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articles about things that are no longer current.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.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment