Summing Up The Witchers

but first, a few words from our sponsors. It's hard to find time for these videos, but if you'd like to support them, consider getting a free audiobook at audible.com. slash Bunnyhop sponsorship is something I would normally like to avoid if it weren't for this issue. in particular, the ending of audible makes a lot of sense to me because did you know that The Witcher was a series of books before they were video games? Audible.com has most of the books that came to English, including the first anthology. you should start with the last wish read by peter kenny's cockney antics.

Playing these games and reading the books at the same time has been a pretty good experience. It really reduces the level of immersion. You end up getting a lot of jokes and references. You wouldn't have it any other way so give it a try at audible.com slash bunny hop and with that being said let's get this show started. The entire Witcher video game series is a spoiler. Each game in which Geralt goes on extravagant adventures further contradicts his canonical and very real death written at the end of the last book, which is why the most recent Witcher book published in 2013 is actually a prequel to the previous book from 1999.

The author is not going to bring Geralt back to life. He thinks it's nonsense. The entire timeline of the game is silly and I noticed that when some viewers heard me talk about Gerelds dying in the video game, they considered it a spoiler, but it's literally the first few minutes of the first game, it's not something to He's very bitter, so imagine the irony. I felt it when I got through the Witcher 3 prologue and discovered that Ciri is apparently the daughter of Emperor Amir, who was the urchin all along. In reality, she didn't die in a storm at sea and Ciri can apparently travel through time and space.

She's the most powerful being in the world or something like that. She was getting to that part, but why did I bother to taste elf blood? It is the first Witcher book in The Witcher saga, which sets it apart from the first two anthologies which could actually be one. It is more satisfying to read them on their own because this time the books are just one part of a long series rather than many parts. small, so it moves much slower and has fewer events and that is also partly due to a change of protagonists. Geralt is more of a supporting character this time around, but the vast majority of the word count here is dedicated to Ciri rather than his adopted and supposedly orphaned daughter who spends a good half of the book training to be a witcher, he cared. morhen, which means that the first few minutes of The Witcher 3 we are gloriously indulgent, deliciously splashed and plump fanservice imagine the surprise of reading this exact same scenario in the pages of a book minutes before suddenly seeing it come to life fully interactive and cutting-edge, but just some of the details are wrong Yennefer wasn't there and Tris's book turns out it was all a dream and Geralt even notices the discrepancy, it's like he's reading my damn mind.

It's a pretty strange situation when writers, characters, and players are faced with the same thing. The problem and that problem is how to introduce you to two incredibly important characters from a long-running series that hasn't seen them at all at this point. You know that Fur is Gereld's main love interest throughout the saga. She appears in book 1 and the book series soon becomes more of a protagonist than Geralt himself and she appears in book 2, but then comes a series of games where Garrett loses his memory because that's easier for writing games and It turns out that Tris is the first woman he wakes up with and Ciri is nowhere to be found, so with her reappearance in the third game, someone has to do a lot of explaining that could start fights and make people choose sides because After reading these books, Tris ends up leaving the cynical Rijn ISM. she seems like one of the creepiest and most manipulative characters to ever steal Geralt's history with Yuna Furoshiki. hers has his hot, sterile and immune sorcerer's body all to herself.

Someone has been taking advantage of me. I haven't even hinted that we have to hurry after all, how was she? She's supposed to know that she lost her memory, but now she's supposed to get it back. Remember to try to go hunting at that zoo. Go to the trash. You spent half the next day bathing and scrubbing yourself. How can I forget? Which is not entirely good. about the most important people in your life for months at a time makes for some pretty awkward confrontations. I heard you and Tris made a great couple and then I lost my memory.

That's really your excuse which side and which sorceress you choose, if any. It can't at all depend on how much you've read, in other words how much memory of Gerald's video game you've virtualized compared to the memories of his books with branching paths available for both options, that's just one of a billion writing tricks. clever at this thing that really elevates this game to the next level. I was a little worried here. The Witcher series has always come dangerously close to replacing smart writing and interesting characters with some kind of thoughtless, edgy M-rated badass, the kind that its own marketing portrays games as ladders. oh no, turns out we're cool, the game is said to even make a joke about it.

Vesemir told me about that work you did for those Xin Velen Nilfgaardians. What are you doing killing monsters? Well, one just came out that way. It's really important. That this game chooses to poke fun at itself and make the best of all of its depraved situations, a glimmer of hope for optimism is really the line between writing that feels contrived versus mature writing, you're not really pulling any punches when a story with For More misery that he manages to see, see the bright side of everything after a few hours of monotonous fantasy babbling, the narrative can gladly change the sad mask for a smiling one, there is no way that an audience that is gasping and laughing at the same time feel relieved. boring just think about Gwent and how inconsistent it is, it's one of the funniest minigames ever and it's also a complete anomaly to the story and setting, apparently these miserable mud farming peasants have enough time and money on their hands to enjoy.

A collectible card game, apparently this casino deals exclusively with a strategy game and by grinding these cards, only characters relevant to the player's adventures are presented in a game that goes to great lengths to hide the player's omnipotence. Quint is a gorgeous game and it's also a joke, ciri is a 15 strength hero card and no one knows who is what ciri is. The whole thing is one of the best minigames of all time and one of the least played casually fourth wall breaks. It's fucking great. The third game returns us to the first game setting of Tameria, home to the world's flimsiest trees, and that setting choice is just one of The Witcher 1's many spiritual throwbacks, including the more light-hearted tone that makes jokes, He takes breaks and doesn't take himself too seriously while trying.

Create serious content while increasing the scale and spectacle of almost everything for a satisfying leap into producing a sequel. In the first game, you had to compose a poem with a bard to exercise a couple of angry ghosts. In the third game, I have to compose a play with the bard to encode a secret message for a double hidden somewhere in the crowd, which I feel a lot of people might not notice and what the second game forgot and what separates to The Witcher from many others. Deen Forgotten Realms Kitsch is that The Witcher is actually closer to Shrek than Game of Thrones; is a series of attacks on the kind of European fables, legends and folklore more easily found in Disney films than Tolkien, the bread and butter of his quests. are grim derivatives of Grimm's already grim fairy tales, so in this game many little stories give cynical twists to Snow White in the Seven Dwarfs Cinderella Hansel and Gretel Bluebeard Fun fact a quest, but our mouse quest is based on An old German tale about a ruthlessly evil ruler who flees a peasant revolt before being locked in a tower where mice eat him alive, the music is specially designed to evoke that romantic, fantastical version of pagan Europe with a return to catchy Celtic melodies and a bolder step.

In strident female vocals courtesy of a collaboration with folk band Percival, who are actually named after a character from The Witcher books, this exciting and intense battle music is called Steel for Humans, but is actually a remixed version from a song by Percival that they call Lazar. eh, and that's a traditional Bulgarian wedding song about wishing a young couple good help, so its use in the game was surely exaggerated. These light flavors of Eastern European culture may seem exotic, but conventional Western European fairy tales are found in most of the content. They are very, very familiar, the interpretations of these stories are raw and explicit, but they are also empathetic.

Hansel and Gretel's candy trail leads to an orphanage. Kirra Metz's romantic subplot uses Cinderella as a date night theme. The bloody baron whose analogue is the rich and murderous Bluebeard. He manages to be an incredibly likable and deplorable character at the same time because he knows what he's done and is genuinely sorry for it, even though almost everyone in this universe has their dark secrets, no one in The Witcher will easily believe him to be the bad. He notes how many times after cutting to Van de Kamp you'll find letters they left mentioning their families or their future plans.

He feels a little forced at times, but it's an approach to world-building and character development that's sadly sympathetic and dare I say. This kind of realistic rationalization, denial, and victim blaming are the motivations for the closest thing this series has to two villains. Brave heroism usually causes more problems than it solves, and sometimes the best policy is to simply not engage in the fleeting glances we receive from the Crone. crookback bog whose visual and audio designs hinted at an absolutely inhuman level of cruelty are still riddled with moral ambiguity that includes an endless stream of little hidden butterfly effect options that don't seem very relevant at the time but slowly become a ball of unexpectedly massive snow but logical changes in the story, maybe you do something wrong and you have to rationalize it for yourself, no matter what happens, you will have to live with it because this warlock actually deletes your old autosaves, there is no going back, but all that talk about Hidden Decisions and moral ambiguity is nothing new for the series.

He's been doing all of that fantastically since day one, but it's always been a series of polished or technically unreliable games that had to be loved by his better half despite the worse half of him. What's new when this third game is a big step forward in Polish? Its scope was expanded along with its gameplay and it was also changed to a slightly lighter tone now with upbeat and catchy music tracks and graphics that paint a brighter, cleaner and more colorful picture. Thanks to the occasionally cheerful atmosphere, I ended up feeling many of the same emotions I had in the first 3D Zelda games, which may be a bit of a stretch, but hear me out, they're both 3D third-person action adventures that can be played back.

To the classic, wholesome themes of fairy tales and heroes' journeys, you have an ever-growing inventory of devices that solve environmental puzzles. You talk to intelligent rock monsters. You race horses. You sail in an open sea full of underwater treasures and little mini islands of adventure. locking onto the bad guys and pressing the attack button thankfully gets more complicated than that on the second hardest difficulty. I was playing combat, it was a real pleasure and probably the most exciting factor I enjoyed about this game, combat has always been the weak point of the series, but after three games of experimenting with different styles, they developed it to the point where It's one of my favorite combat systems for a sprawling Western RPG.

The first game had a weird rhythmic Baldur's Gate point-and-click hybrid thing and the second game felt like a poor man's Demon Souls broken by shoddy collision detection and unbalanced backstabbing rules. . The third game mostly repeats the second game, but fixes almost all of the problems by simply giving you the ability to walk to your side this time. The lock button actually locks your camera to a target and you can strafe it. In fact, they really want them to machine gun. Strafing is mandatory even if you are not pinned. You can barely strafe. You have to take a stand. a penalty forbreak it the backstab bonus from the second games is still there but you always face your opponents by default, it seems like they really didn't want players to leave themselves exposed to those backstabs and since the main defense de Gereld en Still, in evasion, this time they went all out with two different dodge buttons to quickly maneuver at two different distances with two different speeds with two cooldowns, effectively doubling the player's strategic evasion options and it looks like to mitigate the greatest number of options the player has.

Slowing down all of Geralt's strafing is a blessing, but his movement speed when doing so is a snail's pace, you move faster by dodging where you want to go instead of walking there, which makes getting your own stabs in the face. back requires work and further explore the witcher. danceable combat styles described in the books and also includes a diverse bag of tricks inspired by some of the most beloved combat systems, from Dark Souls to the Batman Arkham series and Japanese character action games, which is a point with which I sure wanted to continue. As soon as I watched the DMC series, the extremely slow traps of the second game were replaced by a small crossbow that works surprisingly like the weapons and bloodborne is more for interrupting enemies that bother them and luring them until they pass out instead of damage them.

The AI ​​of the common monsters and their large number of dodge animations make them dodge as their most basic predictable move, which brings back memories of ninja gaiden where the common. Enemies prefer to spin and dance around you rather than attack blindly. Your most useful button is not the attack button, but combinations of the Dodge and then attack buttons, dodging the path of a hit and then following up with your own. is really the only reliable way to guarantee a safe hit, combine that with the active parry mechanic that rewards you for feeling Arkham counters being telegraphed and you have a system that ramps up the tension by rewarding you for constantly letting your guard down in between. . of danger, it's intense, and it also feels like Gerelds' default moveset now gives you real options to get through fights with skill and applied learning rather than stat sheets or feats, as evidenced by a quick new playthrough that made me dance intact and fights they gave me It was a really difficult time for me, the first run is not perfect, it is not even really excellent, but the fact that it is so many leagues ahead of any competition in Bethesda I managed to get out and at the same time managing a game with as much scope and complexity as theirs is something that I think is amazing combat in an RPG, it's usually pretty awkward unless you're Darksouls, but finally something else comes close: it takes a lot of selective elements from others. games and applies them to his own goal, which is to translate form.

In the books it is described that a Witcher fights in a game, that is why his simple quick attack button not only makes Geralt cut his sword, but it spins in a 360 degree spin that carries his momentum to cut his sword, slower combat appropriate for a game about story-appropriate RPGs, which was what made the first game unique: it was a completely solid RPG system that consisted of playing only one role that the C RPG class of work He took it off the books and was given a game that punishes the player for not participating. through the same rituals this character would do, brew a meditation potion, prepare a blade, oil, investigate, and investigate, generates a verbal list of play actions covering almost everything this character would do, simplified in a third game in the most complex system and at the same time managing it with a budget of buttons. press the number of potions increased exponentially, there is a whole new genre of them and three levels of upgrades for each one and once again they require alcohol as a base, but they also refill automatically after each rest, which you will have to do since they are Capped at two to four bottles per rest, they only last a few seconds, but can be consumed immediately in the middle of a battle, solving the second game's issue where potion buffs would expire before you could actually use them.

The list of blade oils. is again much bigger and more complicated, but they can be applied an unlimited number of times, but since there are more of them, they apply to a smaller, more specific subgroup of monsters, meaning you have to pay attention to them and change them more. The bestiary is often easier to read than ever and is filled by either directly fighting monsters or following a contract quest for them, decreasing the steps required to prepare for battles while also increasing the amount of knowledge. preparatory work that is obtained from them, the investigation and the detective work. which was previously written into the dialogue system is now a complete mechanic in itself.

The Witcher's senses have players follow obvious navigation paths that require just a little mental work to unearth, but they're mainly there to solve the classic open-world RPG. problem of stopping thinking about blindly following the objective markers on the map, it's not totally perfect, although Gwent and horse racing stick out like a sore thumb, they don't fit the character in the books or the games either, at least Gwen is very fun. horse racing is not so lucky. My biggest problem with the game has to do with the way it rewards players who raid and loot, because anything other than one of the main quests just doesn't work, pretend it does, but if you're aiming. spend some time immersing yourself in the landscape and people outside of The Witcher Gear's main quests or treasure hunts, the length and detail of the side quests are a real spectacle, even the most disposable monster hunts have whole minutes of scenes.

Importantly, some of the biggest characters from previous games appear in the water, throw out the optional content on this one, but a few hundred gold and about twenty XP rewards won't get you very far if you want to level up and develop your skills efficiently, you're better off ignoring all that great content, it creates a problem where you can play for hours clearing a huge list of side quests but you don't really feel like you're doing anything once you finish them all, which reminds me . My other big complaint here is something made worse by the constant patches and content additions they've been giving this game since its release, they added a couple of higher level quests in the game to earlier areas and since you can't get a view prior to a recommended mission. level until you've accepted it, you'll find a bunch of worried villagers who will gladly sit and wait for months until you level up and do that thing they wanted you to do forever;

You have no way of knowing whether or not a mission is for now or later until it's already on your to-do list. Likewise, if you want good gear, you're better off ignoring the vast majority of it and sticking only to The Witcher Gear treasure hunts that the game sets up very early. Additionally, The Witcher gear will be the best items available based on your level requirement increments, meaning that if you decide to take the time and care and max out your stats in 2 minutes using other armor, you'll soon be leveling up, you're just wasting your time, especially since these crafting menus needed to make them are very time consuming, why can't I hide these old diagrams so I don't have to scroll through them every time I want to see my armor menu?

Something is definitely wrong when upgrading two armor sets had me jumping in and out of these menus for a full 30 minutes, even after they added a feature that saves time by pinning crafting formulas to other menus and talking about UI elements slow and time consuming with big chunky text for console style, watch this, any map looks awfully familiar, those icons are straight out of Far Cry, the whole way exploration is handled feels awfully Ubisoft, with you running around from question mark to question mark to methodically clearing a list of sandbox checkboxes, the sheer density and constant need for map markers to be everywhere feels like a bit of a stretch as enough of an abstraction. to ruin the illusion of this world they had me looking at the minimap more than the rest of the screen and as the game progressed at some point I decided to turn it off and ended up having a lot more fun once I did.

There are enough directional hints elsewhere on the screen to make this dialogue. It has enough instructions to help you find things without a map. Important NPCs will still appear. They have clear labels floating above their heads. The Witcher's senses guide you where you need to go and the on-screen objective reminder is enough to keep you focused, you'll get lost and once you do, the big map is just a quick button press away. I totally recommend giving this a try if you're into consoles. Here's some advice. Press and hold. Start for a moment to instantly get in and out of that big map.

The thrill of plotting routes based on geographic landmarks, scanning the horizon for those landmarks, and eventually completing them. a path to the intended destination is a great feeling, it's much more rewarding and immersive to use your head instead of the HUD and with a more minimal HUD setup this game went from being a great sandbox game to what may be one of my Favorite role-playing games. experiences never lived and with that evaluation we have a series of three games that has two of the best role-playing games of all time. The Witcher is a trilogy that took its time between installments where each one feels fundamentally different from the last and represents a scale of quality.

That was constantly slipping upwards, perhaps the most telling factor is the phases in which we have gone from these horrible Blender dal Potato people to truly cutting edge technology and with that improvement also came the performances, the voice acting and the Writing improves with each game. More than technology, does it fulfill my dream? You said the days of goofy voice acting and alien character models are gone and so are the easy villains, even the skeleton, all the black Knights of the Wild Hunt turn out to have their own justifiable ambitions, it's a far cry from the cartoonish levels of the coward Ness seen by the Professor and like our Javid in the first Witcher game, Witcher 2's cast, motives and plot goals were murky and so was the morality of its characters, this is something that was rightly praised. , but after playing all three games in a row, it ended up feeling like the one with the least balance in the trilogy, the one with the most unstable ideas and the most confusing mechanics.

You're juggling the heavy choices and consequences of an old-school C RPG by far. from barely usable vanity features like QTE bosses and dialogue skills that the player has no way to develop, the third game manages to rectify many of those negative ratings while also running the risk of going open world and that's a move that It usually opens up so much. There are a lot of holes that the developers can't fill fast enough even though The Witcher 3 is much more polished this time around, they still missed a couple of points, but they hit a good number of others, giving the entire world and his character is a The most overwhelming amount of attention that a game of this type has yet to be seen.

What's a real joy about playing all three games in a row is how the layouts of some returning areas stayed exactly the same from the first game to the third. The entire trilogy feels like a cohesive, cohesive experience despite how different each game is, but I'm so grateful that this all ended on such a high note.