From the list of quests below, it does not look like any of the individual writers are "bad", they all have great quests and also not so good ones. The latter typically towards the end of the game.
So, to me it seems like the writing was not very well coordinated in terms of the overall story, although there are good quests in isolation, and there were problems late in the development with the budget/resources/time. But it is only a guess.
So, to me it seems like the writing was not very well coordinated in terms of the overall story, although there are good quests in isolation, and there were problems late in the development with the budget/resources/time. But it is only a guess.
I'm replaying the game for the second time now. I really enjoy the game most of the time but there are some things that are simply facepalm-worthy, in terms of writing.
At one point in Novigrad, Priscilla tells Geralt "so, you have to find Doudou to find Dandelion to find Ciri, what a mess... good luck!" (so the writers literaly aknowledged how silly the quest is...)
And Geralt adds: "I have to find Junior first." (...)
Not counting Djikstra, Triss, Corinne Tilly, Dandelion's lovers, Priscilla herself, Menge... I guess that quest is meant to introduce the politics of Novigrad, but the convolution was that necessary? It feels like meeting people is considered a reward in the Novigrad main quest, with unnecessary and underused characters like Francis Bedlam or Rosa Var Attre, which seem to be there for "flavor" sake, while I'm simply losing my appetite for the game. I could play for hours in Velen, but I noticed that I couldn't play Novigrad as intensively. The city is great but the quest design is not good at all, to the point it bores me, despite great moments.
At one point in Novigrad, Priscilla tells Geralt "so, you have to find Doudou to find Dandelion to find Ciri, what a mess... good luck!" (so the writers literaly aknowledged how silly the quest is...)
And Geralt adds: "I have to find Junior first." (...)
Not counting Djikstra, Triss, Corinne Tilly, Dandelion's lovers, Priscilla herself, Menge... I guess that quest is meant to introduce the politics of Novigrad, but the convolution was that necessary? It feels like meeting people is considered a reward in the Novigrad main quest, with unnecessary and underused characters like Francis Bedlam or Rosa Var Attre, which seem to be there for "flavor" sake, while I'm simply losing my appetite for the game. I could play for hours in Velen, but I noticed that I couldn't play Novigrad as intensively. The city is great but the quest design is not good at all, to the point it bores me, despite great moments.
It is understandable that there are more NPCs, quests, and dialogues in a large city than in Velen or Skellige. And probably even more content was planned in Novigrad, but many things ended up unfinished or cut. That may explain some of the issues, and it is also more difficult to design a more complex quest line that involves many NPCs.
Mh, comparing this game to the books is a bad mistake. Actually, all the years of gaming has proven to me that games are immensely inferior to books regardless of genre. You can clearly tell this game was made to make a profit with a mass market in mind. I doubt Sapkowski wrote his books thinking that some day a video game studio will aquire the licence and he will make a lot of money off of it. The witcher games are a dumbed down version of the books. They are great games and this last one is a masterpiece in the realm of games, but not in the realm of art.
I am not sure if you can easily blame the writers for the last part of the story. After all a computer game of this scale is highly complex - it cannot be done by one person alone. You need a group and in that group you will have those with heart and soul and those who might enjoy it but actually do it for the money.
Has anyone considered that the last part was overlooked on purpose? They concluded that since (there was a number out there and it was pretty high, but I can't find a quote right now) over 60% of gamers never finish their games why should they put in more work into the ending. And this beast surely wont be an exception to that rule. Why bother to put in more money and hours, rather fix the beginning and the middle part. Then most gamers will be happy, because they will not play through the entire game. It is a very economical stand point and I am pretty sure considering the monthly costs of producing a video game that this was done.
Not sure how much quality one should expect if profit is the driving motivation for a piece of art.
I am not sure if you can easily blame the writers for the last part of the story. After all a computer game of this scale is highly complex - it cannot be done by one person alone. You need a group and in that group you will have those with heart and soul and those who might enjoy it but actually do it for the money.
Has anyone considered that the last part was overlooked on purpose? They concluded that since (there was a number out there and it was pretty high, but I can't find a quote right now) over 60% of gamers never finish their games why should they put in more work into the ending. And this beast surely wont be an exception to that rule. Why bother to put in more money and hours, rather fix the beginning and the middle part. Then most gamers will be happy, because they will not play through the entire game. It is a very economical stand point and I am pretty sure considering the monthly costs of producing a video game that this was done.
Not sure how much quality one should expect if profit is the driving motivation for a piece of art.
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Like @sv3672 says, it's not like they can't write well, they prove their worth in various places but sometimes a writer needs to be told, 'sorry, this piece isn't good enough' and sadly that appears not to have happened,but looking for someone to blame isn't really helpful at this stage. I understand that time constraints may have resulted in compromises being taken in order to get the game out but the writing that lets this game down can be fixed if there is a willingness within CDPR to improve upon what they've already released. The ball is very much in their park now.
Well, it is better to give the developers the benefit of doubt at least until it is official that nothing will be improved (i.e. patch support for the game is discontinued, if I recall correctly, that is planned at the end of 2016). Not that I have particularly high expectations, to be honest. Nevertheless, it would be disappointing if your last sentence quoted was proven right - I think it was said in an interview before the release that CDPR's approach to the game is "all marketing driven", but it was in the context of technical aspects (prioritizing consoles as the target platform); when the same is applied to the content as well, then that indeed affects the quality of the result, regardless of the medium.
According to Steam achievement statistics, 24.8% of the people who own The Witcher 3 there completed it on any difficulty. But only 70.6% got past the prologue (the rest may not even have started, quit very early, or played off-line), so that means 24.8 / 70.6 = 35.1% of those finished the game. Not far from your number. Although I do not think the later parts of the game were deliberately made worse, they might have been a lower priority. It is also interesting that the first major quests most people would play (Bloody Baron and Wandering in the Dark) are among the best made ones.
Which would also support that the first part of the game - I'd say about until you meet Triss - was on high priority and is generally well written, fleshed out and thus just very enjoyable. Then until the siege in Kaer Morhen that part might have been 2nd priority and you know what happens after that.
People love simple straightforward tasks. It's easy on the mind. But how many times have you heard about a real life story where someone says "If I wrote that as a book no one would ever believe it"? I've had 'dealings' with local politics and politicians. I grew up in Chicago, Ill, USA. The stuff that went on there is way more convoluted and twisted then anything that could ever be in the Witcher. The infighting, backstabbing, deal making involved was way beyond anything here.
So to hear an opinion that the writing is bad I often wonder how people would react if they knew what is going on in the real world right nuder their noses.
Maybe the writers tried to make it too real life and since this is a game players don't actually want that.
So to hear an opinion that the writing is bad I often wonder how people would react if they knew what is going on in the real world right nuder their noses.
Maybe the writers tried to make it too real life and since this is a game players don't actually want that.
I am terribly sorry for bumping a dead thread like this - a post by sv3672 in another thread lead me here:
I've searched through a couple dozen pages of this thread but haven't been able to locate the list of quest ID's. Is there one in this thread at all?
sv3672;n2146892 said:
I've searched through a couple dozen pages of this thread but haven't been able to locate the list of quest ID's. Is there one in this thread at all?
A few points, though I haven't read all 48 pages I did read almost half of them. 
1. It's pointed out that a significant degree of success or failure in the end game depends on how Geralt has interacted with Ciri in a handful of "parenting" situations. People who liked the ending point out that the vagueness of the choices the player makes in those parenting situations and how it's not clear that those choices will have a profound impact later on and how it's also not clear WHAT impact those choices have later on is a good thing. It's realistic to the experience of being a parent. And that's true, it is somewhat realistic to the experience of being a parent. You never know what effect the things you do are going to be, you never know when the consequences of your choices will come about. Your choice to ground your son for a week for not cleaning his room when he's 8 years old could ultimately result in him dropping out of high school and becoming a drug dealer. You don't know, and you'll never know. In that sense the game reflects something of the reality of being a parent, by having Geralt make choices about how to deal with Ciri as her parent and making the consequences of those choices completely opaque until it's far too late to do anything about them.
My objection to this is that a) I'm not interested in playing a parenting simulation in general. I wasn't aware that was what we were signing up for and as a parenting simulation Witcher 3 sucks. It's a decent hack and slash RPG, but it's a really crappy parenting simulator. So, yeah, making the entire ending all about the parenting simulator portions was an... well, idiotic decision on someone's part. b) if they want to make statements about what is good parenting and what is bad parenting then they could at least let the parent in this situation try to course correct once it's obvious that something has gone wrong. But they don't ever let the player correct course once the player sees the result of choices made. And often those choices were made far prior, and often they didn't seem to have a connection to what happens later.
This is the same exact problem with the Geralt/Triss/Yennifer "love triangle" story in that there are good reasons why someone might end up sending confused signals to both Yennifer and Triss, there are good reasons why Geralt might say he loves both of them at the different points in the story where he has the chance to tell them that (on the lighthouse after the mages escape, with Triss, and after the Djinn removes the love geas and Yen confesses her love to Geralt). But at no point after this is Geralt given the chance to talk to either woman about their relationship or about his feelings for the other woman. At no point after this does he have the chance to realize what road he's on and where it might lead and try to course correct to end up in a place where he'd like to end up. Instead, just like with Ciri and the ending, choices made by the player in seeming isolation end up coming back to haunt the player in a big way and there was never a chance to *do anything about it*. This seems to be a common theme with the writing in this game, this idea that you make choices then much later the unforseeable consequences of those choices are inflicted upon you, and at no point did you have the chance to analyze where things were going and try to change what was going on.
2. Many people point out the battle at Kaer Morhen is the narrative climax of the game and they are right. It's a bit depressing reading how many people consider that to be the apex of the game and the "best" part of the game in many ways, considering how little anything I did seemed to matter in that battle. Is it just me or are all my allies and all the things I did leading up to that battle utterly irrelevant? It seems that none of it matters much, the end of the battle chapter is going to always be the same and someone at CDPR wasn't told that literally freezing the protagonist during the most important parts of the narrative and removing all agency from the player during the most important parts of the narrative is a BAD THING. Sitting there watching through the power of the cut scene as critical events occur in which my character has no influence and no chance to act is not particularly enjoyable. Someone make sure Bioware also gets that memo?
3. People need to chill on focusing on the OP's comparison of pacing from a movie to a game. Jumping all over that with pedantic objections just makes you look like an apologist. It was one example of good storytelling pacing and the form of good storytelling pacing applies across media, anytime you're engaged in storytelling. Yes, it's not exactly the same but the lessons learned in "how to write a good action adventure novel" carry over to "how to write a good action adventure movie" and they also, shockingly, carry over into "how to write a good action adventure computer game".
1. It's pointed out that a significant degree of success or failure in the end game depends on how Geralt has interacted with Ciri in a handful of "parenting" situations. People who liked the ending point out that the vagueness of the choices the player makes in those parenting situations and how it's not clear that those choices will have a profound impact later on and how it's also not clear WHAT impact those choices have later on is a good thing. It's realistic to the experience of being a parent. And that's true, it is somewhat realistic to the experience of being a parent. You never know what effect the things you do are going to be, you never know when the consequences of your choices will come about. Your choice to ground your son for a week for not cleaning his room when he's 8 years old could ultimately result in him dropping out of high school and becoming a drug dealer. You don't know, and you'll never know. In that sense the game reflects something of the reality of being a parent, by having Geralt make choices about how to deal with Ciri as her parent and making the consequences of those choices completely opaque until it's far too late to do anything about them.
My objection to this is that a) I'm not interested in playing a parenting simulation in general. I wasn't aware that was what we were signing up for and as a parenting simulation Witcher 3 sucks. It's a decent hack and slash RPG, but it's a really crappy parenting simulator. So, yeah, making the entire ending all about the parenting simulator portions was an... well, idiotic decision on someone's part. b) if they want to make statements about what is good parenting and what is bad parenting then they could at least let the parent in this situation try to course correct once it's obvious that something has gone wrong. But they don't ever let the player correct course once the player sees the result of choices made. And often those choices were made far prior, and often they didn't seem to have a connection to what happens later.
This is the same exact problem with the Geralt/Triss/Yennifer "love triangle" story in that there are good reasons why someone might end up sending confused signals to both Yennifer and Triss, there are good reasons why Geralt might say he loves both of them at the different points in the story where he has the chance to tell them that (on the lighthouse after the mages escape, with Triss, and after the Djinn removes the love geas and Yen confesses her love to Geralt). But at no point after this is Geralt given the chance to talk to either woman about their relationship or about his feelings for the other woman. At no point after this does he have the chance to realize what road he's on and where it might lead and try to course correct to end up in a place where he'd like to end up. Instead, just like with Ciri and the ending, choices made by the player in seeming isolation end up coming back to haunt the player in a big way and there was never a chance to *do anything about it*. This seems to be a common theme with the writing in this game, this idea that you make choices then much later the unforseeable consequences of those choices are inflicted upon you, and at no point did you have the chance to analyze where things were going and try to change what was going on.
2. Many people point out the battle at Kaer Morhen is the narrative climax of the game and they are right. It's a bit depressing reading how many people consider that to be the apex of the game and the "best" part of the game in many ways, considering how little anything I did seemed to matter in that battle. Is it just me or are all my allies and all the things I did leading up to that battle utterly irrelevant? It seems that none of it matters much, the end of the battle chapter is going to always be the same and someone at CDPR wasn't told that literally freezing the protagonist during the most important parts of the narrative and removing all agency from the player during the most important parts of the narrative is a BAD THING. Sitting there watching through the power of the cut scene as critical events occur in which my character has no influence and no chance to act is not particularly enjoyable. Someone make sure Bioware also gets that memo?
3. People need to chill on focusing on the OP's comparison of pacing from a movie to a game. Jumping all over that with pedantic objections just makes you look like an apologist. It was one example of good storytelling pacing and the form of good storytelling pacing applies across media, anytime you're engaged in storytelling. Yes, it's not exactly the same but the lessons learned in "how to write a good action adventure novel" carry over to "how to write a good action adventure movie" and they also, shockingly, carry over into "how to write a good action adventure computer game".
Jobenheim;n7435240 said:
Sorry for the late reply, but I posted the list of main quests and large side quests in the base game in another thread, and the forum update seems to have broken the links. While I could not find the post that originally included these (it is somewhere in a quite long thread), I did find the images themselves on my profile.
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