Generally speaking, I'm a fan of horses. I mean, not the actual, real-life bug-eyed gargantuan monster that is 'the horse', because even having lived in close proximity to my mother's horse for fifteen years, I still find them to be slightly freakish animals. Horses in video games, however, are another story. They give us new ways to engage with available space. They provide lore-friendly means of faster travel around the commonly open worlds in which they are found. Most importantly, they both have and add character to the game. Once you're on your horse, whether it be in Skyrim, Afghanistan, World War I or Hyrule, you're not really controlling your designated PC any more: no, that puppet-person meatbag that you can twist and throw all around the world with ridiculous precision and disregard has been downgraded to passenger on this new, tenacious, fearsome beast that is far less likely to put up with you trying to ride down mountains, or jump fences after approaching at less than a perfect right angle. Video game horses command respect: you play by their rules, or you get bucked off. And if you don't wanna, well, then, enjoy walking.
Of course, their general aptitude depends on how well they've been programmed in, and certainly, over the years, developers have had some interesting ideas about how to attach these sentient rockets to their worlds. Sometimes - rarely, I have to say - horses are sublime joys to ride. Sometimes, they have so much character that their flaws are rendered irrelevant. Sometimes, their programmed flaws end up looking like aspects of their character, and the results can be hilarious. And sometimes, getting on a horse is a really great way to become dead through no fault of your own. One's own patience for any given horse is generally informed by how much patience and good feeling one has towards a given game, and, since I'm generally a very patient and gentle gamer unless I'm playing Pokemon, I've met a bunch of good horses over my time, and would like to pay my respects.
That's right, this post is a listicle! Gotcha!
1. Epona (The Legend of Zelda)
Hey listen!
Epona gets to go first because she is the proto-horse. She might not have been the first rideable horse in a videogame ever, but within my arbitrarily narrow category of 'horses used to navigate open worlds' she's certainly up there. At the very least, she was the first horse I ever rode. Unlike many, she has to be earned, also; it's quite possible that a goal-oriented player of Ocarina of Time might never visit Lon Lon Ranch, and therefore miss both ends of the neat time travel arc that culminates in Link basically stealing his first horse (idea for a future post: Link the criminal). It's hard to have affection for Epona that isn't borne out of nostalgia, however, because she doesn't have much in the way of personality; her only distinguishing feature is her hatred of fences. In later games, she's become a bit of a mystical figure like Link and Zelda, reincarnating to give Link a lift when he needs her, but I like to think she's actually on her own extensive multi-dimensional adventure that keeps coinciding with Link's. I think the same thing about the various Dogmeats in Fallout.
2. Agro (Shadow of the Colossus)
The one on the right
In Shadow of the Colossus, the world is massive, and pretty empty. Throughout the entire game the only things that stir are the twelve colossi, the main character, his horse Agro, and ten thousand lizards. It's a lonely experience, jetting around that world, hunting down magnificent monsters that were just minding their own business until this schmuck with the magic sword came to ruin their day, so it's nice to have some company. Indeed, Argo's constant companionship is equalled only by how he's more than willing to get stuck in and help Wanderer out for some of the battles. In a world where most videogame horses are terrified of slight slopes and errant trees, it's not hard to come out looking comparatively badass, but even so Argo is an impressive dude. He even, completely inexplicably, survives a several-hundred foot drop in the game's climax - I've personally always thought it would have been more emotionally satisfying if his sacrificial moment stuck, but damn if I'm not glad to see him every time he nonchalantly strolls back in during the ending.
3. Horse (Skyrim)
This is fine.
The horses of Skyrim are hardy and strong, and make up for in endurance what they lack in speed. - Skyrim Loading Screen
The main reason that I don't always agree with horses in videogames is because they're not always worth the effort. I'm the sort of open-world explorer who isn't happy until he's uncovered every inch and every secret, and that can be hard to do on a horse: whenever you climb aboard, you have to acknowledge that you're trading the thorough control you have over your character for the far more temperamental control you have over a horse, with the benefit of increased speed. In Skyrim, horses don't go that fast. They also charge headlong into battle against any and all enemies, and usually end up dead, or else find a different way to die by accidentally jumping too far when I'm trying to explore on them, a touch that is remarkably over-realistic for what is such a wildly fantastical game. They are, in summary, more trouble than they're worth.
But that's okay, because they have such a hilarious disregard for physics, as demonstrated above, that I can't help but love them anyway. A combination of side-hops and jump spam is sufficient to climb most of the mountains in Skyrim that you're not supposed to be able to, but if you ever can't make it, come back with a horse, and ride straight up vertical slopes with aplomb. Meme-makers, one and all.
4. Lightning (Breath of the Wild)
CHEEESE
Breath of the Wild is quite remarkable for a Zelda game in that it doesn't have Epona in it. It makes sense, in a way; the Link of this game is actually from a hundred years in the past, so even if he had an Epona, she wouldn't be around anymore. Unless she is a time traveller, which, you know, could be, because it is possible to get her if you have the Amiibo that opens the relevant wormhole. But for all us lowly people who don't have the disposable income to spend on cool but worthless figurines, Link has to choose a horse from one of the many that live in the wilds of Hyrule. I spent much of this game riding around on my decidedly average horse James Baxter, seeking the holy grail of a horse that had 5 stars in each of its three stats. If you're still out there trying that for yourself, let it go. They don't exist. Be like me and find one with maximum speed, then dye its hair purple and give it the monster saddle so that it can embrace the punk life like this joker.
I've never been as attached to a horse as I have to this one. She hit all of the sweet spots of being beautiful to control, ridiculously fast and efficient, and full of character. She also came to my aid in the final battle against Ganon, so she even has Agro checked. Breath of the Wild is considered excellent in many ways, but I give it the most props for really nailing down this whole horse thing.
And yet, there's one more...
5. Roach (The Witcher III: Wild Hunt)
X gonna give it to ya
This is why we're here, why I'm writing this piece. Meet Roach, the biggest troll in The Witcher III, a game that has literal trolls. Roach is, quite simply, the worst horse of all time. She is but the latest in what is implied to be a long line of legacy horses that main character Geralt has owned and given this same oddly uncomplimentary name, but this particular Roach seems particularly eager to put her mark on history, and yeah, she's succeeding. Just look at the meme!
Never in horsing history has there been such a severe disconnect in control between player character and character's horse. Geralt isn't the most spry of PCs - he doesn't have the skills to Skyrim Hop his way up mountains and into places he shouldn't be, although that's not for the lack of my trying - but he does, for the most part, move in the way that I want him to. On Roach, however, things get a little more interesting, because whatever complex algorithms the developers used to connect her to the world seem to have only a very tenuous grasp on, well, the world. Roach loves nothing more than to divert from the game's paths by means of unexpected 90 degree turns into the woods or off cliffs. I would wager the problem is in her autopilot, an excellent feature that first turned up in Red Dead Redemption and then disappeared until this game and Breath of the Wild. When on a path, Roach will automatically follow its various turns without any controller input. That's the theory, at least. But whereas RDR and BotW are games that contain a vast amount of open space, the world of W3 is much denser, with paths that wind their way through forests, closely blocked in on both sides by trees. That's a lot more potential obstacles to mess with Roach's pathfinding, no matter how good it might be. That might almost sound like I'm trying to give credit, but it's the kind of credit that goes 'this thing could potentially be very good if it weren't for all of the things that make it bad'. I mean, she screeches to a halt every time I try to ride her over a bridge for goodness's sakes.
Luckily - and this is a personal opinion, as I'm sure there are many people on the internet who are legitimately angry with Roach - I find that the sheer slapstick nonsense of this horse's ineptitude blows right past 'frustrating' and loops back around to being hilarious. To me, Roach is, in-universe, just a shit. I imagine her rolling her eyes every time Geralt gets on her, and debating as she runs the best places coming up where she can try to buck him off. That'll teach that bastard to keep strapping the decomposing heads of monsters to her and expecting her to deal.
----
There we have it: the assembled horse avengers. And what a superhero team they would make! Agro would be designated hero Captain America. Epona would be the reliable if slightly bland sidekick, so Thor, the Skyrim horses are obviously Spider-Man, Lightning is the bantermeister Iron Man, and I guess Roach would have to be token evil teammate Loki who spends most of her time fucking with everyone, and you know what, this post has gotten silly so I'm going to stop writing it.
A post about the 2017 Election, originally posted on voting day.
So I guess it's time for my annual political message. Before we start, here's a quick recap of the election campaign so far.
Labour's poll position swings upwards as soon as election rules require a balance in coverage and so people start to see that actually, Corbyn is a good'un, and that maybe he'd make a pretty decent statesman and negotiator given how he's come through all the shit that's been thrown at him over the last two years
May meanwhile begins to look more and more like a slightly malfunctioning robot
Blue tabloid media becomes oddly concerned about how Corbyn talked to the IRA decades ago in effort to make peace, says little about how May went to Saudi Arabia two months ago to sell weapons
Conservative manifesto introduces hugely unpopular dementia tax which lasts for about as long as it takes to become disliked i.e. one day
Conservatives attempted to idiomise 'magic money tree' in the face of Labour's fully-costed manifesto, despite the fact that their own contains no numbers at all
The prime minister refuses to engage in democracy by debating with her opposition, seeding doubt about her negotiating skill in the immediate run up to the most important negotiations in a generation
The Guardian attempts to steal May's crown of 'Best Election Campaign U-turn 2017' by remembering it's supposed to be a liberal newspaper and deciding to support the man it's been shitting on for two years
Blue tabloid media screams itself hoarse with hatred because there's a chance that the party who gives its' owners tax breaks might not steamroll this after all, non-rich people are expected to read it and think yes I agree, please tax me more instead
Terrorist attacks lead people to wonder where all the police have gone, but the Home Secretary who got rid of them all is unavailable for comment because she's too busy 'thinking about Brexit' and pulling hilariously memetic faces
Prominent horrible conservatives mysteriously disappear because they're not exactly vote-winners, and it wouldn't be right to show the country what they're voting for (seriously, where are Gove the backstabber, Hunt the NHS Judas, and Fox the all-round twit?)
Conservatives call out Labour MP for having the gall to similarly disappear on legitimate grounds of ill health, because no-one in blue wants legitimacy to come anywhere near this election
Conservative placards start to appear solely around all of the nearby mansions. Labour placards start to appear in the windows of houses on my street.
Corbyn speaks to crowds of thousands, May' s events are full of cardboard people cut-outs.
Blue tabloid media abandons all illusions of sanity and starts calling Corbyn a terrorist and calling for the abolishment of YouTube (no seriously, that's The Sun today)
I gotta say, it's been a real wild ride, and that's only the cliff notes version. You can probably guess which way I'm leaning given how kind the above notes are(n't) to the Tories, but do you know why, and why I urge anyone thinking of voting Blue to go Red, or whichever candidate in your constituency can beat Blue? It's because, for the first time since ever that I can recall, we're faced with an election that isn't about the lesser of two evils. There's a definite evil, the one that has been running our country - into the ground - for the last seven years, turning it into a nastier, poorer place to live, the one that called this election out of hubris and is now running around like a maniac hoping to not come out of it looking like twats (too late, idiots). And then there's the side led by a man who is that rarest of things, a politician who people actually like, and who wants to enact genuine change, and who has lit a fire under the young in an unprecedented manner.
Last year, I urged my elders to listen to the young, and the need for you to do so has only gotten more pressing since then. No matter what Bob Geldof might think, this isn't just a Brexit election: there's a chance to bring some hope back to Britain, to start realigning this country as a positive force, a place I for one can be proud to be a part of again. And while part of me wants to enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the Conservatives deal with the Brexit beast they unleashed, the greater part of me fears what lies ahead, and worries a lot about facing another five years of Blue insanity. So yeah, I'm voting Labour, and I hope you are too. I don't even mind that we may not win: the cat is out of the bag, now, and unless the Conservatives absolutely nail Brexit, which, based on this campaign, they won't, then, come 2022, there will be a reckoning. I'd just rather not wait that long to be heard.
To sell the unsellable: the greatest challenge of the copywriter. Of course for the most part we find ourselves putting words to the task of reasonable projects, items and services, so it's just a matter of selecting good words and putting them together in a complementary manner. But, well, that's pretty straightforward, and I fancied a challenge to dust off my skills with, so I asked the good folks of Facebook to suggest some highly unlikely and nonsensical products for me to write about. Naturally, they delivered. So without further ado welcome to the online store for stuff you are very likely to never need!
Disclaimer: do not attempt to purchase any of the following items.
1. Invisible ninja suit that is
also delicious
Invisible: for perfect stealth.
Delicious: for any situation.
TECMO’s ninja suits have been the leading world standard for
fifteen years, and we’re proud to serve the needs of the discerning modern
ninja. But we also know that it’s a tough world for ninjas out there these
days. So we’re proud to present out first hybrid ninja suit, which combines the
best features of our Stealth and Tasty models: the Sneak’n’Eat suit.
No longer will you be detected by sharp-eyed minions. No
longer will you find your stomach rumbling on a lengthy stake-out. The
Sneak’n’Eat runs on advanced rice paper technology that makes it completely
unremarkable to the naked eye, but we’ve also dipped that rice paper in vats of
leading nutrients, infusing it with a deliciousness that can’t be compared.
The TECMO Sneak’n’Eat: because we care about ninjas.
2. Edible washing up liquid for
cleaning chocolate teapots
Edichocpotcleanse is favoured by 90% of hungry chocolate
teapot cleansers.
Complicated pot-cleansing technology removes 95% of stray
chemicals from chocolate teapots: other leading brands top out at 85%.
Flavour infusion makes our washing up liquid the tastiest
around. Our ever-expanding range of flavours covers every conceivable taste,
from bananas to sesame oil to cat farts.
Edichocpotcleanse: it cleans your teapots, and tastes great.
What more do you need?
3. Fosters with bubbles
Since 1889, the Fosters family have taken immeasurable pride
in refreshment. Our signature beer is famous worldwide, and while we could have
stopped there, we haven’t. We’re always looking out for new ways to improve our
brew, and so are proud to announce our latest innovation: bubbles!
Very soon, in a bar near you, you’ll be able to enjoy the
enhanced taste of the all-new Fosters, purposefully infused with quality
carbonation by leading brewing technicians. If you enjoy our signature utterly
flat taste, you’ll love this – and if you’ve not enjoyed a cold, crisp pint of
Fosters lager before, then there’s no better time than now.
Effervescence: for epic refreshment.
4. Editing Skulls
Typos: we all make them. In this age of mischievous
autocorrect, it's nothing to be afraid of, but it sure is inconvenient. But
never fear! - we at Yorick and Boni LTD are proud to present our new Editing
Skulls.
Place one of our unique skulls on your mantle, and it's
ethereal eyes will burrow into your brain and follow your every manoeuvre
online, converting your words from the hilarious sequence of typographical
errors that is real life into the sequence of sleek grammatical wisdom that
no-one real ever speaks with. Friends, colleagues and strangers alike will be
amazed at your lexical dexterity and the faint demonic glow that exudes from
you!
So if you're looking to get ahead in the world of words,
cast your eyes on a Yorik and Boni Editing Skull, and soon you'll be saying
'alas! Poor typos! I knew them, [insert name of relevant conversational partner
here]'.
5. Jun
Picture the scene: it's a bright, beautiful sunny day, but
you're at home, alone, sitting in the shade, feeling bored and unfulfilled.
Sound familiar? It should. Our extensive studies show that approximately 100%
of the population is like this 93% of the time.
Because they don't have Jun.
Guaranteed to make your life 5632% more interesting and
nonsensical, Jun brings highly unique charm and insanity to all situations with
his unique breed of imaginative mania. Soon you'll go from sitting at home to
sitting atop the wings of success, flying through a series of increasingly
unlikely scenarios as Jun takes you on a journey to the inside of your mind.
Beyond that, the world is truly and forever your oyster, or other preferred
item of seafood or alternative cuisine.
Don't be dumb. Invest in Jun.
6. A instrument with cpr type
qualities that takes a normal piece of steak and renovates the meat back to a
cow.
In times of political and geophysical crisis, when even
imported vegetables are a finite resource, no budding restaurateur wishes to
find themselves paying through the nose for overpriced steak. Well, no more!
With the M-00 Cowcannon, a single shot is sufficient to renovate a piece of
meat back into a fully grown cow, which can then be personally slaughtered for
fresh, pleasant consumption. Enjoy the luxury of infinite meat twinned with the
boost of masculinity that comes with playing God and slaughtering innocent
creatures, all for the a-moo-zingly low price of £500,000!
Now 90% less likely to completely annihilate the global
market!
7. A ladder for moths to escape
from the bath.
Jun Alex Prince Cheung was having what he assumed was a
perfectly normal day: he'd just got home after a long hard slog at the office,
and was looking forward to a nice relaxing bath. But it was not to be, because,
upon arrival in the bathroom, horror of horrors, moths in the bath!
Permit us, if you will, to science. See, a bath is commonly
wet, and when the wing of a moth comes into contact with wet, a remarkable
chemical reaction takes place that renders it unable to fly. So if a moth
should land in your bath... there'll be trouble afoot, as poor Jun discovered.
But no more! Because now, Jun has a moth ladder! Easy to
install and easy to use, the moth ladder is the world's leading mechanism for
allowing wet moths to escape from baths with their personal integrity intact.
90% of moths agree.
Here's what Jun himself had to say after we gave him a free
sample moth ladder:
Welcome back to the Wayback Machine, folks. Come on in and
settle down, because today I need to tell you about a difficult time in my life:
being a fan of Doctor Who in the 2000’s.
Where were you when Doctor Who came back to television? I
know where I was – somewhere else. Although I was aware of this incoming potentially
interesting show, I nonetheless managed to space and miss the first episode.
The first episode of Doctor Who that I ever watched was the second episode, The End of the World, which you knew was
set in the future because Britney Spears was considered to be classic Earth
literature and the main adversary (spoilers for something that aired 12 years
ago) was a piece of sentient skin. And you know what, I’m pretty sure that at
the time I enjoyed that. It very quickly became apparent that this was a show
that was unabashedly, unreservedly goofy, running on a level of camp that was
about as far from hard science fiction as it’s possible to get – which is, it
turns out, the sort of area where a significant two-part episode in your first
season is about farting aliens taking over the world, by which I of course mean
London, and by which I of course mean dodgy CGI and Cardiff interiors standing
in for London.
And you know what, at the time, that was okay. We didn’t
know any better! I know there’s a fanboy forum explosion’s worth of debate as
to whether Doctor Who’s original showrunner, Russell T. Davies, ran a better show
than his successor Stephen Moffat, but in my eyes there’s a definite upswing of
quality right from the very first season through to the current one, one that
exists independent of concerns like who’s actually in charge. the Doctor Who of
2005 had no idea what it was doing; it’s been fairly well documented by Davies
himself that the production crew of that first season were making it up as they
went along, with no idea if their revival of a show that had been cancelled in
the 1980’s would prove in anyway tenable. The Doctor Who of 2010, by contrast,
was a show that had found its feet and was confident enough in its science
fiction credentials to start really digging into the conventions of its genre.
The Doctor Who of 2015 was a worldwide hit, and the juggernaut shows no signs
of slowing down. But there’s a problem with this seemingly consistent curve of
improvement, and it is thus; the further away we get from those early seasons,
the worse they become. Here’s where I have to admit to a slight bit of
misdirection, because the great dilemma at the heart of this post isn’t about being a fan of Doctor Who in
the 2000’s. No, it’s about being a fan of 2000’s era Doctor Who…. in 2017.
WIBBLY WOBBLY TIMEY WIMEY
The reason this is all up in my head right now is because me
and my partner have been rewatching these early seasons after I got her hooked
on the current season by means of cunningly watching it while she was around.
Unfortunately I had to accompany her on her delve back into history with
cautionary messages about how it wasn’t gonna be that good, a warning that the
show was remarkably quick to prove apt. Yet, despite that, we came out of the
first season with a generally favourable impression. There are, I think, a few
reasons for this: first, there’s Christopher Eccleston, who is a master of
making shitty material somehow seem not so shitty. Secondly, given that this
entire season was constructed knowing that it was the only one in which he
would be playing the Doctor, his incarnation of the character has perhaps the
most clearly drawn arc of all those who have come before or since: from suffering
survivor and damnable destroyer of friend and foe alike through to believing in
himself and being worthy of his own title again, justly rewarded with a heroic
death. Third, we only watched the second half of the season because my partner remembered
watching the rest previously, so perhaps we hadn’t had enough time to get sick
of the show or Rose.
Because rest assured, we are sick of Rose now. My partner in particular had some particularly
choice and generally unprintable thoughts when I asked her for her opinion as I
was writing this. We’ve always been of the opinion that the new Doctor’s main companion
is a bit hateable, mostly in terms of how she treats poor innocent left-behind
sort-of ex-boyfriend Mickey (although Mickey certainly doesn’t help himself in
that regard). But it was okay, in the first season. It’s not until the second
season that the show really develops a Rose problem. The character demonstrates
a staggering amount of self-obsession, or perhaps obsession with the Doctor and
the relationship they share, which moves much
closer to an outright romantic liaison now that she’s paired up with David
Tennant’s fresh-faced, open and more approachable incarnation of the character.
I by no means intend to disparage Tennant’s work in the role: I know for a fact
that in seasons to come he does some really outstanding stuff with the material
he’s given, and my general opinion on his tenure is that he’s a solid Doctor, but
in this season, well… Watching it now, I do
not like the Doctor.
You knew this was coming.
That’s a bit of a problem. I wish I could say it was intentional
on the show’s behalf, and indeed, in odd, fleeting moments during this season,
there does seem to be a nugget of a coherent theme about how the Doctor and
Rose bring out the worst in each other. But it never seems to snap into focus,
and instead I find myself watching two arrogant time-travellers get lost in
their own hubris as the lives of the innocent people they meet are torn apart
in the background. This is most apparent in the second episode, Tooth and Claw, where the Doctor and
Rose are dancing around squeeing about encountering a werewolf literally
seconds after a supporting character sacrifices himself so that they can escape
from said werewolf. The fact that Queen Victoria, who is a supporting character
in this episode because shut up, takes quite appropriate umbrage with this and
ends up founding the organisation whose actions will eventually tear the Doctor
and Rose apart, is a nice
touch, and perhaps the most overt indication that there was a deliberate arc in
play here. But in the stretch between these events, we have eleven episodes of
the Doctor and Rose being awful, and never getting called out on it. Of
particular note are the times when the Doctor goes full god-complex, declaring
himself the highest available authority in a stunning display of arrogance that
16 year old me thought incredible cool but which 28 year old me thinks makes
him kind of a dick. The season actually leads with this, having him declare
himself such in the very first episode when he thinks something has happened to
Rose, and that has the unfortunate effect of colouring all the following times
when he leans on his genius. He is the Doctor that Rose made him, and
unfortunately, that doesn’t make him a very nice guy.
It’s worth pointing out at this point that I love Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, who is
often very much not a nice guy. I don’t
have a problem with the Doctor being a dick, as
long as the show is willing to call him out on it, and that era of the show
is: indeed, one of the hallmarks of Stephen Moffat’s time in charge of Doctor
Who is his interest in deconstructing the Doctor. Is he a positive or negative
force in the universe? Moffat’s seasons 6 and 8 were basically all about that,
and for their flaws, they were at least interesting. Season 2, by contrast, has
no such focus. The one episode that does seem like it might be interested in
exploring this, Love and Monsters, is
so weighed down by how it’s universally terrible in every single way that an
episode of a television show could ever possibly be that it never has a chance
of even coming into the vicinity of sticking the landing, and so opts for a
blowjob joke instead. This leaves us with is a long, long stretch of two people
being generally terrible, and that is hard to swallow (phrasing). It’s quite telling that
the standout episodes of this season, The
Girl in the Fireplace and the The
Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit two-parter, feature the Doctor and Rose
separated from each other for significant stretches. That said, I am quite
looking forward to the concluding Army of
Ghosts and Doomsday, but at this
point I’m not sure if it’s out of a genuine hope that my memory of them being
pretty good episodes is accurate, or if I’m just looking forward to the schadenfreude
of the Doctor and Rose getting what they deserve.
Until this happens, of course.
I wish I could say that I’m hopeful for things to get
better, once Rose is gone. In a way, I am, because I know that they do, but in
a way, I also know that the next companion is going to spend her entire season
living in Rose’s shadow. I also know that the next season is going to end with Last of the Time Lords.
Even 16 year old me had trouble swallowing that one. What will 28 year old me
think?
Welcome, oh lovely travellers, to the Wayback Machine, a
time travel device made entirely out of toilet roll tubes and unlikeliness.
Through the whims of this stalwart mechanism I’ll be moving back and forth
along the scales of pop culture, investigating and reviewing current and
ancient entertainment alike, because we all know it’s vitally important to have
a threadbare fictional explanation for why we’re inclined to write reviews and
articles about things that are no longer current. The real reason is because
there’s a lot of interesting things about there that I haven’t had chance to
write about in a while, and it’s about time I got caught up. And, if a
perspective enhanced by time lends itself to a different consideration to what
you might have previously read on the subject, then well ain’t that a lucky
coincidence!
Our first trip back in time is a short one, back to play The
Witcher III: Wild Hunt, the biggest game of two years ago. Or at least, one
assumes, given that the version I picked up was handily marked ‘Game of the
Year edition’. But then again, what does that
mean? There’s no supreme justice of gaming who decides what the very best game
of any year was, probably simply because no-one deserves the amount of internet
grief that said arbiter would receive when it inevitably made a controversial
choice.1
Indeed, so many publications throw out similar awards – everyone loves a good ‘best
of the year’ list every December – that the moniker is essentially meaningless.
And that’s probably why we all read ‘Game of the Year edition’ as ‘Game + DLC’
without paying attention to what the words actually say, and I guess the moral
of the story then is that developers ought to be a bit more modest.
Seriously, take it easy heroes.
That’s not to say that The Witcher III isn’t great, because
it is. But it’s a very odd kind of great. Conceptually, for example, the world
is open for free roam, but the various areas of the world are divided into map
cells, and though you can see them from the start, access to more cells only
comes along at various points in the story, with each cell also having a
general sense of level requirement guided by the relative level of the quests
that get you there. There is a very definite structure to this open world;
progression is tied to story in a way that initially, I found rather rankling.
But there’s a chance I’m coming at this from a position of bias, given that the
last four games I’ve played have been Fallout 4, Skyrim, Just Cause 3 and
Breath of the Wild i.e. four of the most open and navigable sandboxes of the
current generation. Part of what I loved about the former two games especially
was being able to, from the start, go to places I shouldn’t probably be able to
get through yet, and finding inventive new ways to bumble my way to a highly
unlikely victory (have you ever tried to take on the mage boss at the end of
Skyrim’s Dawnbreaker quest at a low level? ‘Highly unlikely’ hardly begins to
cover it). Those games never railroaded me in a particular direction; if I saw
something on the horizon and liked the look of it, then I could go there.
That last point is especially true of Breath of the Wild and
Just Cause 3, whose navigational mechanics are among the most joyous things I’ve
ever experienced in videogames. I could fly around on JC3’s wingsuit for hours,
and that alone would be satisfactory; that particular game was unique in that
it had a fast travel system whose convenience was outweighed by how fun it was
to just travel to a place manually. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never ever
thought that about a game ever before, and I highly doubt I will again. The
problem with open worlds, especially in this generation, is that they’re massive, and great as that is, no-one
wants to spend their time trekking back and forth across familiar parts. Fallout 4’s fast-travel disabling
survival mode sounds excellent in terms of realism, but horrible in terms of
fun.
So, with all that in mind, I found The Witcher III’s
structure to be, well, pretty jarring. Even quests have a particular level
requirement, and early on the game seems to find a particularly vindictive pleasure
in giving you the starting keys for quests that are far above the player’s
ability. My quest log is teeming with all sorts of things – mostly monster
hunts – that I’d love to have a crack at, but I just know will destroy me over
and over again. I can have a go at them – indeed, there’s more than a couple of
quests that I have muddled my way through against the advice of the numbers,
but whereas triumphing against the odds in a game like Skyrim was a great
feeling, in W3, there is no such tangible sense of victory; even when I’m on
the cusp of victory over that group of level 23 dwarves that have been tearing
holes in my level 15 character, the only sensation I get is that the game is tutting at me for daring to be so bold!
Not pictured: the likelihood of this ending well.
The reason for this is intricately tied to the game’s combat
system, which is at best awkward, and at worst god damn it Geralt why are you
trying to swing your sword at the enemy on the other side of the field when
three other guys are right next to you stabbing a spear into your gut. The
seams of transition from general control to combat control are incredibly obstinate
and difficult to predict, mostly because it’s an automatic process that
triggers a change in stance when hostiles get close enough. What exactly constitutes
‘close enough’ is a great mystery for the ages, as I’ve on occasion found
myself alternating between screaming at Geralt to get into combat so I can
block the swarm of ghouls bearing down on me, and randomly pulling my sword
while in the wilderness and turning to face an enemy that isn’t even there.
Lock-on and target selection is tied to the right control stick, but the
limited movement of Geralt’s combat stance and his tendency to auto-home on
nearby enemies regardless makes actually using that system more trouble than it’s
worth, especially when I’ve been trained by years of videogames to use the
right stick to steer the camera to keep my enemies in sight; try to do that
here, and you end up transferring your lock on to the aforementioned enemy on
the other side of the field while his friend twats you in back of the head.
Ultimately, though, none of this really matters, because if
you’re fighting enemies that are appropriate to your level, then combat is
pretty easy. The game throws an overwhelming amount of combat options at you
very early on, but doesn’t seem to require you to use any of them consistently
in order to do well. I get by mostly by means of swinging swords around - dodging,
blocking, parrying – and liberal use of two of the five magic sign abilities.
That leaves the other three magic signs, the crossbow, bombs, and the game’s
vast variety of alchemical concoctions that I’m just not doing anything with. And
for all that the game seems to support a pick-and-choose system, given that the
number of character upgrade slots is so small and slow to unlock that you’ll
have to choose between maximising efficiency in two or three fields or being a
tiny bit better at everything for the vast majority of the game, the sheer abundance
of stuff begins to feel like so much wasted memory.
This sense of over-complication infuses the entire game: the
very first map is a prolonged tutorial, essentially introducing you to the game’s
various elements, and you can choose between powering through it and having
information spammed into your eyes, or taking your time, visiting the various
map markers, powering yourself up and forgetting the things that you’ve already
been told. I opted for the slow path, and still found myself spamming past
tutorial screens when they popped up because there’s only so much of that I can
handle before I begin to lose interest. But once you’re past that, you still
have to deal with the overwhelming deluge of stat comparison that comes with deciding
whether to swap your old piece of gear with slightly more armour out for this
new piece that has less armour but a potentially beneficial secondary effect,
as well as the overwhelming amount of raw materials that you need to collect in
order to craft weapons, armour and alchemical ingredients. I’m not necessarily
opposed to any of this; indeed, when I get into it, I really enjoy this rather
old-school style of raiding and dungeon-crawl-esque gear-getting. But in this
game, you have to fight with the incredibly clunky interface to get it done,
and that’s where it all falls apart. Here’s an example of how that goes down: on
the crafting screen, it’s possible to buy individual ingredients that you might
be missing in order to complete a piece without having to navigate to the
shopkeeper’s inventory. But when you go to a herbalist, you’ll discover that
for absolutely no discernible reason, you can’t do that for alchemy
ingredients. All you can do instead is mark an individual recipe, move over to
the shop screen, drag the cursor past the mountain of stuff in your inventory
and the vendor’s in order to find the highlighted ingredients, buy them, and
then go back to the alchemy screen to oh my god I’ve gone cross-eyed. You can
only mark one recipe at a time as well, so if you’ve got a lot of things that you
want to make, prepare to do lots of tabbing back and forth!
I actually need about 10% of those items on the left. I have no idea which 10%.
The same problem is evident on the quests and map screens.
You can’t mark multiple quests at once, and, even more damningly, every time
you complete a quest, the game automatically picks a new quest to track for
you, usually whichever main quest it thinks you should be doing. In my
experience, the quest it chose was almost never the one I wanted it to. At the
point I’m at right now, halfway through the game’s second act, it keeps
triggering the opening quest of the third act. Back in the first act, when I
had two concurrent main quests, it kept picking up the one that required me to
travel a significant distance, rather than the one that was happening in the
area where I was. The upshot of this was that I spent far too much time
dragging myself into the quest screen, reminding myself what I was wanting to
do, reselecting the relevant quests, tabbing to the map to orient myself, and
then setting off. The game doesn’t track statistics like ‘time spent in menus’,
but I reckon it’s got my ‘time spent playing’ stat looking over its shoulder
worriedly.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why the game is built like
this, I’d pin it on developer intent. This is a PC game, ported to consoles
without thought as to how that might change the experience. Or at least, that’s
certainly true of the previous Witcher games, which began their lives on the PC
and were ported to home consoles later in their life cycle. But this game was developed for concurrent
release, which means either the developers didn’t playtest the game on console
thoroughly enough, or they refused to compromise for the console market. Perhaps
Projekt Red feared the cries of ‘dumbing down’ that Skyrim suffered from (not
that it did suffer, since the only people angry about that were the PC gamers
who were free to mod it to their liking anyway, and that game’s interface is
one that as a primarily console player I find simple and effective, come at me
master race). Is it too much to ask that developers design their games to be as
effective as possible for every console? That’s the question at the heart of
this, and it’s a difficult one to answer. My heart says no, but my head is
under no such delusions, and offers a vehement yes. I had a great idea for a
re-imagining of this game’s menu system that draws on the potential of the PS4
controller’s touchpad, but that kind of thing couldn’t be implemented on the
Xbox One controller: why spend time on individual incarnations built to take advantage
of specific consoles when instead you can build a version that basically
functions on every system, and call it a day? As much as we might like them to
cater to our whims, and believe that as consumers we should be able to possess
the best version of a thing possible, developers have limited resources, and
honestly, they don’t have to listen to us. In the end, we can’t always get what
we want, but that doesn’t mean that we deserve what we get. And it’s a pretty
long fucking step from there to ‘game of the year’ isn’t it? It’s a good job
words mean nothing, else my poor broken thumbs might have something to say
about this.
With all of that in mind, then, I cannot conclude that The
Witcher III is not a flawed game. But, as you might recall, I did say earlier
that it is a great game, and I’m
gonna stand by that. All of the various flaws and fiddles that I’ve just listed
are definite problems, and aren’t diminished by the parts of the game that I do
really like. But when this game is good, it’s really good. I went into it with no knowledge from either of the
preceding games, aside of a basic backstory primer and whatever I’ve since
picked out from the game’s built-in encyclopaedia, and while that’s still
creating occasional moments of confusion when the characters talk about past
events or someone turns up who I’m clearly supposed to recognise but obviously
don’t, I accept that that’s my problem, not the game’s, and move past it. But
even with that hampering my comprehension, I still find myself utterly absorbed
in this world. The world-building, tone and general atmosphere all take great
pains to point out how much life would suck in such a setting, with misery,
mayhem and death standard procedure for most of the people born with the grave
misfortune of irrelevance to the overall plot. It’s the classic A Song of Ice and Fire realist fantasy, except
that it also embraces magic and the fantastic in a way that that series refuses
to, and that makes it much more attractive to someone like me who generally enjoys
ASOIAF but also often finds it to be
a miserable slog and wishes everyone would lighten the fuck up once in a while.
As a result, this world feels much more real,
and interesting, and the quest chains
and character arcs that play out under my control make this feel very much like
the sum of what George R.R. Martin’s world might have been if it had been
specifically designed to my more optimistic interests. And also if it didn’t
have such endlessly lavish depictions of food and feasts, for goodness’ sake
George go and make a sandwich already.
THIS IS AN ARTICLE THAT EXISTS
Another thing that intrigues me is the curious duality of the
main character, Geralt of Rivia. As a ‘witcher’, a highly-trained and mutated
monster hunter, he plays up to the in-universe meme that his people are
emotionless zombies who only care about the dollah, and thus tips his hat to
the classic videogame everyman/silent protagonist/player stand-in archetype. But
he’s not emotionless, as is on occasion
noted by the people he meets; he might sound like Solid Snake with a grudge
against personal pronouns, but he does have feelings that go deeper than his
default tone of exasperation at the ridiculous world and all the ridiculous
people with their ridiculous problems (a feeling I often share after the
twentieth time I arrive at a quest objective only for the game to move the
goalposts, which honestly happens far too often). His character informs his own
story, while keeping him an obstinately neutral interloper in the lives that he
touches, and it’s left to the player to make up the difference. When I write it
out like this, it really doesn’t seem like it should work, but somehow, it more
or less does, and it makes the story-based progression all the easier to swallow;
by the time I’d finished the main questline of the first act’s area, I was
emotionally satisfied by the arcs of the characters I had dealt with, and ready
to move on. Usually, in a ‘regular’ open world, that won’t happen until I’ve
scoured every single rock and cave in a region and grabbed absolutely
everything that I can from it, but in this game’s weird structure, I’m okay with
it.
I don’t know, in the end, if all of this works out from a
purely gamer’s perspective. In fact, I strongly suspect that in a different
setting the over-complications and unavoidable flaws of this game would have
led me to walk away from it by now. But in the end, fantasy is my jam, and the
world of The Witcher III is a really interesting, complicated and often subversive
fantasy that I find fascinating both from an entertainment and a literary
perspective, and that’s what’s really keeping me in the game. At this point, I’m
only halfway through, if that – this story-based progression makes it hard to
tell, and also I think the game might be hiding some maps from me, so it
remains to be seen whether this precarious balance will ultimately land in the
game’s favour. But I’m willing to see it through, so I guess we’ll find out.
I’ll let you know! Until now, dear traveller, it’s time to
step out of the Wayback Machine. Next time, I’ll be talking about the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who, specifically David Tennant’s first season in the
title role, since I’ve finally convinced the missus that it’s entertainment
that is worth her time, only to become unsure myself if it actually is.
1.The closest thing to such
an institution would be the World Video Game Hall of Fame in NY, who you might
have heard about recently; their 2017 inductees included Halo: Combat Evolved
and Pokemon Red and Green. Naturally, the internet exploded, although
personally I think there’s a strong case for recognising both of those.↩
