of RPGs, defining the genre and being one of its greatest strengths. Just think of the many RPGs that use this tools, games like Deus Ex Human Revolution, Mass Effect, Planescape Torment, Wasteland 2, Fallout 3, Alpha Protocol and - of course - Witcher 1 and 2. All these games build in certain way and at certain points heavily on narrative choices.
So what's make these narrative choices so attractive? Why do we want to experience them in RPGs? Well, that's probably just my interpretation but I think one of their core strengths is that they challenge us. They expose us to questions we have to think about. They confront us with situations in which we feel torn apart. They create the feeling in us that it's us who have influence on the world we're immersed in. That it's us who have the power anc control to change the fade of characters we like. That it's on us to make the ultimate decision. That's what is usually called agency, the feeling that you have power and control in a game, that you not only experience or watch it like a book or movie but that your actions and decisions have influence on how the narrative continues. Good choice situations can have a great emotional impact on us if they find the right tone and topic to challenge us on either a mental or emotional level (or both). When I play a good RPG that offers great situtions to make choices I often think about them a lot, even some time after I finished it. It's not always just about the consequences. A good choice situation doesn't in all case require a resolution or visible consequence. Our imagination is a great tool and it is often sufficient to feel the impact of a good choice situation. We envision the possible changes to the world we cause by our choices in our own imagination, struggling with ourselves if we did the right thing. Of course, something like that can only happen if the choice situation has a proper trade off like desribed above. The effect isn't the same if the assumed choice sitution is just a mere calculation.
So theory aside, what's the problem with choices in Witcher 3. Well, that might come as a surprise but the last third of the game narrative doesn't really offer many meaningful choice at all which sounds rather weird for a story-driven RPG that was so heavily marketed as a game that is ultimately based on meaningful choice and consequence and whose predecessors were a great example of good choice situations. And you might say that I neglect the situations in which Geralt deals with Ciri, the situations that determine which ending and epilogue you will see. Of course these situations exist, but are these real choice situation with a proper trade off? Is there a trade off between moral aspects? Is there a trade off between a long term or a short term goal at all? Is there a trade off betwen ingame goals or player's desires? Well, I don't think so. These situations are very much only calculations instead of choices and therefore simple actions wthout any emotional impact on the player. Ironically some people obviously even defend these dialogues between Geralt and Ciri with the argument that there is a definite path to the "right" ending if you follow a simple rule or psychological behaviour which is pretty much the definition of a simple calculation (right vs wrong) instead of a meaningful choice. I admit that there is basically one situation in the last third of the main narrative that could count as a "true" meaningful choice, namely the choice whether you tell Emhyr about Ciri or not. In that case you have an internal conflict between various considerations like your wish to protect Ciri, your probably reluctance against Nilfgaard and the emperor and your ongoing thought process about the various results that could arise from Ciri's fate (concerning the White Frost, the Wild Hunt, the northern kingdoms, her life, your life, and so on). That's meaningful choice that challenges the player without a clear, more or less obvious "right" decision.
Another issue that harmed these situations were the often completely misused time constraint to give an answer. They probably copied that element from games like The Walking Dead, but sadly without truly understanding the concept. In The Walking Dead these situations made sense and were properly used because two requirements were fulfilled: first, there was an actual urgency to the respective situation and second, the options were clear enough to give the player the actual chance to decide on an informed basis. Simple example: zombies are about to break into a house you're hiding in and you have to decide whether you send person A or person B to the door in order to stop them. Obviously there is urgency because the zombies could break in every minute. And the option to send one of these person is a clear task that doesn't involve a complicated thought process or higher moral concepts that needs time to be explored in depth. It's also a true meaningful choice because there obviously is no right or wrong. You know that whomever you sent might be killed and that in both cases you might feel sorry. It's a true "the lesser evil" situation in which you have decide in a certain amount of time. That entices you to make an emotionally guided decision, maybe just on the basis whom you like more. In such a situation the time contraint adds to the tension and the emotional impact. And in Witcher 3? Well, sadly in almost none of the situtions in which a time contraint is used in a dialogue choice there is any real urgency. So the context of the urgency is completely lacking. And then the choice situations themselves are not realy meaningful or written well enough to enable an emotional answer in such a short time, especially if you just follow the "I always make what she wants" principle. It's really weird. Either you see these situations just as simple calculations based on pure logic. In that case the time contraint makes no sense at all because there is not tension to be enhanced in the first place. Or you see these situations as proper meaningful choice situations. In that case the dialogue options aren't clear enough to give the player proper, unmisleading(!) information for a decison that doesn't feel arbitrary in the end. Of course the second option diminishes over time once you've realized that pretty every decisive narrative situation in the last third of the game between Geralt and Ciri follows the very same pattern with the very same calcuation behind it.
Apart from these situtions pretty much the whole rest of the last third of the main narrative is purely a linear experience without any meaningful decision involved. I asked myself why I felt this part of the game felt so underdeveloped (apart from obvious inconsistencies in the story itself and badly written ore underdeveloped characters) and that's the answer: I felt almost no agency. I didn't feel that my actions (as Geralt) matter or change anything that's going on on a greater scale. I just do what the game and the narrative wants me to do without any real influence on it. Weirdly enough the game doesn't even offer the illusion of choice very often. And when it does, it feels arbitrary or simply superficial (like e.g. the decision whether Geralt should grant Sile a mercy killing or not). Maybe the biggest diappointment was the realization that the ultimate end of the game was a pure matter of consequences based on these previous calculation-style "choice" situations. I mean, that's pretty weird since every other great RPG I know offers the player some kind of agency in the end, some bigger, some smaller. The end of a game has a big influence on how we feel about the game once we finished it. It determines whether we're satisfied or not. Usually RPG makers understand that. Often they even do a bit "too much" in that direction, as you could e.g. argue for example for Mass Effect 3. But then again, the ultimate choice in Mass Effect 3 was satisfactory because it challenged the player and gave him ultimate agency and feeling of "power" at the end (of course there were obvious problems with the story and the execution of the whole story in ME3, including the deus ex machina moment at the end, but that's a topic for a different discussion). Or think of Deus Ex Human Revolution, where you could decide on the future of augmentations and even sacrifice yourself in the process at the very end with the epilogues presented the though process behind these decision and the probable outcomes. Or think of Alpha Protocol which is almost exclusively made of meaningful choice situations until the very end. These games got this aspect right, the usage of meaningful choice situation at the right time to give the player agency and therefore satisfaction. In Witcher 3 however, the very end didn't give me the feeling that I had any power or agency. I did what I was supposed to do and then I watched what others did instead of doing or deciding something on my own. What makes it even worse is that the epilogues are far away from the actual choice situations and not influenced by what the player does in the last 2-3 hours in the game - at all. Instead, the epilogues are based on these calculation-based "choice" situations (which determine whether Ciri returns or not) and on the one true choice situation (which determines whether Ciri becomes Witcheress or empress) alone. It shouldn't come as a surprise that many gamers ask themselves how the hell the epilogue they see came together. And it also shouldn't come as a surprise that many players are not happy with the ending they got. That's actually a pretty weird thing since in a real meaningful choice situation along the famous line of "the lesser evil" that shouldn't even be possible. But without that there is no real and obvious chain of causality that connects your choice with how the narrative plays out. No matter which ending you see it's mostly not based on you struggeling with yourself about two almost equally hard options (the lesser evil) that both seem promising and depressing at the same time in certain ways in different situations but based on you saying arbitrary things to Ciri in arbitrary situations, situations which are neither urgent, nor provocing, nor challenging, nor offering any kind of trade off between different aspects. If you see the "bad" ending it's not because you made hard decisions, carefully considering different outcomes in your mind, it's only because you've failed at doing the "right thing". You've failed in doing what CDPR obviously wanted you to do and how they wanted you to treat Ciri (which becomes quite clear in the quite "negative" cutscenes you get to see if you decide wrongly in these situations". That's not a meaningful choice sitauation at all. That's not causing satisfaction for the player. That doesn't cause the player to think about the choice situations and decisions, at least not in a good way. That's actually not what the whole concept of narrative choices in RPGs is all about and that's a huge shame.
Looking at the end of Witcher 3 and the last third of the main narrative it almost seems that CDPR have forgotten everything they knew about meaningful choices and player agency in story-driven RPGs. It's hard to believe since they are pretty much the same people who did in outstanding job on the same matter in previous games and even in other parts of the same game. They neglected both all the best practice examples of the industry (including their own games in the same series....) and the basic theory of choices in video games for the end of Witcher 3 - on top of all the logical inconsistencies and underdeveloped aspects of the narrative. I cannot explain that. I wish I could but I can only guess and that probably leads nowhere. I can only assess and evaluate what's there. And what's there is a true and complete disappointment in one of the very basic and most fun aspects of story-driven video games that leaves the player behind without any satisfaction at the end an RPG player usually expects from such an experience. And that's a damn shame for a game, with these developers, with these predecessors and with such striking qualities in other aspects of the game.
:vava:
