Witcher 3 - Understands War

[Silver]

@warisboring.com Matthew Gault writes about the Witcher 3 through the lens of its war time setting.

Fallout and Call of Duty were fun. Metal Gear was fun and brilliant. But The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt was on another level. It was the best game I played in 2015 and one of the best games I've ever played in my entire life. Polish developer CD Projekt crafted an immersive world, told a compelling story and made every moment fun to experience.

But more than that, CD Projekt took a staple video game setting - war - and presented it in a way games rarely do. War is awful. It shatters lives, separates families and ravages the land. The Witcher 3 understands that.

[...]

Many video games are power fantasies, and most that involve warfare depict the glory of combat and put the player in the lead role. Not so in The Witcher 3. Geralt has his own motivations, and he does his best to avoid politics and the larger conflict between Nilfgaard and the Northern Kingdoms.

And CD Projekt never depicts war as glorious or fun. Soldiers describe combat as a lot of boredom and waiting punctuated by moments of frenzied madness. The Northern War of the The Witcher 3 is all about waiting, survival and boredom.

[...]

Dead bodies litter the ground of the Northern Kingdoms. Nilfgaardians and Northerners alike rot in the sun. People hang from trees, a sign posted in front of their swinging and bloated bodies lists their crimes - desertion, stealing provisions and rape. The North and the South hang criminals in equal measure. Refugees huddle outside of the few cities untouched by the war. Soldiers demand the proper paperwork and keep the rabble from flooding the last civilized outposts in the North.

Civilians cling to tradition and appease whichever army is currently occupying them. They know it could all change tomorrow. There are no heroes, just men and women desperate to survive. This sense of despair and struggle permeates The Witcher 3.

More information.

 

[luj1]

Awesome setting, a sort of gothic medieval fantasy with a Polish vibe to it.

Props to making it believable as the article said.

 

[hairyscotsman2]

My biggest hates of this game (in ascending order):
1) Over-priced on PC at release. Expecting people to pay the same price for a PC download as a physical console boxed copy?
2) The amount of other humans who were exactly that stupid.

 

[hairyscotsman2]

And before anyone gives it the old "I can spend my money however I want" routine. It's not a matter of that. I'm speaking about primarily Steam downloads. It's a fact that if you get less for your money, for paying the same amount, then you're going to look like a mug if you pay it to that source. It was a top seller on download at a price for which a physical copy gave more. I'm in no way unjustified in calling you a bunch of mugs. Steam saw you all coming a mile away. And how many big release games are going to get a price hike as a result?

 

[joxer]

Noone will give you whatever routine - this is not Codex.

I'll just say on your #1 - you want console prices? Buy the console garbage then and knock yourself out with thumbs on mushrooms.
Also IIRC TW3 sold more copies on GOG (because DRMfree) than on Steam.
And even more also, if you bought TW1 and/or TW2 before buying TW3, you got a discount depending on the platform you had 'em on.
The story doesn't stop there. GMG offered superhigh discount on game preorders, there was some fuss over it, but everyone got the game. On PC. Not on phonsoles.

 

[hairyscotsman2]

Noone will give you whatever routine - this is not Codex.

I'll just say on your #1 - you want console prices? Buy the console garbage then and knock yourself out with thumbs on mushrooms.
Also IIRC TW3 sold more copies on GOG (because DRMfree) than on Steam.
And even more also, if you bought TW1 and/or TW2 before buying TW3, you got a discount depending on the platform you had 'em on.
The story doesn't stop there. GMG offered superhigh discount on game preorders, there was some fuss over it, but everyone got the game. On PC. Not on phonsoles.

You know more sensible people than I do

 

[Toff]

I never saw it for sale at MSRP before it was released, at least on PC. It was always at a discount. It was probably at MSRP at release but that is to be expected. Its 50% off at Steam right now.

 

[JDR13]

My biggest hates of this game (in ascending order):
1) Over-priced on PC at release. Expecting people to pay the same price for a PC download as a physical console boxed copy?

Er… where have you been for the last 10 years? This has been common practice now for a long time.

And before anyone gives it the old "I can spend my money however I want" routine. It's not a matter of that. I'm speaking about primarily Steam downloads. It's a fact that if you get less for your money, for paying the same amount, then you're going to look like a mug if you pay it to that source. It was a top seller on download at a price for which a physical copy gave more. I'm in no way unjustified in calling you a bunch of mugs. Steam saw you all coming a mile away. And how many big release games are going to get a price hike as a result?

It's pretty simple really. A lot of people just don't care about owning a paper map and an art book (or whatever else the physical copy came with). They also want to be able to preload the game and start playing it immediately as soon as it's unlocked.

 

[suibhne]

This argument is economically naive. I'm not saying it shouldn't be right, but it simply isn't; just as there's a cost structure to manufacturing and distributing physical goods, there's an analogous (and disappointingly, counterintuitively steep) cost structure for digital delivery. And as for the rejoinder that CDPR controls pricing on GOG.com, well, that's only partly true and it has ramifications on relationships with other vendors. This issue isn't at all CDPR's fault and isn't specific to TW3.

As for the argument that physical goods provide more value for less money…well, much of the market obviously doesn't agree with you, and that doesn't make them idiots, as you claim. Personally, I strongly prefer digital delivery at this point in my life, and I only purchase a physical copy if it's overwhelmingly cheaper. I have multiple motivations, and I (quite predictably) don't believe they're idiotic. E.g., I don't want to deal with storing and organizing all of my physical game media; I don't want to track serial keys on a game-by-game basis; I don't want to patch my games on a game-by-game basis via each publisher's website (or a collection of multiple hubs); I like Steam's huge convenience of bypassing the Windows registry, collecting game files in a single predictable location (much more effectively than Windows file rules), enabling me to share games and even savegames across multiple machines, and allowing me to reinstall my entire games directory with a single action rather than swapping dozens of DVDs; and so on. The point is that, for many people, digital delivery actually provides somewhat or even significantly more value than purchasing physical goods.

As for the actual article, I agree strongly. I was struck by the game's portrayal of war as I explored Velen. But Skellige almost feels like a cop-out sometimes - it's fantastically beautiful, but hews much closer to traditional fantasy RPG settings and is further removed from real-world relevance. It's a nice counterpoint, but I would've loved to see CDPR work solely with a warzone.