The epic castle analysis of Kaer Morhen from the WITCHER

greetings I'm shad and it is time to have a very close look at K Moren from The Witcher 3 now of course the very first thing that has to be mentioned and addressed is the horrible state of disrepair that this Castle is in it is just a mess and I'm guessing from many a past battle and of course its current state would definitely negatively affect its defensive capabilities but it's easy enough to infer what this Castle would have looked like at its peak or or if it was repaired because it would be unrealistic if I was to rate how effective defensible or realistic this Castle is in the state as it appears in the game so I'm going to be reviewing it as if it was how it was supposed to look but having said that even though I'm going to pretend that certain you know parts of the castles and towers are repaired and back at 100% I'm not going to ignore any flaws that are actually in the castle or pretend that they aren't there like I am going to pretend that the damage on the castle isn't there there if there's a part on the castle that is actually done incorrectly it's a floor in design or if it is unrealistic I'm going to point it out so with that out of the way let us begin and I'll start with k moren's layout and I actually have a lot to say about it to make a broad statement it is beautiful okay like absolutely beautiful why well what we see here are three external bailees each one self-contained and locked off behind a gate this is beautiful castle and defensive design if the enemy ever breaks the outer gate they still have to deal with two more additional Gates which forces the enemy into a funneled set position to which you should be able to rain down death upon them this is something that I've repeated quite often in all my Castle reviews but we do run into a bit of a problem here and it is that the castle walls are not effectively designed to attack enemies on the inside what am I talking about here well it has no inwards facing battlements and the access to the walls are completely undefended now this is not an unhistorical thing you'll actually find many historical castles that had what I consider to be a bit of a floor in their design as to how much of a floor it is it is debatable because there are many castles okay that have such an impenetrable position that it is almost Unthinkable that an enemy would actually be able to breach one of the outer walls or indeed the outer Gat housee and so because of that I can understand the mentality of well what what's the point of having internal facing battlements and also blocked off and defended access to the walls and K Moren kind of follows that same philosophy the issue that kind of arises then if you are so confident that an enemy wouldn't be a to breach your outer wall why then have you subdivided your internal BAS by doing that it is kind of an acknowledgement saying well we do expect the outer Gate House or an outer wall to be breached therefore that's why we are subdividing it which means if they ever take one of the external bailees they still need to deal with breaking through another gate and if they have foresight enough to do that that they are actually actively planning and preparing for one of these areas to be breached why then have they not prepared the actual walls themselves to be able to defend themselves against attacks from the inside how it is currently set up in K Moren is if you take a Bailey you will be able to take some of the external walls of that Bailey with a bit of a fight the Defenders can still try and defend those walls but if an enemy breaches the outer gate housee and they're trying to defend the first Bailey they don't have any cover from crenellations and the staircases that lead up to those walls are not blocked off in any way they completely open and so the only advantage that the Defenders have on these walls is height the attackers can shoot at them pretty pretty much just as easily as the Defenders can shoot back down and push up that staircase as well now remember as I have said this is also done on historical castles there are many historical castles that have no internal facing battlements but there are historical castles that do why because it is a more effective defensive principle remember layers of Defense if you have an enemy that has breached one of these bailees you do not want them to be able to take the walls surrounding it in fact you want that Bailey to be as much a death trap as anything else because if you have the walls self-contained from the Bailey so access blocked off by either doors or walls with internal facing battlements well that Bailey will become an absolute kill zone for anyone any enemy that falls within it and so this isn't an unhistorical flaw in K Moren and indeed I find it difficult to call it a floor because it would only exist if the enemy is even able to breach one of the extra stal walls or out a gate house and K moren's position it's on a raised high up position which makes it very difficult for any enemy to assail the wall you wouldn't be able to bring a Siege Tower to it I do think the nearest flat terrain is close enough to be able to set up tribet or catapults to try and take out some of the walls but that is by no means a guarantee that you'll be able to demolish castle walls in fact I think that most people actually think that these things tribet and Cat pults are far more effective than they actually were if you could demolish any castle by just whipping out these Siege engines well then it would have been done far more often but I do give K Mor and points for having a very effective position but the next part about it is this back Cliff that is right behind it I just don't know how easy it would be for an enemy to climb that cliff and engineer some type of landslide or if the cast would be at risk to things like Avalanches or not so I'm just not 100% % confident in how secure it is with this big mountain behind it now let's have a look at the gate house and the gate house is in a bit of an interesting topic like it it does some things really right yet there's some missed opportunities here now let me just state that not every historical Gate House had two Port calluses a front one and a back one those that did were far more effective in my opinion because you want to make it as hard as possible for the enemy to be able to break through this entry point and the entry point of the Castle is essentially its most vulnerable place therefore it should be the most defended and protected and K Moren has this which is beautiful it has a draw bridge though I think the bridge part has been replaced with with a more permanent bridge but it is obviously made to be a to have a proper drawbridge and then it has its port colors and if you the enemy was ever to break through it they would be inside the Gat housee and have to deal with the second one and this is where we come to a very big problem okay say the enemy breaks through the front gate okay and now they're in the gate house and this is the perfect opportunity to destroy the enemy in the Gat house if you can actually shoot at them inside the gate house there's nothing for the Defenders to actually be able to shoot back at the en the attackers there's no arets for them to be fired at and there's no murder holes this renders the effectiveness of having two gates to this gate house completely void I mean once they're in the gate house this is the point where you should be able to destroy the attackers but you can't there's nothing here the attackers could just sit down for a cup of tea while the Defenders would be up on the top of the gate house and around it saying you know we really should have put some Arrow slits on there yeah yeah you're right I blame geralt he said he didn't like people perving on him when he take the bath well that's just his fault for being so attractive and so it's almost like that the game developers or whoever designed this castle made the gate house to have two entry points because that's what you know hisor many historical castles had two two entry points to a gate house without properly understanding the why this was done because if the enemy can actually breach us out of gate house and then not be attacked while they're inside the gate housee they effectively have a rally point for their assault they're fully protected of course the Defenders can try and shoot at them through the second port colors but it's easy enough to set up barriers or something to that will block arrow fire and such so yes unfortunately this was a big fail another thing that's OD about this gate house is the fact that I can't find the windless for these Port cuses which effectively means shouldn't be a to be raised this mistake was actually also made on skyhold in Dragon Age Inquisition but in the process of making that video I forgot to mention it but I'll mention it here what I will say is that it does look like there used to be an additional floor within this Gat housee and if there was a floor here that has since fallen through because of the disrepair that K Moren is in well the missing murder holes and wind lists could have been located on that floor the problem is there's no way to confirm this and also if there was a floor here there should be doors on that level providing iding access to it from the outside and looking up we can't see anything to indicate this okay so that was the gate house now don't worry there is still stacks of things to love about K Moren okay one of the things that ah I just you know loved so much okay is that the internal walls of this Castle have been painted have a look see how they've been painted this is a profoundly accurate thing and I don't think I've seen it in any other video game Castle you see the people who live castles were generally rich and when someone visited them in their Castle they wanted those people to know that they were Rich so they wanted their wealth to be seen and one of the things that they did is that they plastered everything often quite garishly with bright colors patterns designs paintings murals you name it it was there unfortunately there are very few examples of it I mean there are more modern examples like what you can see in nanstein but novin was built more recently yet it still gives a good idea of what the internal castles would have looked like probably not to this level but definitely paintings and murals and colors and stuff like that the idea that the medieval period was drab gray brown and dirty is an absolute load of bull even though London was a pretty dirty place it didn't mean people didn't like to bathe or to just happily walk around covered in crap of course not and if you are rich one of the signs of you being rich was being able to afford expensive dyes or artists to paint your dwelling and when it came to their hom such as castles it wouldn't be Stone often times they would actually plaster the inside and whitewash it and then paint it this is another reason why being an artist in this period could actually be quite the money-making job and I love that K Moren especially in their large kind of Great Hall section they have these big murals ah so so good awesome so out of anything K Moren should get massive points for this glorious bit of medieval authenticity I also love the attention to details here in this Castle such as the stonework around any of the archways window frames everywhere just beautifully done and the massive fireplace in the Great Hall is just awesome the external design of the keep is actually really well done and really practical you have a square back section with a barberin kind of sticking out in front with a large side tower that accommodates for some of the larger bedrooms in it another thing that K does perfectly is the size of the merlons head height that's exactly what they're supposed to be big tick the next part is both a hit and a miss and that is the maculations in some parts of the castle it actually has maculations but in other parts it doesn't and that I just I don't understand if they were mindful enough to actually do them accurately in some parts why on Earth didn't they do them accurately in all the parts and in fact in the places where they do do them accurately I really like their design the way that they've been executed they were even mindful enough to put a base block of stone that Bridges the gap between each Coral which is absolutely what needs to be done to make a proper maculation because this is Stone that is essentially hanging in the air so it needs support and if you don't have a base brick that spans that entire Gap the stone is just going to fall through and a collapse and they did that here yet they didn't actually have the open space the actual maculation all over the castle it just doesn't make sense did they get lazy and you might think well they just don't have the micul on the areas where they wouldn't be useful really really the purpose of a mulation is to solve the problem of angle if you're on a wall and you're protected by a Battlement there is only so much of an angle that you can shoot down at to the point where if an enemy runs right up to the wall and puts their back against it that can actually give them full cover from you above so what a maculation is supposed to do is to give the defender on the wall the ability to shoot directly down at anyone who gets so close to the wall and any external wall okay no matter what it is any enemy can try and run up these steep inclines to get right next to the wall and in many of those locations where the micul should be it's being filled in on K Moren and then there are two absolutely perfect locations on this castle for maculations and not only do they have you know provision for maculations and that have been filled in and they haven't taken opportunity for that not only is that not done there's not even provision for those meticulous it's just sheer flat wall right up to the battlements at top and that is on the second and third gate if you have a look at the second and third gate it's just sheer wall right up to the battlements above these areas here are the perfect locations to have maculations because it is these areas on the castle that if an enemy ever was to breach parts of the castle it is these areas where they would have to come to to try and get to the next section whereas on the external walls it's you know just in case it's a maybe but there's slim chances that an enemy would ever come to these parts on the walls but on Gates absolutely it is the gates that are you can Bey guaranteed that an enemy might try and attack therefore it is those locations where you want those matriculations but here they are not there at all at least on the third gate there are inside facing battlements which just confuses me again it means that the designers of this Castle were aware of some of these principles but just didn't employ them on the whole castle the next thing that is a quite a big fail in my opinion on K Moren is because some of these you know parts of the walls and towers are in disrepair we can actually see how thick they are exactly and they are not thick enough have a look they're only half a meter thick and that is nowhere near thick enough walls of this thickness will not stand up against catapults and trebuchet which probably explains why so many of them are in Ruins here is a layout of a real castle specifically canavan castle and have a look at how thick these Tower walls are in most cases they are as thick as the main walls themselves why because castles are supposed to be impenetrable okay they are not supposed to be easily demolished by rocks thrown at them and one of the most direct ways you can design a castle to be able to defend against that is by making those walls thick this is a very important quality of nearly every proper castle and the fact that these walls are so thin my goodness it almost disqualifies it from being a castle in my opinion because these walls would be so easily destroyed I'm not going to all right I will still call it a castle but seriously if this was real if K Moren was real well then in that case you could definitely demolish these towers at least with catapults and trebuchets and those catapults and tribet might actually be as effective as many people suppose they they are when in reality against real castles no demolishing castle walls is a far more difficult task than many people think now of course the flat straight wall that run in between the towers they are thick enough okay no complaints there but the tower walls no there's another part where the design of this Castle is both done correctly and incorrectly which is confuses me again because it really seems the designers knew what they were doing yet if they did how did they make these mistakes and it's the matter of volage ceilings if you are on any floor above the first floor and you want to have a stone floor for these higher levels the only only way to do that is to have it Ved underneath a flat stone floor cannot support itself in any other way and they've done that accurately in many parts of the castle especially the Great Hall the Great Hall is just this arrangement of voled ceilings yet in parts of the castle outside we have stone floors that are supposed to be supported by Timber beams no all right no that's no I mean we can do this kind of thing with steel reinforced concrete and then you have a stonik you know floor that's able to support itself but stone bricks held together with mortar this type of floor is architecturally impossible okay so we are reaching the end of this close analysis of K Moren and look even though I've been pointing out a lot of inaccuracies about K I do want to say overall I am of the opinion that this is a far better designed Castle than many I have seen in the past its external layout with the three self-contained Bailey is just glorious okay and the gate house could be absolutely awesome unfortunately some big flaws with it but on the most part it's a good Castle okay and the last thing that I want to address is the internal layout now it might take too long to explain the exact reasons why but let me just say and try and give some explanation that the internal layout of K Moren is absolutely nonsensical and very unrealistic but it has been specifically done for the same reasons as the layout of skyhold in Dragon Age Inquisition it was for gameplay mechanics and so perhaps go watch my video on skyhold because I explain a bit of the ins announce there and to touch on it briefly here is that the waste of space within this keep is atrocious no Castle architect in his right mind historical or otherwise would ever allow for such wasted space when you could use this room to create so many more bedrooms greeting Halls dining Halls storage rooms sitting lounges libraries servants quarters kitchens undercroft dungeons there's just so much you see because rooms are useful they are very useful and the more rooms that you can fit in of decent adequate size the more you fit in that's just common sense in regards to architecture but in terms of a game it makes navigating through places very difficult cuz the camera gets hooked in on things and it's also much easier to get lost so I'm not saying the game developers should have done this differently I'm pointing it out so you know the difference between realism and fantasy if K Moran was actually real there would be so many more rooms in this place and only one or two of the rooms like the side Tower rooms would be as big as they are shown in the games all the other levels would be internally divided into multiple rooms and you wouldn't have so much vertical wasted space like all these stair St Wells that run up these towers to the upper rooms no you would have floor after floor after floor GE you could fit almost 3 to five extra stories here and still have ample head space to spare then of course there are so many places in the castle that are inaccessible now there are doors that said locked when I tried to open them so they might have been opened if I played further into the game but then there are other places that just have game walls that you can't walk past and simply completely inaccessible or are unfilled out where they would have been if it was real so yes just saying that to make proper note of it but that really is it these are all the observations that I have made when taking a very close historical realism and practical look at care Moren from The Witcher 3 how effectively it is designed as a castle and what's right or wrong about it I really do hope you guys have enjoyed it has been by far the most requested castle for me to take a look at many of you were expecting it to be mostly perfect in its design I'm sorry if I've disappointed you I'm just being real here calling out what is wrong where it's wrong but what is right where it is right thank you very much for watching and as always until next time farewell

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 441,943

Keywords: witcher, the witcher, witcher 3, kaer, morhen, kaer morhen, castle, castles, analysis, review, video game, sword, knight, medieval, fortress, battlements, keep, bailey, design, architecture, game of thrones, lord of the rings, skyrim, fantasy, rpg, roleplaying game

Id: -icJ155Eseg

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2016