Why Geralt of Rivia Hates Me
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- Опубліковано 16 тра 2024
- Open worlds like The Witcher 3's and Sable's are contentious, complicated and very interesting to talk about, so I went ahead and blundered right into the topic like a ridiculous oaf.
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Music used:
A Story You Won't Believe - Marcin Przybyłowicz
Back on the Path - Marcin Przybyłowicz
Castle in the Mist - Michiru Ōshima
Glider - Japanese Breakfast
Better the Mask - Japanese Breakfast
Burn Oak Station (Day) - Japanese Breakfast
Sunrise of Flutes - Jeremy Soule - Ігри
Hi folks. Just want to issue a public apology. My partner has pointed out that I say “Sable LEAVES” instead of “Sable lives” about 15 minutes in. Upon checking, she is correct. Please rest assured that I have reached an appropriate level of self disgust and will never make such an egregious error ever again. You all deserve better
Lovely video. That divergence of motivations between the character (when they have an urgent quest) and the player is so complicated to deal with for me. The same happened to me in TW3 but also Fallout 3-4. I really appreciate games with ludonarrative coherence.
Glad you enjoyed it! It’s really interesting that some games, like Sable, manage to give you a pre-existing character to play as without having their motivations pry the game away from you. Fallout 4 especially is actually a great example! I’ve heard others make the same point about Mass Effect too!
"The witcher 3's world is a container for stories, but in Sable the world is the story" This is why I can't get into the Witcher or Skyrim I think and you said it perfectly!
I’m happy it’s resonated with you! One day I’ll make a Skyrim take down video, no beloved classic is safe
New tongue twister discovered within 30 seconds of a video. 10/10
Was gonna cut that for professionalism but I needed everyone to know the lengths I go to. The emotional depths I must plumb
@@BacklogReviewer I like it! Any opportunity for personality to shine through is good 👍
Amazing video! Keep up the good work 😉!
Thanks mate that’s extremely cool of you to say!
The HUD in games like Assassin's Creed partially makes sense, because AC games are canonically set within Animus which as I understand it simulates memories within the virtual environment. Or maybe I'm wrong it's stylistic choices. The problem with it is that dressing down the augmented reality is not given the player front and center to decide how much HUD they need and game structured around not needing to give these Quality of Life features, that nobody asked for and that optimize the fun out of the game. In Assassin's Creed it would make sense that you'd need obvious HUD less and less as you progress and the things would feel less like a game and more like living someone's life: knowing what they know and going where you want to go, while empowering you as a player to remove the convenience in order to get more comfortable with the world. For that you need to design a game without the need of map matkers, though.
The Cyberpunk is a bit different situation and it has (like many transhumanism adjacent video games). It makes sense that your character has a video phone calls in their eye sight. It makes sense, that you can have a minimap GPS at your side view. All these technologies make sense for AR machine interface. But I think the mistake is conform to the video game UI standards. Somebody during the first round of critiques of Cyberpunk 2077 said, that cyberpunk as a genre always struggles between making the things look cool and making the meaningful commentary. Few indie examples manage to avoid it and build a compelling world without falling aesthetic trap. But big video game essayists rarely talk about modern indie games.
In any case, I think more cyberpunk video game developers should hire people with app development experience. People who actually try to solve problems that people have. Because, I believe you can comvey through the medium of video games, the complex feelings of awesome, "I have computer I can control with my brain at moments notice", the sheer mundanity of something utterly ridiculous (don't tell me, that the experience of flight or teleportation in a well realized game world didn't change your perception of real world capabilities), the incredible handiness of technology and at the same time it's limits and imperfection.
I think the problem where many game designers of Cyberpunk/transhumanist games are failing is that they replace the in-fiction HUD and technology with the out-of-fiction video game UI. Thus, the limitations of in-universe fictional technology are completely replaced by the limitations of the video game UI budget and players are aware of that. This artificiality detracts from the players' ability to interact with the character's perception. It's a missed opportunity to let player get into headspace of a character. I think in NiEr automata they did the connection between video game interface, difficulty slider and robot character settings _really_ well.
If the HUD in Cyberpunk 77 served better the role to ground you in its unreal reality, making you think and act like person with that kind of augmentation, if it had shown you bunch of interesting uncomfortable consequences of having this technology (without necessarily punishing you as a player), if it had a the reasonable limitations this technologies would have it could've given much interesting worthwhile experience with the hud.
I could share more ideas swirling in my head, but I think that general lack of dating to think anout technology and its portrayal and subsequent laziness leads to HUD experiences being detrimental. It's not the fault of HUD, but how it isn't used.
I hated how the urgency of the main quest made me anxious and uncomfortable about the side quest. As a result I missed out on most of the callbacks and references to earlier quests in the game.
Despite loving the game. To tell yhe truth, the most pleasant the experience became once I got to Tussaint. Beauty, relative serenity and lack of urgency made for a much more enjoyable knight errant experience.
At some point, after I've done most of the content, I learned that there's button to turn off the HUD, so for a couple of months I just walked around the Toussait and enjoyed it.
i love witcher but i do find that a lot of rpgs seem to fall into the trap of relying on being open world when they want to increase the scope of the game. especially witcher being so character focused, it rubs against the open world aspect when they should be supporting each other. like with sable, both the world and sable herself are the characters. they are both defined by their interactions with each other, it’s beautiful. great video, lots of food for thought!
Right? It feels like open worlds are the default format for RPGs, and it needn’t be that way! So glad you got something from it!
Asterix is some sort of pun or something along those lines. It is with x at the end and pronounced like "ks".
Asterisk is the typographic symbol (*) has "sk" at the end spells like you read it.
Obelix is also a reference to obelisk typographic symbol (†).
Great video ! Leaving a comment to boost the algorithm !
That is greatly appreciated, thanks alot!
Please keep making these !!
Ugh thanks for reminding me how obsessed with the sable soundtrack I was
I literally couldn’t stop if I tried lmao
I gotta say tho that you didn't really mention any DLC from witcher 3, which if you play without a hud, especially the heart of stone which is the most cinematic storyline in the game i think, give you better immersion through their questline with the world than the base game.
I think the DLC's really benefit from having less world ending stakes than the main campaign. Totally agree that they're much better in that regard, but I never got round to replaying them before making this vid - might do another on on them in future!
Nice video man, i am yet to play and of the witcher games, i hope to remedy that this year! 😂😂
Thanks for watching! Don’t be afraid to start with the third one, the original is pretty dated!
@@BacklogReviewer yeah I think I will have to. I moved to Poland so it feels rude not to play their most famous game 😂😂
Real talk tho i love W3 but i haven't played it with minimal HUD same with Cyberpunk. My biggest issue with W3 tho is that the main quest seems to default to "person has info about daughter but do this for them first" and as a result i spent WAYYYY more time on side content and repeatedly burnt myself out on the game to the point it took me 4 years off and on to finish it lolololol despite that i still wanna play the DLCs but i have no idea when. Maybe turning the HUD off will make me less prone to detours
I’ve definitely felt that about TW3’s campaign at times, but I find I generally get invested enough in the characters to carry me past that - that’s purely me though and I’ve definitely heard others cite that as an issue too. I think the DLCs are better in that regard because the stakes aren’t as world ending, it can afford to be a little weirder and more whimsical - you’ll have a good time with it! Hearts of Stone is also mercifully shorter, so it’s not as much of a time sink
Tbh i never thought about disabling hud just to enjoy the world. Oh boy, i guess it's time to download witcher 3. And as a Pole it's extra special game for me :3
The Witcher 3 is also nine years old today - you have every excuse to dump 200 hours into it, I grant you permission
@@BacklogReviewer i already did over 200h. literally did every quests and markers
LOGGED ON
WELCOME BACK TO THE LOG ZONE LITTLE GUY
Where did you get candle light,i only have tourches.
I actually couldn't tell you lmao, it just appeared in my inventory at some point
I've finally gotten into playing The Witcher 3 this past month. Unfortunatelly it's one more game that leaves me with this weird feeling. It's not a huge thing, and by no means it makes this a bad game.
But TW3 sometimes feel split into two different games: the witcher simulator, and Geralt's story. Both are really, really great, but sometimes they don't really fit together.
Games that actually tie both open world and narrative together are few and far between. Most end up feeling like you have this huge urgent and important task you need to accomplish, but you keep neglecting it in favor of chatting with trolls and fighting an underground crime network because that's fun or because you want to complete all content. That doesn't make a game bad for me, but really makes me appreciate more when a game doesn't have this dissonance.
One example that I really feel is underappreciated in Genshin Impact. While from the get-go you are given a sort of urgent task, find your missing twin sibling, the game makes it clear that you won't find them that easily. Instead of looking directly, you'll find them when you "discover the truth about this world". This allows the character to keep their end goal, but still freely explore the world looking for small fragments of this truth (which you do find). Not only that, but both twins are immortal beings (or at least can live for millennia), so even though they long to be reunited, time is of no concern to them in the grand scheme of things. This way, exploring the world becomes part of the main quest, no a distraction from it.
I’ve never tried Genshin, but you’ve got me curious! Will add it to my truly ridiculous backlog of to-play games. Thanks for the rec!
@@BacklogReviewer if you don't care about the gacha mechanics and play It casually as one should instead of focusing on the endgame, Genshin is a pretty great daily game. I could hardly believe It was a free-to-play game when I got into it. There story gets pretty great in later chapters, especially if you get into consuming the lore and community theories.
Through it's not everyone's Cup of tea, I guess. Lots of people think gacha is bad, others complain about the lack of endgame, others don't like how you have to read item descriptions to fully enjoy the story, others think there's too much text or there's too little challenge... But I play it for what it is, a casual daily activity. So.. try It até your own risk, and hope you enjoy it if it fits your taste!
genshin have beautiful open world but empty with very few npc for a huge world seems wasted
@@ChonkyBoi_yt I'm not sure we're playing the same game. If you're talking about settlements, I can't disagree more, they're always full of people. While on the road, I'm not sure what you expected... People don't often spend their day in the middle of the wilderness...
About that tension between you the player wanting to explore and Geralt wanting to find Ciri ...
Did you read the books? Sapkowski tells a big part of the story through dialogue and unreliable narrators. And then a lot is let to the reader interpretation. Destiny is a topic trough all the books.
You could make the argument Geralt is a tool of destiny. What need to happen with the chosen one (Ciri) will happen and Geralt is instrumental to this, even when it isn't his intent. At times is a little like the saying: "A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." Other times not even that. His decision about unrelated stuff set in motion a chain of events that end making a huge difference . E.g. Geralt going out of his room to take a piss that morning in Thanend Isle.
Let me repeat myself. This is only one possible interpretation of the events in the books. I'm not saying this is the truth written in stone.
But in the spirit of that interpretation, you could role-play a Geralt who learned regarding to Ciri, things will happen when and where must happen. He must deal with what fate puts on his path, running, trying to fight against, it will only lead to misfortune and pain.
So that’s a really interesting interpretation.
I’ve just finished the first book and I’m waiting for the second one from my local library, so my feelings might change, but here’s my thoughts on what you’ve said, as it stands.
While Geralt in the books is (from what I understand) very much borne along by the tides of destiny, CDPR made the (imo correct) adaptational decision to explicitly put him more in the drivers seat in TW3. They also characterised his relationship with Ciri as explicitly a father-daughter one. RPG main campaigns have a non-completion problem, so I think CDPR wanted to motivate the player by bolstering that relationship between Geralt and Ciri.
So while role playing as a Geralt who’s more at ease with his role as a sort pawn of fate, I don’t think that that rp is supported by the game - you’re role playing book Geralt in the video game. For all the agency you’re afforded in TW3, Geralt is still explicitly a character with a personality unto himself - you can make him more pragmatic or empathetic, but there’s fundamentals about how he acts that you can’t really role play away. So while I think playing Geralt that way would absolutely mitigate some of my issues with the game, it would also introduce its own issues by reducing player motivation to interact with the main plot, and would ultimately have to be mostly head canon, with the interpretation of the character in your head clashing against the boundaries of the character CDPR wrote.
I hope that makes sense!
@@BacklogReviewer It makes sense.
I just tried to offer you an option for further runs. Now I see my original comment may be read as a critic to the video and it isn't.
I do admit without reservation this disconnection between the character and the player motivations is an objective problem of TW3.
@@kefkaFollower not at all, and the option you offered is very intriguing! I’m honestly pretty curious to see how well it could work!
I never really understand this complain in witcher, If you really get yourself immersed in the Witcher3, you wouldn't really feel to rush yourself to find Ciri because there's no phone or wifi in their era you have to ask around first to gain details talk to people, live in their city in taverns etc. its not like Geralt can just track down Ciri with gps. And while staying on novigrad, Yennefer is also collecting information. Tho i agree Blood and Wine got better story, but the main game have many characters. If Witchet 3 isn't open world and rush ahead to Ciri, then it will be like those other typical boring linear games like tomb raider. Being open world benefits in the world building that the book witcher had to convey