Yeah the story is a let down,for this i give you a big cookie
Yeah the story is a let down,for this i give you a big cookie
This.
When creating narrative villains writers should ask themselves five basic questions:
- What are the villain's motivations?
- Why are these the villain's motivations (what makes him tick)?
- How can we communicate these motivations and transform them in concrete goals?
- How do we align the villain's actions with these goals?
- How does the hero fit in and how should he tackle the villain's actions and goals?
Often the best villains tend to be somewhat sympathique or comprehensible. They don't only cause us to feel with them but they also cause us to re-evaluate our own goals and motivations. Good narrative villains are a challenge for the hero and his internal conflict. They serve as an obstacle on many different layers, not only a mechanical one, but also an emotional, rational and moral one. We shouldn't forget that good narrative villains - as real persons - most likely don't see themselves being the villain in somebody else's story. They don't see themselves being the "evil force". Well written villains have comprehensible goals with which you could even agree on in different circumstances or with a different background. Often good villains have a "fatal flaw" which means that their actions are less the product of cold calculated decisinos but more the result of the critical understanding of an aspect of life that is out of control. Darth Vader qualifies for that sort of villain again, as does Letho. They both had to deal with situtions in life that got out of control and they had to react to that. Situations like that can cause "normal" persons (often even heroes) to become villains, when they make "bad" decisions thinking that i was the only viable option at that time. That leads to their fatal flaw, their "original sin", that determines all their further actions and motviations. They are on a certain path they think they have to follow, that feels the natural path to follow for them. Often they have good arguments for their actions and we can sympathize with them, feeling their pain, their internal conflict. And often there is tension between the hero and the villain that results from their mutual attempt to convince the other party of their own goals and motivations (another Star Wars archtype, but there can be way less "clear" alignments than dark vs light or good vs evil). These are the villains in entertainmentthat we usually remember, because they challenge us and because they let our heroes grow as characters.
Sadly, the Wild Hunt is nothing like that in Witcher 3. They are just a bunch of evil dudes planning evil things, doing evil things and they just need to be killed. They are so evil, it's not even worth talking to them. They are so evil, that tackling them on any other level than just pure violence is pointless. They are so one-dimensional (not only compared to the theory of good villains but also to former Witcher villains), it's beyond my understanding.
And yes, it severly harms the depth, complexity and impact of the narrative in the game, especially in the third act. The whole third act is "one-dimensional" in many different aspects (one-dimensional villain, one-dimensional/linear plot, one-dimensional character interactions,...).
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Sry but i must disagree with that cristal clear element.
Remember Alvin=?Your influence to a child will not have the same effect ,as teenager nor even adult/teenager . Its clear to my at kaer morhen when you ask cirrila or even comand : she needs to stay at the castle entrance ,ignoring almost evryone and gos ken style on rampage.
My point is, she is no more a child nor a teenager she is woman(stated she is 20/22 at age). Back to Alvin/Cirlla: flashbacks from the childhood with triss/yen/geralt would solve many problems like they have dont it before even if its only a slideshow or some one liners.
is it not cirillas fault? that my mentor/uncle vesemir is DEAD
Watch or replay Kaer Morhen and you will see how twisted that can go. . . if you had the option to put here in to the castle.Sry but i must disagree with that cristal clear element.
Remember Alvin=?Your influence to a child will not have the same effect ,as teenager nor even adult/teenager . Its clear to my at kaer morhen when you ask cirrila or even comand : she needs to stay at the castle entrance ,ignoring almost evryone and gos ken style on rampage.
My point is, she is no more a child nor a teenager she is woman(stated she is 20/22 at age). Back to Alvin/Cirlla: flashbacks from the childhood with triss/yen/geralt would solve many problems like they have dont it before even if its only a slideshow or some one liners.
is it not cirillas fault? that my mentor/uncle vesemir is DEAD
I insist. You're forgetting the principles of narrative + the fact that it is a game. You are in control, on the game. Not some books that most of the people who plays it had not read. You're making the characters evolve. The books served as a base of how is the character at the beginning (plus some little of invention from the exrta years). But from that point the evolution of the character comes from the game-movie-book you're playing, watching or reading. From time to time you will see a flashback but the thing that matters is in the last book.
So if you press the story to be depressive you will have a sad ending. If you try to find an optimistic point of view from your chooses, you will have a more happy ending. It is as simple as this.
And it's a very,very bad and poor concept for making choice situations in a game like this. It is as simple as that. :dead:
No, it is the only one that have sense.
It is a game with +100 hours of normal gameplay. You're moving the history in a positive way. Do you want it to end in an awful mood? no
You're moving the positive in a negative way. Do you want to end in a good mood? neither.
You want to feel that your acts had affected the ending. And it is the thing that happens.
Otherwise it would be Mass Effect 3, not win "color endings", but with "random endings".
At the end the important is that the end fels a consecuence of your acts. It happens in Catherine, it happens in The Wolf within us, it happens if Walking Dead season 1 and 2, and it happens in the Witcher games
And I expect it to happens in Life is Strange
the third chapter ending was depressing.... :_(
I agree overall.
My biggest problem is that the all the Wild Hunt is...underdeveloped.
In The Witcher 1 and 2 you had this spectral riders which rapresented a realt threat for you, and Eredin was more...involved in The Witcher 1.
In The Witcher 3...he says just few underdeveloped lines which makes him just like a cartoon Bioware Villain
But doesn't seem developed enough to be a real threat or to be actually an enemy woth to be defeated.
Yes, he want to capture Ciri. Yes, he make a mess in Kaer Morhen.
But overall, it doesn't have a developed personality. the same with Imlerith and Caranthir, which have good starting points, but in the game are just two random thug to be defeated. Imlerith especially, which doesn't seem an aen elle, but just...well, a naziskin.
Now...I don't want to offend any writers. I know they made their best and working on TW3 is for sure a nightmare, and that it hurts when your hard work doesn't seems to be appreciated.. But I think that on this point the writing fell, as the quest design fell in the Brother's in Arm quest. which don't have any consequences to the Battle of Kaer Morhen and to the third part of the game.
So yeah, unfortunately Eredin seems to me just an "Ha - ha -ha!" kind of villain.
My biggest problem is that the all the Wild Hunt is...underdeveloped.
In The Witcher 1 and 2 you had this spectral riders which rapresented a realt threat for you, and Eredin was more...involved in The Witcher 1.
In The Witcher 3...he says just few underdeveloped lines which makes him just like a cartoon Bioware Villain
But doesn't seem developed enough to be a real threat or to be actually an enemy woth to be defeated.
Yes, he want to capture Ciri. Yes, he make a mess in Kaer Morhen.
But overall, it doesn't have a developed personality. the same with Imlerith and Caranthir, which have good starting points, but in the game are just two random thug to be defeated. Imlerith especially, which doesn't seem an aen elle, but just...well, a naziskin.
Now...I don't want to offend any writers. I know they made their best and working on TW3 is for sure a nightmare, and that it hurts when your hard work doesn't seems to be appreciated.. But I think that on this point the writing fell, as the quest design fell in the Brother's in Arm quest. which don't have any consequences to the Battle of Kaer Morhen and to the third part of the game.
So yeah, unfortunately Eredin seems to me just an "Ha - ha -ha!" kind of villain.
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The Wticher saga is not about wrong or wright decisions, good or evil, possitive or negative options. It's about "eat or be eaten" as CDPR define The Witcher's world.
Entering in the new Open-World state, CDPR have lost a bit of their philosophy when they decide to dedicating time and effort subtracted to the story line for benefit of the world open.
Entering in the new Open-World state, CDPR have lost a bit of their philosophy when they decide to dedicating time and effort subtracted to the story line for benefit of the world open.
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I disagree. And even If I did that doesn't change the fact that the choice situations are piss poor. Just read my previous posts on the topic if you want to know why.
And you say it yourself: if this is a "clear" choice with a clear right choice there is no reason why it exists in the first place. What's the purpose of that? You either get punished for not making the "right" choice on time (because of the stupid, completely pointless timer btw...) or you just get the result you always expected. There is no meaning to such a choice and little meaning to the consequence as well. I don't only want to feel that my choices had meaning in retrospective, rolling up the chain of causality from the very end (which is the consequence aspect). I want to feel that my choices matter the moment I have to decide on them (which is the choice aspect). Good choices stand on their own, they don't only serve as a turning point to make any differing consequences possible. The moment of choice is just as important as the consequence or even more so.
You know, choosing between a "good" and "evil" (to make it simple) option is different and depends on the way you roleplay. Do you want to roleplay a good or bad character? What's the same thing in TW3? Do you want to "supportive" or "depressive"? Who would willingly ever want to choose the latter? I think we could agree that probably nobody chose the depressing ending on purpose because it was a choice that people made willingly. So the choice itself is bollocks. It's not meaningful. It's just a bad puzzle disguised as a typcial RPG dialogue choice.
Imo the endings in TW3 are not less random. And all of them are based on a distinctive choice, even if it's only one. People complained that all their previous choices had no impact on the ending. Guess what: same is true for Witcher 3. Nothing people did in 99% of TW1 or TW2 or TW3 did has any influence on the endings. Only five arbitrary, badly desinged situations in the last third of the game without any chance to have any influence on it after a certain point. I don't think that this is any better than ME3...
Don't even dare to compare these games to Witcher 3. All of them are at least one level better in therms of choice and consequence that the main plot in Witcher 3. Especially WD Season 1 is so much better in terms of meaningful choices that it hurts my mind...
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I see three main reasons for the problems with the narrative, especially in the last third of the game.
1) The decision to to open world that led to a shift of focus from the narrative design to world design with all respective consequences for the development of the game.
2) The decision to rely heavily on the books, its main characters and parts of its main plot ideas and the wish to give closure not only to the Witcher games triology but the whole Witcher sage (including the books -> spectacle creep), although there were some serious differences between book elements and game elements that remained mostly unexplained instead of giving the whole thing a real "own" creative input on a larger scale.
3) The decision to erase all meaningful (moral) choice from the main storyline in the last third of the game, making it basically a linear epxerience for Geralt with no real possibility to influence the narrative or acting like you'd possibly want or expect him to act. I don't know the reason for that but I guess it has a lot to do with reasons 1) and 2)...
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But seriously,who likes the bad ending,its horrible and it shouldn't even be on the endings list
Too much lore for a game
Maybe the whole problem is that the Witcher universe with all his characters is too much for being put in a game trilogy. Sapkowsky had 7 books and Season of Storms to develop complex relationships, motivations and personal agendas of the characters. Many of the main characters such as Yennefer, Ciri and Eredin(personal) appear for the first time in the third game, but they are too complex characters to be effectivly portraited in single game.
Imo maybe it would have been better if CDPR did make a smaller game for EVERY of the books and instead of a trilogy make some kind of saga with much more episodes. From a story, narrative point of view it would have been better maybe that way. (Just a theory nothing more)
Don't misunderstand me, the trilogy is great (chapeau to the devs), but maybe it's in the very nature of the Witcher universe to be too complex for being a game. This means it would also be impossible to be a movie, since a movie cannot transport that much information as a tv show about the characters and lore. the devs had only one game to unfold Ciri, Eredin, Yen, the sorceresses and many other characters like Dijkstra and to close the legend of Geralt. It's impossible to do all that in a 100h+ game. Maybe its not even impossible but i think they were just overburdened with it.
Maybe the whole problem is that the Witcher universe with all his characters is too much for being put in a game trilogy. Sapkowsky had 7 books and Season of Storms to develop complex relationships, motivations and personal agendas of the characters. Many of the main characters such as Yennefer, Ciri and Eredin(personal) appear for the first time in the third game, but they are too complex characters to be effectivly portraited in single game.
Imo maybe it would have been better if CDPR did make a smaller game for EVERY of the books and instead of a trilogy make some kind of saga with much more episodes. From a story, narrative point of view it would have been better maybe that way. (Just a theory nothing more)
Don't misunderstand me, the trilogy is great (chapeau to the devs), but maybe it's in the very nature of the Witcher universe to be too complex for being a game. This means it would also be impossible to be a movie, since a movie cannot transport that much information as a tv show about the characters and lore. the devs had only one game to unfold Ciri, Eredin, Yen, the sorceresses and many other characters like Dijkstra and to close the legend of Geralt. It's impossible to do all that in a 100h+ game. Maybe its not even impossible but i think they were just overburdened with it.
This.
The bad ending only serves as punishment for the player, for not making the "right" decisions on time in assumed choice situations (and that's a horrible decision, one of the worst things a dev could possibly include in a game...).
It's also the opposite of a meaningful choice that requires you to think and weigh the possible consequences of your actions, both good and bad, having an emotional impact while you make the choice and in the time that follows.
Except that is not. The horrible choices in WD don't have any effect on the story. You choices don't matter in TWD Season 1.
It is, because your choices have direct influence on the ending. while in Mass Effect nothing change, all you have done is cut off and the game give you three random choices just at the ending, where the only change is just the colour of the catalyst's laser.
In The Witcher 3, your ending is based on your relationship with Ciri, and every choice you make actually matter.
Ahem, why are all these characters required to appear in the games after all?
A smaller game for every of the books? Sorry, but the games should be as detached from the plots and ideas of the books as possible. The only two elements a Witcher game imo requires is the main character (and name giver) and the world he lives in. There is no reason at all why the games should reference or follow the books in terms of concepts and plot ideas.
But I somewhat agree with you, one of their biggest failures was that they wanted to give closure to the whole saga, instead of just to their own game or game triology. That was indeed "too much" for a video game of that kind...
This is exactly how to make a bad choices system.
You don't have to be aware of the consequences of your choice. You have just to make a choice, but you don't have to know what the consequence would be.
Because in that case, it is a flat and lame choice, and you choose only based on what consequence you like more.
As in real life, a clear choice doesn't exist. You can't predict what the consequences would be.
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I love those games but most of the time those choices are nothing but an illusion, so Witcher 3 is actually doing a much better job.
But even knowing that I can still enjoy the story, Life Is Strange is probably my favorite one
Please read again what the concept or narrative and meaningful choices in game acutally contains. I made an extensive post on that just yesterday on this very thread...
A choice doesn't require a consequence to work. A good choice works on its own by changing our emotional state. The reward of a good choice is not the ingame consequence but what we thought while making the choice and what we thought might be the outcome of that.
What you criticize her is not the choice, but the consequence, in an academical approach, that is ony (!!!) possible if you autopsy the whole game and all its paths. It's impossible to evaluate that by only playing the game once. The chain of causality works great if you look at the actions that lead to your outcomes in a single playthrough without any other knowledge. And that's what a game like WD is made for and what actual meaningful moral choices are made for. They work (with a deeper impact than any other possible game element), but only if you leave the magical curtain intact.
Every choice you make? You mean five arbitrary small dialgoues with Ciri that don't even feel like real choices? Five small arbitrary small dialogues with Ciri who have less impact and create less agency together(!) than the final decision in ME3 has on its own? Well, ok...
But the biggest point for ME3 is that it's actual choice feels like an impactful and meaningful choice. It's designed as a choice and you have all the needed information to make an informed guess. None of the situations with Ciri work that way. These are just "right" vs "wrong" situations that work like puzzles which you have to solve on time to get the good ending. Either that or you get punished for having behaved like a bad daddy. That is not meaningful decision making or having meaningful choice. This is a perversion of everything Witcher once stood for... :rant:
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No, it doesn't. Because the "normal" player never notices the illusion if he just behaves normally, in the way the game was intended and created - and if its well written.
The "illusion of choice" is only a matter for people who want to play games multiple times and who think that every decision would have extremely different consequences. Guess what? That's mostly impossible and games like WD and most story-driven RPGs are simply not made for that. And then again it's not about the choices but actually about the consequences...
Not in an RPG. An RPG needs different consequences for the choices you make.
That's the concept of role-playing.
You problem (which is actually a problem, and I don't dare to deny it) is not "how the system is build" but is the short descriptions of the choices, which doesn't give to the player the knowledge of what the choice is.
And no, the choices in Mass Effect 3 are not choices because there aren't consequences. Which mean that everything you have done...it has been a waste of time. And in the ending, you just decide if you want the good, the neutral or the bad ending. It's lazy.
And no, in TW3 you don't get punish. You just get a different consequence which reflect your behavior.
And yes, when the entire main quest rely on the relationship between Ciri and Geralt, the choices couldn't have been build in a different way.
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I agree. You don't have to be aware of the consequences of your choice. That's not the point. What you should be aware of is that choice has "weight". Because different to real life we usually play games for experiencing situations that are "greater", "bigger" or "better" than our real life. Games about real life choices would be incredibly boring. All entertainment media offers settings, heroes and stories that are interesting and compelling, for most of us much more than our own life, at least in some aspects. As gamers we want to have meaningful choices that affect a game on a fundamental matter because we don't have that power in life (most of us at least). We want to play the monster hunter Geralt because he is a badass who can kill monsters easily and loves all the pretty women. So while making "small" choices on things might be realistic, but it's not necessaril what we expect from a game like that. The fascination of meaningful moral choices is that you as the player have significant influence on the course of the game, the world and your story. If a situation fails to make it clear that our decisions have weight while we have to make them it fails to offer us that fasincation and excitement, usually described as "player agency". Again, the choices you make in respect ot Ciri might work well for establishing the final consequences but that doesn't make them good meaningful choices in terms of game design and the goals you as a developer have for such choices. If you only use such choices to establish consequences you WASTE at least 50% of the possible emotional impact of these situations - and that's exactly what happened in TW3.
Games don't work like real life and it's not a good goal to make games working like real life. That's a typical game design fallacy.
Games are made to create emotions within the player, basically like every other entertainment medium. The goal of a good game designer is to create situations that affect players on an emotional level, feeling joy and excitement. Meaningful choices are a core concept of that in RPGs and adventures. That doesn't mean that they work like choices in real life, not at all.
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No, you don't need physical consequences. You only have to FEEL that your choices have consequences. That is a huge, HUGE difference which is at the very core of the discussion...
That's only part of it. On top of that the matter of the situations have a clear right vs wrong pattern. There is no roleplay to it? I mean, what should be the roleplay pattern for that? Good dad vs bad dad? What's the fascination of playing a "bad dad"? I think that's extremely weird and I can't think of many people that would actually willingly do and therefore these scenes are not meaningful choices creating player agency themselves but mere puzzles that you have to solve on time, with no meaningful roleplaying included whatsoever.
You mix up choices and consequences once again...
Choices matter at the time you make the choices. That's it. No matter what follows is completely irrelevant to the choice.
Consequences matter at the time you realize them and evaluate whether they make sense.
If you want to criticize ME you can criticize its consequence system. But its choices are most of the time incredibly well made. It's one of the core strengths of the series.
Of course you get punished. Just read above. The system is clearly designed in a way to show you that you are either a good daddy or a bad daddy. That's about it. There in no complexity to that, it's just a right vs. wrong thing, even worse than the old alignment meters in ME or other games that actually offer different roleplay perspectives...
First of all, there were already two games before that. Second, the relationship between Ciri in the books is completely neglected. Third, the relationship doesn't start before the last third of the game. Forth, Geralt has no direct influence in any situation it would actually make sense. Fifth, the choices are poorly constructed and therefore make the whole system arbitrary and disappointing.
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