Posted August 21, 2015
Spoilers - go away if you haven't finished the game.
Its hard for me to be overly critical of The Witcher 3, being a big fan of the first two games and even basing the timing of a GPU upgrade on the release of The Witcher 3 I had high expectations of the game and it delivered... for the most part. Just to balance it a little here is a link to recently published Eurogamer article about the release of the game:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-08-17-inside-the-witcher-3-launch
One aspect that did disappoint can be somewhat summed up in the events around Radovid. In the first game Radovid seemed to be somewhat balanced but gradually became the witcher equivalent of Joffrey and I was chomping at the bit for chance to bring him down. I wasn't sure while playing if this was even going to be possible given his importance to what was going on in the political landscape and what his assassination would mean to the overall events. When possibility of his assassination first arises in the story it seems fraught with difficulties and was going to be a long game endeavor, but when the time finally arrives it feel like barely an afterthought. One of the most guarded and cautious individuals in the game world got suckered in too easily to which you have to wonder just how hard were these other guys actually trying to assassinate because it wasn't that hard in the end.
The assassination of Radovid should also have had more impact. This guy had nurtured and protected a great deal of fanatical groups that were tearing their way through the populace from magicians to non-humans to any other dissident, but the death of Radovid didn't seem to deliver any obvious repercussions, very little by way of power struggles other than those around the conspirators, very little in the way of reprisals from the fanatics or chaos from individuals that would surely start working their own agendas once the head was cut off, in fact I still recall hearing dialogue in the streets pronouncing "long live Radovid."
Other than I would have also preferred to have seen a little bit more of the Racism and subjugation of the non-human races, there seemed to be more of a divide in the first two games, although definitely there this time around it didn't appear overtly present to the same degree.
These are problems that effect virtually all open world games, it is a lot of work to completely change the dynamic after an event, one that springs to mind that did do it well was dragon's dogma after slaying the dragon.
Its hard for me to be overly critical of The Witcher 3, being a big fan of the first two games and even basing the timing of a GPU upgrade on the release of The Witcher 3 I had high expectations of the game and it delivered... for the most part. Just to balance it a little here is a link to recently published Eurogamer article about the release of the game:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-08-17-inside-the-witcher-3-launch
One aspect that did disappoint can be somewhat summed up in the events around Radovid. In the first game Radovid seemed to be somewhat balanced but gradually became the witcher equivalent of Joffrey and I was chomping at the bit for chance to bring him down. I wasn't sure while playing if this was even going to be possible given his importance to what was going on in the political landscape and what his assassination would mean to the overall events. When possibility of his assassination first arises in the story it seems fraught with difficulties and was going to be a long game endeavor, but when the time finally arrives it feel like barely an afterthought. One of the most guarded and cautious individuals in the game world got suckered in too easily to which you have to wonder just how hard were these other guys actually trying to assassinate because it wasn't that hard in the end.
The assassination of Radovid should also have had more impact. This guy had nurtured and protected a great deal of fanatical groups that were tearing their way through the populace from magicians to non-humans to any other dissident, but the death of Radovid didn't seem to deliver any obvious repercussions, very little by way of power struggles other than those around the conspirators, very little in the way of reprisals from the fanatics or chaos from individuals that would surely start working their own agendas once the head was cut off, in fact I still recall hearing dialogue in the streets pronouncing "long live Radovid."
Other than I would have also preferred to have seen a little bit more of the Racism and subjugation of the non-human races, there seemed to be more of a divide in the first two games, although definitely there this time around it didn't appear overtly present to the same degree.
These are problems that effect virtually all open world games, it is a lot of work to completely change the dynamic after an event, one that springs to mind that did do it well was dragon's dogma after slaying the dragon.
