The Witcher Critique - The Beginning of a Monster

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So far I'm almost 3 hours into the video, and I have to say it's a really good watch. I've been doing pretty much nothing else while watching it, and it gives me more ideas on how potentially make games (story- and gameplay-wise) if I ever get to that point in the future, and also more ideas on how to enjoy a game that I come across.

Really good content so far. I can't wait until I can finish this one and when parts 2 and 3 come up.

👍︎︎ 245 👤︎︎ u/PurpleYoshiEgg 📅︎︎ Apr 06 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Unlike almost every comment in this thread I have watched the entire video. I have never played the first Witcher game, only the third, so I don't know enough to point out any serious flaws in his critique of the game.

The thing with JA's videos is that he recaps the games as he critiques them. With shorter more repetitive games this isn't a huge deal, but with the Witcher, which is so dense with story, it makes the video very long. I know some people may be put off by this style, but I enjoy it.

The Witcher is probably a game I will never play. These videos are almost a "hyper lets play", recapping let's me enjoy a lot of the story without having played the game. And even if I had played the game I would have still missed details or the results of different choices that are shown off in the video.

So could he have made most of his comments and critiques in a much shorter video? Definitely. But I can already find a bunch of old regular reviews that do the same thing.

I like these long form videos because of the unique way they get to analyze a lot of smaller details normal reviews miss, and let me still enjoy them as someone who hasn't played the game. A normal review might say a game has great game design or storytelling, but a video like this really let's you understand why.

On a different note I will say I think the opening of the video was a bit weak and probably poor for anyone not familiar with JA's videos. He does some kinda pointless dissecting of the word "witcher" and tries to sorta justify the length of the video, when I think it would have been better to just start getting into the game and let the video speak for itself.

👍︎︎ 200 👤︎︎ u/wertwert765 📅︎︎ Apr 06 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Joe provided me with an important lesson a few years ago when I discovered his channel; a good critique is not analogous to one I agree with. This is a good lesson for everyone, including a lot of people in this thread.

Good critiques are also not only produced by people with radio quality voices; the vast majority of the popular video essays on YouTube are garbage, but you'd never know it because the writer's voice sounds so nice that you don't listen to the quality of what they're saying.

I disagree with almost 100% of his Odyssey video, but he provides context and evidence for his OPINIONS. The fact that they're different from mine, almost exclusively, makes it more interesting and rewarding to watch (listen to) his videos.

👍︎︎ 42 👤︎︎ u/AnalogueBox 📅︎︎ Apr 07 2020 đź—«︎ replies

I'm a huge fan of the series and just watched the entire video. I loved it. If he's looking as the series as a whole, the lenght of the video is completly justified. 7 books and 3(+2) long RPGs is a lot of story to analyze, specially given how complex the world and characters are. He describes everything in the game, worldbuilding, game systems, art, dialogue.. Going through every chapter in detail allowed him to pass judgment over the game (Witcher 1), and, the way i see it, also set up stuff for the future. Incredibly well edited, researched, and written. the fact that there is a 4 hour video this well edited about anything is insane.

EDIT: I read the comments. Whoever is looking at this as an essay and judging it as such is crazy. It's entretainment, an homage to the series. Enjoy it, I did.

👍︎︎ 51 👤︎︎ u/RRUser 📅︎︎ Apr 07 2020 đź—«︎ replies

I think the issue with the actual videos he makes is that a lot of the time he'll go through specific missions/plot points and so for RPGs like the Witcher which has multiple paths he'll go out of his way to simply explain/summarize all these events, something that takes up a lot of time and that is literally not analysis/critique in any way. Entire sections of his videos are just explaining the plot points of games, which might seem helpful at first but in reality it's probably for the worse. He does come up with points and opinions with specific examples and I'd much rather he make videos that simply state those points themselves without all the summary about the story. For people who've played the game these points are already known to them and with how general/quickly he goes through a lot of story points it's not that important for people who've never played the games to know them in the first place.

Also some might find the 1000s of hours he spent playing/reading/learning what he did to be very worthwhile, but in any sort of essay it's not about the research you did, it's about what your final product is. To cover multiple games, books and several other long games all in one video actually takes away from his point. Essays aren't about making 500+ page analysis on what the meaning of life is, the whole point of essays is to focus in on specific things. If he was only focused on the gameplay throughout the series and took a couple hours to critique the mechanics and how they changed overtime, or the use of music throughout the series and how it shapes the expectation of the player or something that would be more interesting than trying to tackle as broad as dozens of games and several books all in one long series. At that point you might as well just critique the entirety of modern RPGS or something, the scale is so large that he can't go into any particular thing in detail anyways.

👍︎︎ 514 👤︎︎ u/Pineali 📅︎︎ Apr 06 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Since no comment here is going to be about the video itself because of its length (which is only part 1 btw) I want to say a couple of things about Joe and this little project of his.

The amount of effort and dedication he has to his Critiques is undeniable. Say what you want about it or him, but that Joseph has poured so much time and effort into these witcher videos is something unmatched by most, and him replaying so much games and reading the books to try and analyze the art value of them shows that he truly believes in games are that, and that there is a lot to say about them. It is really bothering that some people see this +2 years project of him and say things like: "He shouldn't have wasted so much time" or similar stuff. This applies not only for this video in particular.

👍︎︎ 442 👤︎︎ u/Zeph-Shoir 📅︎︎ Apr 06 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Just finished watching, and it was a damn good video. I have a feeling a lot of the comments here critiquing Mr. Anderson haven't yet watched it to make the summary statements about their perceived lack of value about long video length really apt.

👍︎︎ 39 👤︎︎ u/ImNotSue 📅︎︎ Apr 06 2020 đź—«︎ replies

I'm 3 hours in and Joseph has touched on a lot of issues I had with the first Witcher and he's discussed how the games differ in a lot of aspects. Plenty of jokes too and a lot of observations about little things that got to him. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm subscribed to JA for. I get that it's not everybody's thing but to say the same amount of information can be conveyed in 20 mins is just disingenuous.

👍︎︎ 15 👤︎︎ u/Me0w_Zedong 📅︎︎ Apr 06 2020 đź—«︎ replies

People are fucking hilarious. Countless users spend hours and hours a day watching streamers which have a shitton of down time.

A guy elaborates a script, editing, well though arguments to create a 4 hour in depth video critiques, and people don't think twice on bitching about it.

👍︎︎ 222 👤︎︎ u/Mr_Ivysaur 📅︎︎ Apr 06 2020 đź—«︎ replies
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"Witcher" is a weird word. It's a testament to the success of this series that you might disagree with the very first sentence of this video. It's easy to forget the humble beginnings that are now so distant from the pristine presentation of Witcher 3 and how greatly its presence has penetrated the landscape of gaming. Yet it's still true: "Witcher" is a weird word. The problem is that right now you may not even be listening to me. Instead your eyes may have fixated on the numbers at the bottom left of your video player. Even for those familiar with my videos, that is a large number and this is only the first of three videos—so imagine what the sum of all of them will be. So even though it ruins the punch of this video's opening, I feel it's necessary to justify the length of this video series. It is not quite as absurd as it first appears because this is about three games, which is really four games because, all by itself, the Blood and Wine DLC expansion for Witcher 3 is longer than either Witcher 1 or 2. I played these games multiple times making different decisions and importing saves as I went. I read the entirety of the original five-part Witcher Saga written by Andrzej Sapkowski, and also the first two collections of short stories The Last Wish and The Sword of Destiny. I played through the standalone Gwent game Thronebreaker. I learned Polish to reread the books in their native language to truly understand their beauty. I also played ten other games, including finishing the entire Mass Effect Trilogy plus another game that I'll reveal as a surprise later. I felt they were necessary to draw experience from and use for comparisons to fully explore how these Witcher games succeed and fail. I also didn't shave or cut my hair for two years and started wearing it in a topknot like Geralt does. Only one of those was a lie, by the way. And it's not the hair one. Look I know to some of you seeing a video this long from me is the visual equivalent of hearing: ... But to others it's best to look at this video as a TV mini-series becoming available at once, with the start of each episode linked in the pinned comment below. And the same for the other videos that I've already finished on Witcher 2 and 3 that will soon be released. And as scummy as this may sound and as scummy as I'm going to feel doing it—these videos took over five thousand hours for me to make so I'm going to plug my patreon and paypal. If you'd like to support more videos, toss a coin to your bitcher oh valley of plenty. After all of that I don't think the monstrous lengths of these videos are unjustified. In fact there are a few topics that I think could still be explored in more depth. We're going to get to that in just a few seconds but there's one other thing that I think is worth mentioning now right at the start. Each of these three games do things better than the others. There is no clear "best in every way" Witcher game, even though the third one is my favorite overall. However, and this was the most surprising thing I encountered while making this video, the books were even better than that. I spent 100 hours with Witcher 1. Another 100 hours with Witcher 2. 500 hours with Witcher 3 and its expansions. A few hundred hours with other games, and over a hundred reading these seven books. And it was that time that I enjoyed more than anything else. It was a delight to discover what is now my favorite fantasy book series, and I consider it a privilege to be able to devote so much time to analyzing these games and its world. Thank you so much for allowing me to do so, and I hope the following videos were worth the wait. In 2007 the first Witcher game was released. It was revealed in trailers before this and I, like most people, had never heard the word "witcher" before. While it was a phenomenon in Poland, mostly everywhere else the word sounds like someone trying to cheat at Scrabble. There are witches. You can be a witch. You can bewitch. You can be bewitched. There's the witching hour. Something that has a witch-like quality could be described as witch-y. At an extreme stretch a group of witches could argue over who is witchier or, god forbid, the witchiest. But Witcher sounded like nonsense back then. I don't know if people still have that visceral reaction to it now or if the success of the series is so prominent that most people have become slowly aware of it and don't find it ridiculous. I'd be really interested to know how a lot of people on Netflix reacted to seeing the name when it popped on their list before and had no knowledge of the games prior to that. A witcher is the male counterpart to a witch. The best way for it to click is to think of the female widow to the male widower. But there's also a deep connection on both sides to the hunter gatherer roles of our primitive history. Witches tend to make a home in one place. They are outcasts but still prefer to be permanent residents. They gather herbs, brew potions, cast spells, occasionally help with curses and minor monsters in their one sole area that they call home. Witchers also do much of this same work including casting some simple spells, but they don't put down roots. They do less mundane problem solving with alchemy than a traditional witch, and instead hunt monsters plaguing communities so that people can return to something close to normalcy while the witcher moves on to the next place and the next monster. Both witches and witchers deal with similar supernatural problems, and they are both similarly maligned because of it. This is something that can be traced through our own history: when some real life women were truly persecuted as witches. One theory as to why, is that they were often women that had gained some amount of notoriety as being effective healers, even though—of course—there was never any real magic. They could give advice, offer solutions to problems, and then be met with incredibly sharp disdain if they ever failed, or so happened to be a perfect scapegoat when too great a tragedy befell a settlement—so tragic that it must have either been the dark magic of a witch that was responsible, or punishment for allowing something inhuman to exist and prosper among them. There's also the more understandable reason: that those who provide a service to dispose of a problem—at a cost of course—can quickly become associated with being that problem, or even responsible for it. In the case of a witcher, their freakish appearance and mutations play less of a role in making them hated than the fact that they refuse to work for free. A detail that is brought up time and time again throughout all of the games. They risk their lives for what often ends up being a pittance, but it's still a pittance that is profiting from misery. Witchers and witches sometimes deal in despair, and that can be impossible to shake even as they perform miracles on a budget that are worthy of ballads, not blame. It's an interesting premise for a character, especially in a video game. But upon first encounter, “witcher” is just a weird word. And it's a word the games have reveled in. The world of The Witcher is just as interesting as this concept and character—for one it has more in common with Shrek than it does Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. A Shrek that takes itself mostly seriously—often deathly so. Unfortunately the video game series fails miserably to make this clear in its introduction. In fact the opening of Witcher 1 is such a staggering stumble that I'm often stunned that this series got the opportunity to grow. And it's a harsh failing in more ways than one. I think it will surprise most of you watching that I played Witcher 1 at release. If you play it today, your only choice on Steam and GOG is the Enhanced Edition that was first released in 2008, a year after the original. I played that original version back in 2007 and I gave up after about six hours. The introduction of its story and characters were—quite bluntly—so cringey that I was forcing myself to keep going because I had a friend who promised me the game got better. Ultimately it was the game's long load times that made me move on. Any load screen, whether it was traveling from one major area to another or entering a tiny house and then back out of it again, would take between 30 to 90 seconds. And you are constantly going through these transitions in every chapter. Thankfully the Enhanced Edition addressed this problem, and I went back and finished the game more than ten years ago. Unfortunately though none of the other updates smooth out how bad this introduction is in Kaer Morhen. And yet despite all of that I feel like now I've become that friend I mentioned just a second ago. This game gets so much better after its first few hours and you adapt, like your eyes in the dark, to the flaws that mar one of the most ambitious games I've ever played. CD Projekt Red were insane to try to pull off a game with a scope this large on their first release. You could make the same argument for Witcher 2 really, and that it wasn't until the third game that they finally matched reality with their imaginations. Yet this is nowhere near a total failure. I always got the sense from Witcher 1 and 2 that the devs were trying their damnedest despite the budgetary restrictions they faced, and they refused to phone anything in. There's passion in this game, and this attempt for greatness with Witcher 1 is admirable and I think they succeeded more than they failed. Just not with this opening. The first narrated speech here relates to events that happen in the books. Everyone seems to think that Geralt should be dead and is shocked that he's back and alive, even though he never stops looking like a corpse. There was a war that has passed and these kingdoms are licking their wounds. There's a plague. Monster populations have risen. Things are looking pretty bad. It's all wonderful nonsense if you haven't read the books but it makes perfect sense if you have—shockingly this is a trend that continues with many of the big story moments throughout the entire series, especially Witcher 2. However, in the case of Witcher 1, it might be better if you haven't read anything. I played all the games first, then read the books, and then played the games again. I've structured these videos in a similar way and will only interject some book details here and there until a larger book discussion and comparison later in the Witcher 3 video. Right now I just want to say that the first Witcher game is unique in my experience since it is both an adaptation and a continuation of a large book series. I do not envy the task that CD Projekt's writers had since overloading the player with book details could be alienating, but ignoring so much of Sapkowski's works would do the same to book readers. I don't think they were that successful for those who read the books, but also that those who only played the games suffer similarly in the sequels. Essentially, Witcher 1 became a rotten foundation for the next two games and the story and characters never recover from it, especially in Witcher 3. I'll go into too much detail on that later. For now, we're introduced to a bunch of other witchers and their castle home of Kaer Morhen. We also meet The Professor in a quick flash of dramatic irony since none of the witchers are aware that they're about to be attacked by this guy who comes across as a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain. How evil is the despicably evil man with his evil plans of evil laughing so evilly! He's also an example of that awkwardness from adapting the books since there is also a character named The Professor in Sapkowski's stories who is also a mercenary, also tries to kill Geralt, even looks similar to this person in the game, but it's not the same character. This part of the game is the Prologue. There are five chapters after this and an Epilogue that finishes the game but it's more like the true end of Chapter Five; whereas the Prologue is much more clearly separate from Chapter 1. The rough introduction continues here with some stilted dialogue, awkward breast physics, and your first taste of combat which can be politely described as less than ideal. And instead of moving on quickly to new systems and ideas, this entire section is a slog of awkward dialogue into fight after fight with this bandit group called Salamandra. By the end of this tutorial you will have seen the vast majority of what combat has to offer in this game. Enemies are weak to a specific stance that changes the animations Geralt uses when attacking and also the timing required to keep your attack combo going. On normal mode this is your cursor flashing with a blade on fire. On hard mode you have to look for the sword model itself streaking orange in the middle of the attack animations—which is also present on normal mode—and left click on the enemy you want to attack when it happens. I found the hard mode indicator to strangely be more reliable once I had gotten used to it and I'd feel out the rhythm more than when I was waiting for the cursor change to show up. Some enemies are weak to strong style. Others to quick. Whereas every enemy except for shield-bearers are susceptible to group style when there's enough of them to give Geralt an “outnumbered” damage modifier. When these conditions are met group style is so powerful that it can kill individuals in a group in fewer hits than they would need in another style, even if the fight was one-on-one. It's not just more efficient as an AOE, it's higher single target damage too as long as there are enough enemies around to give you this buff. This combat system is simply a rhythm game test of timing, and only has a few ways for decision making to matter: sometimes changing targets with each timing press to continue combos more efficiently in groups, changing from quick style to strong style after weakening some enemies for extra damage, moving yourself away from an enemy that explodes upon death, and the occasional use of a magical witcher sign to gain an advantage. But none of these are ever required, even on hard mode. Instead the “challenge” is making sure Geralt has been leveled up enough and deciding if you need to use a Swallow potion to gain some passive life regeneration. Combat in this game was never fun but I have to admit it succeeds in the way that is important for me in RPGs: it adds context without getting in the way... much. In other RPGs, like Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, or Neverwinter Nights—which having mentioned, it's worth pointing out that it was built with the same engine that CD Projekt used for Witcher 1—combat is a time-consuming chore of fiddling with positioning, spells, and special moves. I have never enjoyed combat in these games but I do appreciate the context that these battles give to the stories that I love and the character's capabilities. Witcher 1's combat system provides this without taking up too much time, and this simple timing challenge is a quick way to dive into a fight and feel like a monster slayer carving through enemies. It's a part of the Fantasy of being a Witcher. The impressive combat animations also help (like seriously look at this stuff it looks like it belongs in another game entirely) but, coupled with the over-the-shoulder camera angle, may give the wrong impression—that Witcher 1 is an action game. The best comparison here is surprisingly Mass Effect 1—which also came out in 2007. Mass Effect also looks like an action game, with the same camera angle, direct movement control, and aiming and attacking with your mouse. But just like The Witcher series, it's not until the second entry that the gameplay truly moves from an RPG to an authentic action experience, where the player's inputs determine the outcome of a battle far more than dice rolls and stat checks. Both of these sequels still have some leftover hitches from their first games though. In this regard the top down camera perspective in Witcher 1 is a better match to the gameplay, but the over-the-shoulder view is by far the superior way to play. You get a much better sense of being and belonging in this world as you run around directly controlling Geralt instead of using clicks to move like you're an invisible Sky God detached from it all. I know this point may be contentious but I think Witcher 1 is quite good visually. The character models are by far the most dated thing about it and I even remember disliking them at release, but the environments have a tremendous amount of love and attention to detail. One of the things that most impressed me about Witcher 3 were the acres of swaying trees in the wind swept lands of Velen and Skellige. Witcher 1 already had trees reacting to the weather like this way back in 2007. Its faithful recreation of Kaer Morhen from the books, a place that is only briefly used in Witcher 1, was such a wonderful framework that the updated version in Witcher 3 still shares so much in common with it. These beautiful murals are included in the castle's interior. Someone cared enough to have these birds flock off when you get close and they carefully fly away through this stream of light from a crack in the ceiling instead of clipping through a wall and out of bounds. And in an official adventure module—sort of like small free DLC packs added after the release of the original—you can see how much work went into creating the land surrounding Kaer Morhen as well. The models are certainly bad but there's something visually cohesive about this game that makes me unable to dislike its presentation—something we'll see more of in the city sections later. For now though, Kaer Morhen doesn't get a chance to impress since the reality of the lackluster combat will be setting in for most players. Like Geralt, you have no idea what's really going on and have little context for why this attack by The Professor and sorcerer Azar Javed is happening. Geralt lost his memory when he returned from the dead and it's an amnesia that also effects people that read the books. He has no recollection of any of the events in Sapkowski's stories but there's also the mystery of the five year gap between his supposed death and resurrection that even book readers are kept in the dark about. But it's not a total mind wipe. Geralt remembers some of his combat abilities although it comes across as an automatic process not unlike how you can write your signature without thinking about it. He feels very little for his fellow witchers but senses an emotional bond with sorceress Triss Merigold. Amnesia is an effective, if overdone, method of allowing an audience to connect to a character that already has an established place in a world, although I think by now audiences are more than capable of making sense of foreign worlds and exotic situations even if they're just dropped right into it—especially considering the runaway success of Witcher 3 in which Geralt has recovered all of his memories, which was the first game in this series for the majority of people that played it. Geralt's amnesia is actually more successful in allowing this character to have a video game story without the baggage of the books' events—and the expectation to have to deal with unraveling all the possibilities that come from continuing that story. Having said that it's funny to be able to point out once again that Witcher 3 did exactly that and was still successful in engaging a large new audience. I think this freedom for the first game was more a benefit for CD Projekt to tell a more focused story than what's in the big Witcher 3 continuation that they weren't prepared to tackle yet. Probably both creatively and monetarily. Because of this it's Triss Merigold, not Yennefer of Vengerberg, that's involved in the first choice you make in the game. The group attacking Kaer Morhen have brought a large monster called a Frightener along with them, because they apparently thought including a monster in their assault against famous professional monster slayers would help. Turns out it does and you have to choose whether you go with Leo and Triss to stop The Professor and Azar Javed from stealing the witchers' secret mutation scrolls, or help the other witchers fight off the Frightener. No matter what you do the Frightener is defeated, Leo is killed, Triss is left injured, and the witcher secrets are stolen. Unexpectedly this is the only time a Frightener is seen in the entire series. And you can skip this boss fight, and never see it in combat. This sets up the main goal of the game—to retrieve these secrets and be pushed through many different places and characters as you do so, even though neither you nor Geralt fully understand why they're so important. First the tutorial prologue enters its second half which is a miniaturized version of how the game works from this point onward: you have a central task (brew a potion to heal Triss), a location with multiple areas to explore with enemies to fight and containers to loot, and some NPCs to speak to with a lot of optional dialogue paths to exhaust if you want to know more about them and what's going on. This is precisely how the entire game works from now on but on a much larger scale—get a task, fight some enemies while exploring areas, and speak to a legion of NPCs for more tasks and more dialogue options. It can be quite overwhelming later on but here in the prologue things are kept simple and enclosed. You just have to make this thing to heal Triss. Alchemy is an important part of that “Witcher Fantasy” and it's here that you have your first taste of monster harvesting and potion brewing. Like most things in this game there are stringent rules—every potion needs strong alcohol as a base. Raw materials become stripped down to vital essences during the brewing process and you arrange them in specific amounts to create specific effects. Potion brewing takes time that must be spent at a resting location—often at a campfire—where time can safely pass. You can see more of the Prologue's awkwardness here as Triss is sprawled out in agony throughout the potion process, meanwhile the other witchers are sitting around eating and drinking oblivious to it all. And wait for a really long time before carrying her upstairs to a bed. Healing Triss marks the end of the tutorial and, depending on how you react to her dialogue here, you can accidentally have sex with her on “the best bed in Kaer Morhen” which acts as the perfect punctuated ending point of this bewildering Prologue. This is far from the only time Geralt can have sex with someone in Witcher 1, and I think its status has settled as being a mini-game along with playing dice and fist-fighting. Although, like this time with Triss, it's often important to the story whereas dice and brawling are not. Many people consider these illustrations to be collectible cards but I'm not really comfortable with that description. They are marked as “cards” of course but Geralt keeps an extensive journal throughout the games. In Witcher 2 and 3 this is told from the bard Dandelion's perspective. In Witcher 1 it's all Geralt, from his point of view, and saturated with his thoughts. I prefer to think of these illustrations as being made by him for his journal, since they're also accessed in that menu, or they're something like a memento or note that he's made and these cards are representations of the memory he has of these encounters when he sees them. The final scene here is the group of witchers, plus sorceress Triss, agreeing to fan out through the surrounding realms in search of the secrets that have been stolen from them. This is the last time that the player will see Vesemir, Lambert, or Eskel for the rest of the game. In fact, unless you play the extra adventure module The Price of Neutrality, which is a story that takes place years before Witcher 1, you will not see these witchers again until Witcher 3. Triss, however, goes to the city of Vizima in the Kingdom of Temeria. Conveniently where Geralt is also going. It's also where the thieves have their main hideout. Which turns out to be a lucky coincidence that is never commented on. I would love to say that this is the end of the awkwardness in Witcher 1's opening. Unfortunately it gets much worse before it gets much, much better. Chapter One begins with a sequence so poor it's like a sensory assault. We're abruptly with this kid and a woman who might be his mother but turns out it isn't. They're attacked by dogs, eeeeevil dogs! The woman dies outside the gate surrounding an inn. And then suddenly someone named Shani is talking to Geralt. Shani knows who he is, and the woman isn't dead after all! Here she is yelling for help. Help! The evil dogs need to be taken care of and you're just immediately put right to it. The gates open. The woman is now back to being dead. Guards instantly die. And after all of this, Shani shouts “THE BEAST!” before the boy Alvin goes super saiyan and starts floating in the air possessed and chanting some prophetic verses about the end of the world while Geralt looks on solemnly like “yeah, this is fine.” This is the exact moment where the introduction peaks in absurdity. You can stick a pin in the game when Alvin collapses after this and congratulate yourself on getting through it. Except it's not exactly smooth sailing from here on out. Chapter One of this game is one of my favorite sections in the entire series and is high on the list among all RPGs that I've played. The thing is you have to finish the chapter to realize that. The Prologue is always bad no matter what but the ending of Chapter One contextualizes the whole thing in a wonderfully twisted way. But I'd be a liar if I didn't say another big reason why I think Chapter One subverts expectations so strongly is because I was expecting it to be shit. After that introduction can you really blame me? Geralt has traveled from Kaer Morhen to the outskirts of Vizima, where he is now stuck because the city is under quarantine—to prevent the spreading of what's called the Catriona plague, which is actually the Bubonic Plague. The literal, actual Bubonic Plague. Witchers are immune to diseases but Geralt still requires a pass to get into the city and that, along with gathering information about Salamandra, becomes the goal of the chapter. Throughout this ordeal you will be sent running back and forth all over the outskirts. Talk to people here. Talk to people there. Go and kill some monsters. Another settlement is asking for help. Once you've done this chapter you can remember how to do it more efficiently on later playthroughs, but for your first time I propose that the Outskirts is where Witcher 1 drags the most in terms of gameplay because of this relentless marching around and around. Looking at the map reveals the issue immediately. This is the walkable parts of the outskirts highlighted in red. As you can see Chapter One has the layout of a Mario Kart track. Every step you make in the direction of one important landmark, due to the circuit nature of the map, necessitates that you are equally farther from another—which is much easier to see if you imagine the path as a straight line that warps you to the other side when you reach either end. It takes more than five minutes to do a full circuit on this path. The quests keep sending you to each of these locations and you don't know yet how to efficiently combine quests into one trip. Suddenly you're doing so much backtracking that it makes Death Stranding look like it doesn't have enough walking. A couple of relief lines in the middle of the map would have made this area much more tolerable to learn, or the main circuit could have been made much tighter with the important locations jutting off of it instead of being placed along the circuit itself. Of course Liberal Arts Majors among you will no doubt point out that all of this walking is meant to reinforce the feeling that Geralt is stuck in a state of frustrating limbo as he is stranded outside of Vizima walking in circles. Meanwhile me, ya basic boy, will just point out that this repeated exposure to these characters and areas gives you chances to notice some of the less obvious details and provides time for them to marinate in your head—if only subconsciously. This is a good time to speak about how most of the side quests in Witcher 1 aren't really side quests. Now that can initially sound like a huge compliment! The side quests are so well integrated in the game's story that it's difficult to tell them apart—this is a true statement that applies to the majority of side quests in this game and it's one of the best things it does. But it's also a destructive flaw if you decide to skip most of it. Witcher 1 is a game that you have to meet on its own terms. If you rush through it only doing the main quest, then the awkwardness of the Prologue never goes away. Here's an example. In a quest bluntly called “Racists” you will see a dwarf called Zoltan Chivay. He is being accosted by—you guessed it—racists. Whether you help him out or stand aside and watch him take care of the assholes himself, Geralt has the opportunity to have a chat with Zoltan during which he learns that they're old friends. Zoltan, like everyone else from his past, doesn't understand how Geralt is back from the dead. He wants to take him right to the nearby inn and have a drink to mull it over. But the keyword here is opportunity. You can run right by this encounter and not bother with it. You can leave Zoltan to fight off the racists and then walk off without speaking to him, or watch him waddle off into the sunset and then finish Chapter One without ever interacting with him at all. Then if you speak to him in a later chapter—for the first time ever—Zoltan will not remark on how Geralt should be dead. No comments about how shocked he is to see Geralt living and breathing. The game skips over all of it and even references conversations that should have happened in Chapter One but didn't. The game can break and leave you deeply confused if you don't approach its side content in the correct way, and this is after the game directly says to you “To help or not to help. That's the witcher's question”. The worst character this can happen with is with Dandelion. I need to be fair and point out that most people aren't going to ignore Zoltan. But the first “canon” meeting with Dandelion in Chapter Two is much easier to miss. Shani throws a party near the end of the main quest line. It's entirely optional and, considering the events that happen right before she proposes this party, many players may treat it as a superfluous waste of time and keep on trucking to the end of Chapter Two. Which means they miss Dandelion's scripted reaction, drenched in disbelief, that Geralt is alive at Shani's party. Your first interaction with him will instead be a bewildering appearance in The New Narakort Inn where he acts as if everything is business as usual. Or he'll just show up when you're looking for a kidnapped child for a quest as the game makes no adjustments whatsoever for you skipping this party scene. He never comments on how Geralt shouldn't be alive and you'll be wondering who the hell he even is when in reality he's Geralt's best friend in the whole world. Someone out there has had this experience with Witcher 1 and I feel so sorry for them. There are quite a few of these continuity errors throughout the game and some of them were really entertaining to find on my third playthrough. I don't consider it a fatal problem because RPGs encourage you to explore their side content—it's often where the true meat of these games can be found and this game in particular ties most of it seamlessly to the main story. But it's worth pointing out because Witcher 2 doesn't have this problem and Witcher 3 even accounts for players possibly skipping stuff like this and has prepared alternate outcomes in the event that they do. Zoltan surprisingly has little to do with the story in Chapter One and doesn't really offer you any help or is involved in any major way. Most of the other characters you meet are linked to the Reverend of the Outskirts, who has one of the worst models in the game because of his mouth. I don't know if this is a poor masking of the Reverend's beard over most of the mouth or if they just shrank the full-sized mouth down to fit in this small space under his mustache. I prefer to believe the latter because it is endlessly funny to me. It's distractingly funny, actually—it's all I can see whenever I speak to an NPC that uses this model. The Reverend has a pass to enter the city and he alludes that he may be willing to part with it if Geralt does a series of tasks for him, and ultimately rids the community of The Beast that is hounding them. A few quick interesting details about The Beast: it is a large supernatural dog that both summons smaller magical dogs into existence and causes ordinary dogs to transform into them—both called Barghests. It's not clear from the in-game models if the ordinary dogs die and then their spirits become the Barghests or if their original form is morphing into the new one. It would appear like the poor dogs die but that could also be a technical limitation. Barghests also seem to be able to exist without A Beast as a progenitor since they are in a location in the Witcher 3 without any Beast. Maybe it's the case that you are able to have Barghests without A Beast but you can't have A Beast without Barghests. The people that live in the Outskirts are more important than this monster. The big three that the Reverend sends you to are the guard Mikul, the smuggler Haren Brogg, and the merchant Odo. This begins a trend that all three of these games have in giving you multiple objective points at once so that you can get pushed into seeing other quests and other characters but also have some agency in how you choose the order that you do it all in. The Reverend also eventually sends you to see the local witch Abigail who has adopted the prophet child Alvin that we saw in this chapter's opening. Other important characters are Declan Leuvaarden, Vesna Hood, and Kalkstein. But out of those three that last one is the only person you have to interact with to finish the main quest. Haren Brogg wants you to kill some drowners outside his house at night. Odo wants you to kill two echinopsae in his garden. And Mikul wants you to clear the local crypt of ghouls since he's too afraid to do it himself. Whether you speak to Kalkstein at the inn or not, he will show up on the bridge after you clear the crypt for Mikul. And this is where the game delivers its first judgement on you for one of your past decisions. Back in the Prologue, if you chose to go with Leo and Triss then your presence will have made it so The Professor and Azar Javed had less time to ransack Kaer Morhen's laboratory. So now in the Outskirts, they are harassing Kalkstein because he is an alchemist and they want his supplies and assistance in order to further research the few secrets that they managed to steal. Salamandra is already on this bridge when you show up and they attack you with a small force of bandits and a mage. Meanwhile, if you chose to stay with the witchers and fight the Frightener, The Professor and Azar Javed had more time to plunder the laboratory. So Kalkstein isn't being harassed on this bridge—instead this is an ambush for Geralt from the same group of bandits and a mage plus an additional new mutant hound since Salamandra has progressed further into unlocking the witcher secrets since they were able to take many more of them. They've been able to transform this hound into a half-monster already. This is only a minor difference that the accompanying cutscenes make appear to be a much bigger deal than it actually is; after this there are no other changes that result from this decision and I think that's for the best since most players won't have known their choices matter in this way. So this serves as a forgiving learning experience. In fact even among games today, never mind way back in 2007, this sort of reaction is rare. It's a really good thing that so much attention is drawn to this difference—and the fact that you “MADE A CHOICE” is made excruciatingly clear to you. Because now you know your choices matter going forward. Let's talk about Mass Effect for a second. This series gets unfairly criticized for broadcasting “Decision Time” to its players. I say unfairly because I often see the choices in these games being boiled down to Blue Paragon Choice vs Red Renegade Choice. The Blue is supposedly meant to be the uncompromisingly idealistic morally good decision, and the Red is supposedly meant to be the uncompromisingly pragmatic ends-justify-the-means-but-still-bad decision. This is fair criticism for some of the choices in Mass Effect but not all of them are this way. I was actually disturbed by how faulty my memory is when I played the games again and saw that some choices that I could have sworn had Blue vs Red options when I first played actually did not. But most of the decisions in this series do have immediate or at least foreseeable consequences. Much is said about the Witcher games taking place in a morally ambiguous world. I don't think this can be denied, but I do want to argue that this isn't really anything special. Many RPGs have settings like this. Many games have settings like this. Dragon Age Origins even has the main character become an eerily similar mutated monster fighter when you join the Grey Wardens, a group that twists people into dark spawn fighting tools complete with their own horrific initiation trial that kills more of its recruits than it improves—just like the Witchers with their Trial of the Grasses. There are decisions in Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Fallout, Sonic the Hedgehog, Deus Ex, and many other RPGs that can be difficult to parse morally. Not all of the decisions are like this of course but neither are most of the ones you make in the Witcher series. However what is special about the decisions in Witcher 1 is that so many of them have delayed unforeseen outcomes and that those outcomes actually matter. And this is so important in two distinct ways. The first is that because Decision Time isn't often shoved in your face and that you won't know until much later if something even was an important decision, you begin to consider every option more carefully. You can't just see what happens and then reload a save to pick again if you don't like the outcome—which by the way this made dissecting these games a nightmare. Not every decision can or should have severe consequences but now you can't be sure. In fact by the time you reach this bridge with the Kalkstein and Salamandra scene, you may have already made another big choice like this without fully realizing it when you helped Haren Brogg with his drowner problem. In a slightly perverted way the game does something similar with women throughout the whole series. Because there are sex scenes and because you can get them by acting in a certain way with women in the games you may begin to treat encounters with any woman differently if you're feeling horny between monster hunting. Most of the women in these games cannot be seduced—just like most of the decisions you make do not lead to big events—but the fact that some can means all of them are elevated to a higher status of importance. And this is why you shouldn't use a guide when you play these games on your first time through so that's not spoiled for you. I'd like to draw a distinction between different types of decisions which I am going to call Flavorful and Impactful. Flavorful Decisions are by far the most common in video games. If there's two ways to get to a destination and the two paths are only different visually. Or changing the outfit that your character is wearing, or picking a different sword that has roughly the same stats but a different model. Choosing party members in many RPGs are also usually in this category: they might change a few dialogue lines and you have access to some varied abilities during a sequence but they don't really matter. Most games are full of these types of Flavorful Decisions and I usually appreciate them. I don't want to downplay them as lesser in any way. They're a good part of games. That's not to say that these kinds of decisions can't turn into an Impactful Decision later. Mass Effect has moments where you have to choose a party member to do a task and there can be permanent, long-felt consequences from your choice. In Mass Effect 2 particularly there are many Impactful Decisions that do not present themselves as such, whereas in Mass Effect 1 it's usually made more clear to you. I want to point out that not every Impactful Decision is equal. Many of them in Mass Effect and The Witcher series can end up being quite minor. But there's still an important distinction between them and “Flavorful Decisions”. Especially since Witcher 1 and 2 have so many of them. There are many problems with Impactful Decisions in video games and this series is a prime candidate for exploring why games might not be ready for this type of decision making just yet. For now though I want to look at the other quests in the Outskirts which are thankfully more straightforward. There's only one major secondary area in the Outskirts—the crypt that Mikul sends you to that's full of ghouls and a woman that has tragically poisoned herself. There's also a small cave to explore and many houses—most of which have interiors that are woefully mismatched with how they appear on the outside. This is a common flaw throughout the first game. You will be seeing the same interiors over and over again, especially for Crypts and Caves which have the same basic layout, just certain pathways are blocked to make them appear more varied. This first room in the crypt, with the huge grating in the floor, will show up many times throughout the game. Dragon Age 2 had a similar problem but I am far more willing to forgive Witcher 1 for it considering the much tighter budget they had and how ambitious the rest of the game is. But it still is something that has to be forgiven, so it's a good thing that there's no way that Witcher 3 has the same problem right? Some side quests involve doing favors for people—such as recovering the corpse of a man for Declan Leuvaarden and then finding a place to bury him. While other quests are routine witcher work. I feel like Witcher 1 put the most effort into making these feel authentic. Most of the kill quests felt like I was doing a job for someone that truly needed these materials, like the ghoul blood for Kalkstein or the Barghest skulls for the witch Abigail. Ironically it was the bigger kill contracts on unique enemies that felt the most like filler. These enemies simply aren't unique and so they're just another drowner or another ghoul with a larger healthbar. Which is probably a flaw on the combat system more than anything else. Occasionally these witcher contracts can feed into story moments during chapters. Meanwhile, it's the quests that don't specifically need a witcher to complete them that end up being more important. Sometimes seemingly out of nowhere. For example, after burying that corpse for Leuvaarden, something called The King of the Wild Hunt appears next to you and suddenly you're thrust into an incredibly important Main Story conversation that you can easily miss if you didn't bother to help Leuvaarden at the inn. The ghost of Leo appears to taunt you here and this exchange between Geralt and The King of the Wild Hunt has implications not just for Witcher 1 but for the entire series, especially Witcher 3 and the books included. By now I'm hoping that this video is starting to communicate how good this game is in one particular way: atmosphere. There's a tremendous amount of things happening in this world and it was so wonderfully refreshing that the majority of them don't revolve around Geralt—it doesn't revolve around you, the player. You are lost in it all and, sure, sometimes something specific will snap out of that gyre and make it all about you but for the most part you wander and soak it in. The Witcher world has rules. Nighttime is dangerous—that's when most of the monsters come out. But the monsters don't just appear. They're around for a reason—whether that's the haunting of a Beastly ghost or because the locals didn't seal their dead carefully enough so corpse eating necrophages have been lured in to chow down. Those drowners we killed earlier? They were once people. It's not clear if everyone that dies via drowning becomes a Drowner although it certainly feels like it, or if it's just those who committed crimes in their lives or killed themselves with a permanent plunge. This is the standard the game's world upholds. Those killer plants we saw? They most commonly grow from curses, or atrocities that were never atoned for, or sprout from corpses of people unjustly killed. This is all wonderfully messy too with in-game folklore being confused for true facts about monsters. Geralt has his broken memory and so he needs to read books on creatures to recall all of this information—including how to harvest plants and parts of monsters for alchemical ingredients. These books can be quite expensive. Knowledge is worth a considerable amount in this world. But you can also regain some of Geralt's expertise by simply talking to people. In the Outskirts, old women are a particularly strong fount of knowledge and they'll give much of it away for a crumb of food. And considering how curses are a real thing in this world—emotional damnation and targeted willful rage are dangerous forces that can invoke true magical repercussions even if the one spewing the curse has no magical ability—it's not always clear if much of the information you get is accurate because this is what people have learned from study, or if these beliefs of the people at large can become a twisted reflection in the monsters and magic if only because they believe it. Justice and true emotions, or a lack of either, have power in this world and can cause terrible, tangible change. It's the dreaded job of a witcher to make sense of it all. But that's only the fantastical part of this world. The more mundane parts of it are still given development but also within context of the supernatural. Just in Chapter One you are introduced to racial tensions between humans, elves, and dwarves. In fact this is the state of relations the first time you see either of these fantasy races—Zoltan or the dwarf outside the inn being harassed. And the elves of the Scoia'tael—which is elvish for squirrels, named so after the tails they wear—sneaking into the Outskirts for supplies they purchase from smuggler Haren Brogg. And this isn't just a “ha ha the different races sure do like to bicker but they always come together in the end with the power of friendship.” No. The witcher world has no evil overlord nation that forces the squabbling but otherwise good-natured races to work together—if anything qualifies for that it'd actually be the humans. The world of the witcher is one that has been built on genocide. Multiple genocides. In more ways than one. An additional but also subtle twist is that the humans in this series are actually human. These aren't quasi-humans of a purely fictional alternate reality “isn't it funny that humans evolved into the exact same form here, please don't think about it” way like they are in Star Wars or Game of Thrones or most other fantasy worlds. They are from capital-E Earth—well their ancestors are at least. Geralt, like all of us, is probably related to King Charlemagne. But what about the Kings of this witcher world? Politics are also heavily influenced by the supernatural soup that permeates this planet. Magic is like nuclear weapon technology. If one kingdom has it then so must all of the others or they will be conquered by the sheer unstoppable power of those that do. But magic is so common enough and so relatively easy to use that all ruling kings and queens need protection from any stray sorcerer or sorceress. And so high society has to be built around this sort of marriage between mages and monarchs. Without the protection of a personal magic-user it would simply be too easy for another mage to assassinate a ruler. And without the support of said rulers, magic-users no matter how powerful would be overwhelmed by the commoners that fear them. Just as they fear witchers. This is what makes this series so fascinating. It's low fantasy and high fantasy at the same time. Its magic system has strict rules and so can be considered Hard Magic—that which can be understood like a science. But then there are curses and wild forays from barely understood forces, which would be a Soft Magic system—where the rules are seemingly made up as the story goes along. Some spells may just require expertise and a power source and some magic words like it's a mathematical equation being expressed. Whereas others require adaptation to superstition, the embracing of pagan-like rituals, and giving yourself over to the dominance of a power before you can fight it. This is one of the most brutally cruel fantasy worlds I have ever seen, and yet the power of love still exists here and can purge curses. The stories stay grounded despite having some larger than life characters. Kings and Queens and Emperors are clearly important, but the plight of the average worker isn't ignored either. In fact their stories can be the far more interesting ones. It's simply a beautiful mess of contradictory concepts and goals, like a heap of incompatible ideas that have been burned to a pile of ash then reborn like a phoenix of cognitive dissonance—and it works! Somehow it works! From Chapter One onward this game is dripping in that atmosphere. But as always, we have to ask ourselves, what about Shrek? For those unfamiliar with Shrek—all two of you—it's about an ogre's quest to reclaim his swamp when there's a huge upheaval of society in a kingdom where hundreds of characters from fairytales live together. Sapkowski's witcher books lean much harder into fairytale references than the first two games but he also did it with an admirable amount of restraint. There are many stories that can provide a gentle building to a revelatory moment when you say “huh, this is kind of like Beauty and the Beast” or “Rapunzel” or “Snow White” and then you move on. Not every short story in the first two books is built around a fairytale as a core—at least, not that I can tell anyway but I don't know every fairytale from my own home country, never mind Poland and the rest of Europe. The one about the Striga sounds like a twisted fairytale even if there isn't an original version that doesn't have the same amount of horror. A Princess is a prisoner of an abandoned castle and a knight is hired to saved her. Sounds familiar right? Except the Princess isn't a prisoner: she was the victim of a curse when she was still in the womb. The princess's mother died and her corrupted fetus continued to grow into an abomination that now hunts the kingdom's subjects for food. And instead of a noble knight it's mutant warrior Geralt that has to thrash the princess enough so that he has the chance to lift the curse. This story has a happy ending but it comes at a cost when the princess is the opposite of grateful for being spared. This kind of feeling is present in much of the witcher short stories. Like the world of Shrek, the witcher's planet (or Sphere as its people would call it) is an amalgamation of fairytales, legends, and even different religions. It's a melting pot of our real life cultures both past and present that, in many cases, have been brought to real life in this imaginary world. As if in response to that, just like Shrek is a warped protagonist to match the warped reality of his world, Geralt is just as mutated as those fairytales and beliefs have become. The key difference is Shrek is played for laughs. The witcher, while sometimes funny as well, takes this seriously. What would a human society have to turn into in order to survive in a world like this? What would a man capable of going head-to-head against our own worst imagined nightmares, now brought fiendishly to life, have to evolve into in order to stand a chance? And is it any wonder that common people would be terrified of the man that is the monster to the monsters? The lone fairytale reference I found in the Outskirts was Vesna. She's a waitress at the inn and after speaking to her there you have the chance to escort her home at night if you happen to notice her. She's trying to get to her grandmother's house. She's attacked by men at first but then the problem becomes the wolf-like Barghests. And her last name is Hood. You can also have sex with her in a haunted mill after this if you bring her some wine. The sound of you both going at it reinforces the idea that the mill is haunted to some people across the river. This Red Riding Hood reference doesn't really have a point to it like I feel the ones in Sapkowski's books do—where the original tale being twisted calls into question the meaning and intentions of the original. In the Beauty and the Beast story, the would-be beast claims he's happy in his cursed-state. That many women surprisingly enjoy the novelty of... ...it. Book-Geralt, who tries to only kill mindless monsters, decides to move on without attacking this Beast. And while that isn't the ending of that story, it's one of many that feeds into the theme that you can't judge from appearances alone. Just because something is expected to be a monster doesn't mean it has to be one, even if it looks like one or is suffering from a curse that is meant to turn it into one. The conclusion of Chapter One proves that the game is willing to embrace this idea, but it also includes another fundamental part of the witcher and especially Geralt himself. Choosing the Lesser Evil. One of The Witcher 3 cinematics uses a shortened version of Geralt's speech about choosing evil in the books but the meaning is mostly the same. What didn't sit right with me at first is that Geralt is choosing to do evil as his voice over is saying he doesn't want to do that. Upon first watching it may be easy to dismiss these Nilfgaardian executioners as evil for “tormenting” this woman accused of multiple crimes. We know the guards are guilty of overly cruel punishment right before Geralt turns around and dishes out his own cruel punishment and leaves one guard to suffer presumably even more. Just like we don't know if the woman is guilty of what sounds like some truly wicked deeds, another person coming along at this moment wouldn't know if the guards deserve what Geralt is doing to them either. Geralt is, at least a little, choosing evil in this scene. And I hope that hypocrisy is intentional because it's true to Book-Geralt's character, which in this cinematic Geralt now is because this takes place after he's regained his memories. This witcher is constantly finding himself in the middle of a problem and having to act when he's eventually convinced that even inaction becomes another form of evil—and a greater one than choosing what he believes is the better of two bad choices. The issue I have with this being the intended meaning of this cinematic—even though I can just ignore that and go along with my own interpretation—is that CD Projekt has a lot of trouble keeping the continuity straight between their own games, never mind with the books. So even though it may seem obvious that this is the deliberate message of this cinematic, I can't be sure. In Witcher 1's case they contradict this very point within just a few chapters—whether Abigail the witch is guilty of committing evil or not. The true reason why The Beast has come to the Outskirts is never confirmed. You are instead given two options and you must choose which you think is more likely. The people of the Outskirts have committed many crimes. Most of which happened before you arrived. The Reverend has recently led a revolution among the people in which they cleansed themselves and their families of all sin. This information is presented to you in a side conversation with the innkeeper and the way he only alludes to what happened with families being culled of sin makes me very uncomfortable. It makes me imagine quite a bloody cleansing which, as the Reverend claims, will appease the religious force known as The Eternal Fire for it to protect the Outskirts from the plague. Presumably many innocents were killed in this cleansing. It's important to point out that it appears the Reverend is no con-artist. One of the first tasks he gives you is to light the altars of the Eternal Fire in one night to drive away The Beast—it's a good idea to do this while also escorting Vesna Hood home. The Reverend believes this will work. It doesn't, but it's important to know that he believes it. Even though he is revealed to be a horrible man his faith in the Eternal Fire isn't a deception—unless this task is only given by him to make Geralt believe that he's honest but I think that's reading too much into it. Although characters do lie all the time in this game so it's not that unreasonable. Isn't talking about The Witcher fun? The more recent crimes involve the death of Odo's brother, the rape and then suicide of a woman named Ilsa, and the illegal trading of goods to both the Scoia'tael and Salamandra—including, as you discover at the very end of the chapter, the funneling of unwanted children so they can be used in Salamandra's witcher mutation experiment. It seems that all of these crimes have caused The Beast to appear as karmic punishment. Alternatively, it could have nothing to do with the forces of the universe seeking justice and instead the witch Abigail may have summoned The Beast to terrorize the Outskirts as an act of revenge. Even if you do decide that she's responsible, you may think that she was justified in doing so. I think that would be a hard thing to defend seeing as in the opening we can see The Beast attacking even newcomers to the village and a child but hey. Maybe you can understand where she's coming from at least. The last stretch of Chapter One begins when Abigail induces another prophetic episode in Alvin via a potion. The sins of the village are revealed through this rant and Geralt reports to the Reverend that they can be rid of The Beast if the guilty among them repent for their crimes. In exchange the Reverend reveals that Salamandra has attacked the inn and that the Innkeeper has a key to a nearby house where Geralt can find more of Salamandra's goons. When you get to the inn the keeper is already dead and Shani is under attack. This is something every game in this series does that annoys me: sometimes changes happen for no real reason. Geralt has not caused Salamandra to attack the inn. It's just... happened because the developers needed it to in order to move the story along. This is different than the attack on the bridge earlier because that can be understood as an ambush that has been planned out and is happening now that Geralt is at the right place. It's also different to the conclusion of the Flotsam section in Witcher 2, when Flotsam's streets will change after a certain stage in a quest directly because of a decision that the player makes at that stage. Events like this, however, where the inn has just changed now because of an entirely unrelated conversation with the Reverend who somehow magically knows about it, are frustrating. Witcher 3 in particular is full of moments like these in quests. After saving Shani you take a key from the Innkeeper and use it to enter a house near a cave system in the southern part of the village. There you get to interrogate an officer in Salamandra before slaughtering them all and freeing a bunch of children that the Outskirts offered in tribute or trade. Surprisingly Alvin is among them and, in the next section of the cave, you also find Abigail hiding from the angry mob that the Reverend has spurred into action. Apparently he's taken Geralt's advice of “repent for your crimes” to mean that Abigail is the source of all of it and needs to be killed. The pacing here suffers a bit. As I said earlier Chapter One in this game is probably where you will do the most backtracking in what turns out to be by far the smallest chapter in terms of play area. After all of that repeated running around so much happens so quickly that you can be left wondering when all of it occurred: Alvin was kidnapped, the Reverend has mobilized the entire village, and Abigail has coincidentally taken refuge in the same cave that Salamandra was using as a hideout—with only a weak wall separating them. To make it worse you can once again accidentally have sex here since Abigail offers herself to you in exchange for your support in the upcoming conflict with the Reverend's pitchfork party. She presents this offer as “My sins are not as great as they say. Learn for yourself, if you like. We're alone, we have some time...” which apparently means sex. Maybe I'm being a big dumb doo-doo head man for not reading this as Abigail being a pick-up artist but my view on romancing Triss, Shani, and Abigail is that if I'm to choose between one redhead and another, then I prefer not to choose at all. The next scene brings the whole chapter together. My first time through I was firmly in the camp of Abigail. The type of religious exploitation that the Reverend does is abhorrent to me and it felt like Abigail was the classic witch scapegoat to blame for all the Outskirt's problems. But there were a few details that were brought up that stuck in my mind and gnawed away at me throughout the rest of my playthrough. Then, when Abigail showed up again in Chapter Four having seemingly not learned any lessons from Chapter One, I decided to take a closer look at all of this in my next playthrough. Abigail is guilty of something but it's not clear what. You don't get to ask enough questions to solve this mystery and sometimes I find that aggravating. Othertimes I accept that Geralt is speaking to a literal mob and the time for polite investigation has long passed. It's not just that Abigail might be responsible for summoning The Beast, she may also be responsible for many of the crimes committed by the people in the Outskirts that The Beast has apparently come to punish. There are details in the quests before this that you may not have given much attention to—if you're like me that will be because of the game's weak opening. Here, as Geralt confronts the Reverend, you're basically slapped into realizing that this game is worth paying attention to. Ilsa isn't just a random corpse in the crypt—she killed herself with a vial of poison bought from Abigail after being raped by Mikul. The monster plants in Odo's garden aren't just a random outbreak to give you a monster to kill, they've grown there because Odo murdered his own brother—a warrior whose armor you can inspect in Odo's house—and the strange unavoidable interruptions by the dog when you're around here are because the animal is in mourning. In Abigail's house you can find a doll that is quite hilariously just a shrunken version of Odo's character model, which she presumably used for her spells to have Odo kill his brother. It appears that Odo has been keeping himself constantly drunk since this murder too. Abigail also went out of her way to adopt Alvin even though there have been plenty of other orphans in the Outskirts long before he showed up—and it just so happens that he's a powerful Source of magic. The boy's trance-state roaring revelations are also directly caused by whatever concoction Abigail herself decided on using—and who knows what she might have been telling the boy when they're alone all this time, privacy she insists on having while she prepares the potion without any help from Geralt. Not to mention how irresponsible it is to force that heavy of a psychedelic episode on a child with uncontrollable powers. After feigning some ignorance she also already knows quite a bit about The Beast under its other name “Alzur's Demon” and one of the witcher contracts you get here is a request from her for ten skulls from dead Barghests. To study them. Look none of this is conclusive—in a different light some of it could even be used as evidence that she's a good person that's trying to help. I'm guessing that's the point. You're not meant to be sure. But after passing judgement there are some bigger clues. If you let Abigail live you can speak to her again and tell her that choosing her was “The Lesser Evil”. She also abandons Alvin immediately. When you meet her again in Chapter Four she is already learning the dark secrets of people in her new home, is willing to use them for trade, and is brewing love potions. Not exactly exemplary behaviour considering it's the ultimate date rape drug. Additionally—and I do have to preface this by saying this is the weakest point I have against her—her romance card is disturbing. It's very out of character and screams “hey I'm evil”. This goes against the message of many stories in the games and books though since appearances aren't meant to be the best sign of a monster, but I mean she's smearing blood over herself while she squats next to her sex toy skull to entice Geralt. This wouldn't be the only mismatched romance card in the game but I still think this is weird. If you choose to side with the villagers then Geralt demands that there be a fair trial which of course never happens. The villagers kill her immediately and, after the final battle with The Beast, you can then choose to punish the Reverend and his team for not giving Abigail that trial. However the most interesting thing that happens here is Abigail's curse. She invokes dark power and damns Geralt in the name of something called The Lionheaded Spider, which is quite the image. There's very little information about this cult but any worship in the name of this deity is banned in most countries. The glossary entry in the game states that bloody sacrifices are expected by practitioners of this faith and that any captured cultists are tried as murderers. For Abigail to say this and suddenly be a believer of this faith, after all of her calm and careful maneuvering throughout the chapter, feels to me like she finally dropped the facade for a final attempt at revenge before she's put to death. I'm still not sure if she's entirely responsible for The Beast. Many people in the Outskirts are guilty too. I have no doubts about that. It could be that Salamandra is forcing them to cooperate but even then, stealing children for them has nothing to do with Abigail and that's worthy of condemnation all on its own. But there are many places full of horrible people like this in the witcher's world. You even visit some that have worse criminals than this. And yet the Outskirts is special in having a Beast—and in having a witch that knew enough about it to perhaps summon one. The answer that feels right to me is that both sides deserve punishment—although leaving Abigail to this mob has never been something I've been comfortable doing. This is why I love Chapter One so much. It gave me so many details to think about and a conclusion that I'm still questioning. It also looped my preconceptions. You're meant to suspect Abigail a little at first and then it becomes obvious that the villagers are the real monsters here—what could be more fitting in a game with a protagonist as unusual as Geralt for the witch to be undeservedly hated and worthy of being saved? But then it loops back to the witch not being innocent after all, but neither are all of the villagers. Just like on Twitter, everyone is awful here. Even remaining inactive is an immoral choice and I feel more than ever that I agree with Geralt's speech—I'd rather let the two evils take care of each other. I'd rather not choose at all. But you have to. There's one wrinkle here though. And it's a big one. The game ruins all of this in Chapter Four by directly telling you that Abigail is innocent. One of the solutions to a problem in Chapter Four is suggested to you by a literal goddess—The Lady of the Lake. When her solution doesn't work she explains it's because Geralt has the blood of an innocent on his hands and it's directly stated that it's Abigail's. So all of these hints about Abigail's guilt are apparently red-herrings, and her selling love potions and poison to people that she knows are going to use it for misdeeds is morally just fine. This doll of Odo must just be for fun. Maybe she uses it with the sex toy skull. But even this wrinkle has a wrinkle. Three actually. The first is that if Abigail survives Chapter One this solution offered by the goddess still doesn't work. It doesn't matter whether Geralt has “innocent blood” on his hands or not—it's not brought up as a reason for the failure unless Abigail is dead. The second is that this “innocent blood” problem might not be about innocence at all and is instead how Abigail's curse is presenting itself to foil your attempt at doing something later in the game—in the same place she would have gone on to inhabit if she hadn't died. The third wrinkle is a much bigger problem in the series: sometimes making a choice changes more than just what's related to that choice. That was kind of wordy. Here's an example to better explain. Let's say when you wake up one morning you have a glass of orange juice. You then look out the window and it starts to rain. Now we rewind the morning and instead of orange juice you decide to have milk. You then look out the window and it's a bright sunny day. Your choice has nothing to do with the weather but it still made it change. This is how some choices work in this series. I know it sounds dumb but it's true. Geralt is slipped into another dimension where different things happen now because of a choice that had nothing to do with them. Is that what happened here? I'm not sure. To me Abigail is absolutely guilty of many things but maybe not enough to warrant death, and that's why the goddess views it as a stain on Geralt. But then Geralt isn't the one that kills her so should he truly be responsible? He wanted her to have a fair trial and it's the villagers that decided to ignore that and go for blood. Geralt was the one cursed though. And away we go again. Like I said, there's a lot to think about here. Isn't talking about The Witcher fun? The fight against The Beast is noteworthy in that it's one of the toughest battles in the game and it's this early on. The only fight that I found more difficult than this on Hard Mode was trying to kill the Striga in Chapter Five instead of lifting the curse on it. Randomness is a big part of the fight against the Beast since it can inflict Pain which is a status effect that stuns Geralt but it's different than a stun according to the game because of the spelling. A single Swallow regeneration potion is usually enough to get through this fight although it's not always required if you get lucky with avoiding pain. Curiously according to the notes you recover on The Beast there's meant to be a question that it asks you before you fight it. If you answer correctly then The Beast is weakened and can be more easily defeated. This Beast asks no question but the fight does come directly after the choice you make between Abigail and the villagers. The boss fight is much easier if you side with the villagers but gameplay is so unpolished and janky in this game that it's impossible to know if that's intended. Abigail's magic should, in theory, be much more useful but she usually gets knocked out seconds into the fight. It would have been cool if this decision between Abigial and the villagers was The Beast's “question” all along but we'll never know. We do find out about the ultimate fate of the Outskirts in Witcher 3 though—it's burned to the ground by an invading army. Swept away. After all of this you get a pass to enter the city. You meet up with Shani and you both head to the city gate together. Mikul is there and, depending on your choices, he may be the only survivor of the main Outskirts characters that you interacted with in this Chapter. It's here that he betrays you and, after Shani conveniently vanishes into thin air after you get here, you're arrested and thrown into the city jail as your warm welcome back to Vizima. So after spending days being trapped outside the city, Geralt finally gets past the quarantine blockade only to be imprisoned and now stuck inside the city. The witcher series is not without a generous application of irony, especially in Witcher 2. This opening scene is one of the more memorable ones from this game—with the thief bemoaning that he's been lumped in with the “politicals” because there's a witcher and an elf in this large cell. This is one of many speeches and phrases that are ripped right from the books. I believe this dialogue is from The Last Wish, the story where Geralt first meets Yennefer—the second most important person in Geralt's life and one whose name is never spoken in this game. Not even once. (Except for an adventure module) The other memorable part of this scene is the shot when the camera slides between these bars. The Professor has also been imprisoned here but he's being released just after Geralt has been brought in. Again I feel compelled to point out that the character models are pretty bad but I still think this shot is cool, and it shows how even back then CD Projekt still cared deeply about the presentation of their games. It's not just the standard “we want our games to look as good as possible” it's a desire to push presentation forward and have it be a focus. The fully realized city streets of Vizima that we'll be seeing soon also support this commitment. But as Leonardo DiCaprio is fond of saying, let's get back to the models. Witcher 1 doesn't have much variety in its NPCs. It uses the same models for dozens of characters and the reason we're bringing this up now is because this jail cell has nine people in it and six of them are the same person. Same model, same voice. I'm going to catch a lot of shit for saying this but I kind of like this about the game. It adds to that cohesive weirdness of the presentation. In this example it's like a Super Nintendo RPG—the same model pasted to fill up space and dispense dialogue. Whereas on a case-by-case basis, with the same model coming back individually in different sections of the game, it makes it feel like a stage play performance where the same actor is rushing backstage to change into a different colored outfit for the next time he goes on stage as a different character. This definitely only works because of the strained low budget charm CD Projekt was working with, and I don't think I'd accept it in a full AAA game. Which means it's a good thing there's no way Witcher 3 has the same problem, right? My favorite of these NPC archetypes is the fat Jason Statham. He's usually paired with this voice that sounds like his lungs have been tied together in a bow. Yoohoo. Whitey. We foight for money. I crack up every time this guy is around and I wish he had been included in the next games. He's in this prison scene too. The Captain of the Guard, Vincent Meis, comes to the jail with an offer—anyone who can slay the cockatrice rampaging in the sewer can go free. Fat Jason Statham volunteers as well as Geralt and the game misses the incredible opportunity to have this be a buddy-monster-slayer quest with the best placeholder NPC. Instead you beat him up and win the right to go kill the monster. This whole scenario feels like the guards wanted to get some free work out of a witcher that they heard was coming into the city because honestly no thief or drunk in here could ever hope to pluck a single feather off a cockatrice and live. But then after you kill the monster they still pay you on top of the pardon—although maybe that's just paying a much lower amount for the trophy that you bring in. Already the game is expertly setting up the story of Chapter Two. This isn't just filler and fun. You've quietly been introduced to two important new characters along with a refresher about The Professor and, when you're given a silver witcher sword that the guard garrison mysteriously has in their possession, you're given a lead to follow about a man named Thaler. There was another witcher in Vizima recently named Berengar. You can read some of his notes on The Beast in Chapter One and, upon receiving this sword, Geralt suspects that it originally belonged to him and that it's likely Berengar is dead. When you drop into the sewers you watch Geralt adeptly wield his new silver weapon before you get to try it out yourself and, as is standard for this series, you are met with another interruption immediately instead of these scenes being linked together. There's this awkward moment of control like the eye of a storm between cutscenes that abruptly stops just like how I jump from topic to topic. Unrelated, let's pause here at meeting Siegfried and talk about something else. Let's talk about the Witcher Fantasy some more. Witcher 1 does an excellent job at gamifying the witcher experience even if the combat is less than stellar. Geralt wears his arsenal in a way that makes him an embodiment of his profession. Sometimes the weapons on your hip slot can look too bulky but even with that gone you have the potions on the shoulder, the crossed steel and silver swords on the back, and a small weapon slot. It's a small thing to have these present all the time but, added with how you can't carry any other weapons in your inventory, it makes them feel much more real. Switching swords is also more meaningful than switching fighting styles. It starts to feel like these weapons are extensions of yourself—which is something Witcher 2 and 3 do even better. You also have a trophy slot to show off your most recent big kill. Then there's meditating, preparing, and alchemy. If you'll forgive the pun, this is where things are much more mixed. Across all three games, not just this first one. Meditating is the most successful since it adds calm periods between all the noise and monster fighting. Time is way more important in Witcher 1 than it is in the sequels and so you have to think not just about what you're doing but also when you're doing it. Admittedly this can become tedious when you want to do something specific and the time isn't right, but I think this occasional tedium is worth the fantasy weight of the day and night cycle. Potions and preparation are pushed in the opening cinematic. I'm sorry for the indulgence here but I want to gush about this opening. I've always liked it but it wasn't until I read the books that I began to admire this intro. For one it's quite long at over seven minutes. It perfectly sums up the witcher fantasy and the type of world this is. Geralt has his ritual down to an almost fetish level of precision. He uses human bait without remorse. He meditates. Drinks potions. Readies his weapons. And picks the perfect time to fight. He's always in control of this battle. He doesn't draw his sword until five minutes in and then the Striga runs away instead of continuing the fight. Playing the game is nothing like this but with the limited budget of the first game and its focus on being more of an RPG than an action game I think it's understandable. It's the later action-focused games that are more disappointing even if the combat is... … better... right? It is better, right? What I can't understand is how alchemy is entirely useless outside of the occasional use of Swallow—and even then it's just used to save time. Health regeneration is a part of this game, you just have to “pay” for it with some basic ingredients to make a potion for the regeneration to be faster. Outside of that I did not have to brew a potion in any of these three games. Even on the highest difficulties—Hard in Witcher 1, Dark in Witcher 2, and Death March in Witcher 3. I still did brew some to see how they functioned and to explore that part of the system but even as optional gameplay tools they were underwhelming. I don't care about this much in the first game because again it's all about stats and leveling. At best a potion would grant a short level boost or a temporary talent's worth of bonus stats. But I feel like the opening cinematic of this game was the target—in all three games considering how in-depth the alchemy system is in all of them—and yet it's a waste of time. That takes away a large part of the hunting preparation phase and the Witcher Fantasy. And we can see that here with the cockatrice. This is communicated to you as being a much bigger deal than a basic drowner and you just run at it and hit it with your sword a bunch of times. Then it dies. Just like a drowner. Turns out it can be a buddy-monster-hunt after all though since this is where you meet Siegfried, who is one of the nicest characters in the game and wants more than anything else to be your Siegfriend. Siegfried is a Knight in the Order of the Flaming Rose. They're a monastic military mass mouthful that acts as the forceful arm of the Eternal Fire's interests. They're meant to keep the peace and help the less fortunate—which some of them like Siegfried actually do—but there's also that pesky tendency that many orders like this have with setting heretics on fire as an example to others. Siegfried and knights like him hunt monsters for free, which is something Geralt finds offensive. Of course it's not really “for free” since the Order is funded through political pressure as they gain power but that's what Siegfried says—and maybe believes. I'm quite fond of Siegfried and I think the game handles him well. It's also interesting to note that, if this game was made by anyone else, Siegfried would have been the player character. A noble knight that seeks to fight evil, defending the downtrodden, who eventually uncovers the corruption in the Order he swore an oath to and then redeems them from within. Instead you're mutant Geralt. I like that better. The cockatrice poses no real threat whether you team up with Siegfried or not. Regardless you still go to the exit of the sewers together and are attacked by Salamandra. Siegfried defends you and then poses the question: how did Salamandra know that Geralt was in the sewers? Then you leave and you're finally free to wander the streets of Vizima. The game opens up substantially and you'll probably feel a great relief to finally be somewhere new after so much time in the Outskirts. Surprisingly, accepting Siegfried's help in the sewers or turning him away is a minor Impactful Decision. It will make it easier to get through certain guarded doors in the city later. But the real reason I think this happens is to push you toward seeing Siegfried as an ally. If you accept his help he'll be present at the gate to the dock and insist that the guards grant you passage—otherwise you'd need to bribe your way through. If you don't accept his help then he has decided he needs to punish himself for failing in his monster hunt by taking extra guard duty in front of the hospital. He replaces the usual guard there and, once again, you are allowed to go inside unhindered whereas the original guard would require a bribe. The Order of the Flaming Rose, which is usually just shortened to The Order when you're discussing this game, is one of two major factions that will be vying for your support and Siegfried is your point of contact with the organization. The other is the elf Yaevinn of the Scoia'tael and not nearly as much effort is made by the game for you see him as a friend as with Siegfried. I think there are a few reasons for that. The first is that you just dealt with corruption within the religion of the Eternal Fire when you met the Reverend so you may be wary of another faction with the same beliefs. A big monolithic group like this also isn't going to garner much sympathy and so they're made a more viable option by having Siegfried as the friendly face. And by that I mean the developers are using Siegfried in this way, not that the organization is putting Siegfried up to this in some way to lure Geralt to their side or anything. Yaevinn and the Scoia'tael don't need a front man to ease you in since I believe it's everyone's natural tendency to be repulsed by the type of prejudice we see on display in Vizima. The dwarves and elves are treated horribly and so they will get that sympathy automatically. Reading Sapkowski's books made me hate the elves in this universe. And I vehemently mean that. Here's a sentence you don't hear everyday: reading books made me elf-racist. I strongly think that co-habitation between humans and elves is a lost cause and that they should give up. The other races and humans are much more likely to succeed in living in peace but the elves have got to go. Yet I still loathe the conditions I see the elves living in here, and I can't help but feel sorry for them. It's important that every player feels some amount of affinity for either of these groups—or preferably both of them—because much of the main story going forward involves helping either side. Or struggling to stay truly neutral which is possible to do except for one quest in Chapter Three. I'm going to guess that most players would reject the Order outright on their first playthrough if it weren't for Siegfried, and that's why I think he's so important and that he's handled so well. Your interaction in the sewers appears like just another choice you made with a minor consequence but it smoothly opens you up to parts of the story. Any time a game or a story gets more than one use out of something—that's just fantastic. The more the better. Initially this conflict has nothing to do with the main goal of retrieving the stolen Witcher secrets. But, like most of the side quests feeding into the main quest, almost everything in Witcher 1 collapses into being relevant before the end of the game. Chapter 2 is where a lot of those seeds are sown, or it's like the story has exhaled a gigantic breath of details which it will now draw back in over the rest of the game. It's not all good though. Chapter Two's main quest is the most complicated quest that I have ever seen in a game. It can start immediately after you leave the sewer and decide to hire a detective to help you uncover who in the city is secretly working for Salamandra—with the heated question “who told them Geralt would be in the sewers?” being the spark that sets it all off. While I appreciate how dense this quest is—and it definitely has some great moments—there's a fair helping of stupid bullshit that comes with it. Case in point: you never find out who told Salamandra you were in the sewers. It's so important at the beginning and is why you start the investigation off at all and is then dropped. You're left to assume it was The Professor himself who hung around the prison after being released and overheard that Geralt was going cockatrice hunting. And instead of thinking that that's the answer we had to go hire a detective and go on this big fucking Agatha Christie mystery. The detective lives right next to the sewer entrance in this part of the city and you're encouraged to see him right away. But you can wander around doing literally every other quest you can find before this instead and the main quest will wait for you—which is fine, there's nothing wrong with it, it's a nice option. Raymond Maarloeve is the name of the detective and he has a vested interest in finding Salamandra too—since they were responsible for killing his wife and son. Apparently Salamandra was trying to mutate people long before they stole the witcher's secrets and Raymond's boy was one of those victims. His horribly transformed corpse was found a while after the boy was kidnapped, and no one else made the connection that it was his missing son except for him. Over the course of their partnered investigation, Raymond and Geralt will have six suspects. These are: Lucky Leuvaarden. Loosely leisuring lakeside. We've already met this key player of the region's economy, but is all about him as it seems? A true merchant, or a cunning schemer hiding behind the facade of his plain ass NPC model that five hundred other men have in this game? Could he have ties to Salamandra, or perhaps be the mastermind that's funding the whole operation? Toothy Thaler. Tinker, Tailor, Talker, Trader. Tutting Thaler trots through the Temerian town to two tunes. Turning tricks. Taking trades. He claims he's just a simple fence that knows how to bribe the guards well enough to leave him alone. But he was in possession of a witcher's sword—one that presumably belonged to an enemy of Salamandra. He cheats at dice and has the tongue of a serpent sailor. Could he be a fence that deals in Salamandra's secrets as well as stolen goods? Cackling Kalkstein. Charming cordial craftsman? Or cruel coldblooded killer? A seemingly innocuous alchemist in need of your help more than your suspicion—but is this beastly brewer's latest concoction... crime? Was his run in with Salamandra in the Outskirts all it seemed to be, or did Geralt just arrive at the wrong time and sacrifices were made to keep this madman's cover? Randy Ramsmeat. Roaring renegade running rackets round the region. Self-confessed drug boss. Should be a rival of Salamandra and resisting them encroaching on his territory, but can love bloom between a Ram and a Salamander? Has this King of the Underworld turned Prince under the might of Azar Javed and the Professor? Golan Vivaldi. Greedy golem gold grubber. Vicious Vizima vault viper. A banker with many fingers and even more pies. Is he dealing with humans, the Order, the Scoia'tael, or all three? Zoltan claims that Vivaldi is a friend, but has this dwarf's latest deals been made with the Salamandra devil? Captain of the Guard, Vincent “Dick Wolf” Meis. It's nooooot hiiiiim. Throughout this quest you will interrogate multiple characters, try to meet with a witness who ends up being killed before you can get any solid information out of him, stalk people through the streets, track the history of your silver sword, perform an autopsy without knowing how to do one, maybe break into a crypt, and that's just some of the stuff that happens in the streets of Vizima. You can go back into the sewers and wade through a swamp too. What you can't do is get to the rest of the city. For now this Temple Quarter is all you have to explore. If we check out the map we can see a big improvement from the circuit style we were forced into in the previous chapter. There are many more ways to get around and even in the swamp, although it's much larger than the Outskirts, it's much more enjoyable to explore because you have more freedom to choose a direct route from most noteworthy locations. My only gripe is how the slum is sectioned off with only one way in or out. The Hairy Bear Inn is at the end of this path and taverns in this game act as your base of operations. This is where your item storage can be located in each chapter, and it carries over from tavern to tavern. It's also where you can reliably find a resting spot for a small fee and, combined with your stash, makes it the perfect place to brew some potions if you decide to engage with that system. I think a door in the back of the tavern leading up here to where the second floor meets this high street would have worked wonders for cutting down the repetition of running through these slums just to get back here and then running through it again when you want to leave. The game largely gets better about not inconveniencing the player via its streets as the game goes on but I'm surprised these problems in the first chapters weren't addressed. Especially in the Enhanced Edition. Same goes for having to repeatedly select the confirmation that yes, you do indeed want to cross the river via the ferry, whenever you want to go the Swamp. Although this one might be a joke—one that wears out its welcome. What I really like about Vizima is that it feels like a small part of a much larger city. This is something I'm enjoying more and more in video games—when a condensed slice of a place gives the credible impression that the sprawling world around it is actually real—and fully realized if only you could get out of bounds—even though the developers only created this tiny part of it. This feeling in Vizima is also helped by how you do get to explore different parts of it later but, even with the cemetery and Trade Quarter unlocked in Chapter 3, it's still only a fraction of Vizima's true size. Novigrad in Witcher 3 is the most impressive city I have ever seen in a fantasy game or maybe any game at all and I will gush about that when we finally get to it, but Vizima manages to be just as real to me by feeling like it belongs in a larger place that truly exists. There are so many people to speak to. So many buildings you can enter. There are two markets and people coming and going from other areas in the world. It feels like there are enough homes for the amount of people you see walking around. The streets have gutters that fill with rain—people also run for cover whenever a downpour comes along. NPCs have schedules. They eat and sleep. Considering how rough and rushed this first game clearly is I find all of this so amazing. The main quest is the same way. I have many complaints about it—the biggest of which we haven't even gotten to yet—but I can't hate it because it's like nothing else I've seen in an RPG. There's just so many layers and options and so much of it can be rendered obsolete by those decisions. The game responds to your choices and how successful you are at pushing against the boundaries of what you're being told to do. This is how the game springboards off the success of the previous chapter. Now you know that details in this game actually matter and that NPCs are more complex than in most games. They have fully realized lives, back stories, and secrets. Some of these you don't learn until later. For example Carmen, the mistress of the local brothel, appears like a throwaway character at first who is there to simply dispense a side quest that has you kill Salamandra goons that are harassing her girls at night. But she's also the banished, estranged daughter of the Reverend from Chapter One, and is currently in a secret relationship with Vincent. These are two details that don't even come up in Chapter Two. You can take Carmen as your guest to Shani's party and never learn about either of these things about her and, even when you do find out she's the daughter of the Reverend, it's just a low-key revelation. It's not important at all. But it is important to me because it shows so much damn effort in making NPCs more than robotic entities that exist only to serve the player. NPCs with green names usually have more interactions than others but some of them have way more than others. A homeless shoe shiner and a gardener at the hospital have pages between them. But sometimes blue unnamed NPCs can open dialogue trees as well. The world feels real even though it looks fake. Characters lie to you because why wouldn't they? They can also get pissed off if you say the wrong thing to them and they won't talk to you until you've been gone for a while. They don't abide by the same laws that many other video game NPCs follow. You're the famous White Wolf, Witcher Geralt on an important mission. Yeah? So what? Says Vincent and Thaler and Ramsmeat and Kalkstein and Vivaldi and Leuvaarden. They have their own plans and schemes and they have no idea if you're a friend or a foe. Do something for them if you want something in return, but don't be surprised if they continue to keep you at arm's length. Maybe you're working for evil Salamandra after all. How the hell do they know otherwise? The game is built around every character acting in accordance to their own limited perspective. Beautifully, this is exactly how it is in the books and larger world of the witcher. Information isn't always reliable. There are lore books in this game that lie to you because CD Projekt thought about how these books would actually be created—by flawed sources with unreliable perspectives or dishonest ambitions. I can 100% confirm for you that humans aren't originally from this world but this book in the game is going to tell you otherwise—elvish propaganda! It's got to be! Magic is the source of all evil! Witchers don't have feelings! They're emotionless mutants! Witcher 1 wants so badly for you to pay attention to all of this and engage in thinking deeply about its world and stories. The problem comes up when your potential choices don't match or aren't presented reasonably. Clearing the names of the suspects on your list is not a fair task and it's done so awkwardly by Geralt ranting off information in the suspect's face and then concluding whether or not they're innocent. The double flaw here is that sometimes this is done with ridiculous leaps of faith and even after Geralt is satisfied that he's correct you can later learn that he wasn't. Yet the quest slashes off a name like you're Sherlock Holmes moved on from the Hounds of the Outskirts to your latest greatest deduction. You learn that Vivaldi has lost control of his bank. The Professor was released from jail at the beginning due to bail money being provided from said bank. But learning that Vivaldi isn't in charge of it anymore is the instant trigger for him being concluded innocent. There could be much more going on with this like a double deception or it being used as a cover to move money but no. Innocent for sure. Leuvaarden can be cleared when you find someone buying Salamandra badges at the Hairy Bear and pressure them successfully for info about who they work for. Apparently Leuvaarden buying these badges is enough to deem him innocent, even though he could be using these purchases as a front on Salamandra's behalf to discover any enemies they have that are killing their people. Vincent Meis is crossed off if you discover one of Ramsmeat's men named Coleman is an informant for him against Salamandra. Which doesn't mean anything really since Vincent could still be working for more than one group. Ramsmeat himself, as well as Kalkstein, are a bit trickier and the best of the six. Thaler is the most bizarre. Proving his innocence on your own requires that you decide to stalk a Mysterious Man through Vizima at night so you see him enter Thaler's house to sell some stolen goods, definitively proving that Thaler really is the fence he claims to be. There's no clue at all that this man is related to Thaler or the quest, or that Thaler's position as a fence is even doubted enough to warrant proving. Or that proving it even means that he's not working for Salamandra on top of being a fence. But this is the final piece of the grand puzzle for Geralt to determine his innocence and, to top it all off, it's WRONG. Thaler is a Temerian spy pretending to be a fence to help keep the peace in the city. He's King Foltest's right-hand man and is here trying to prevent the political situation in Vizima from getting any worse—which is a conflict Geralt isn't aware of yet. You may have already picked up on the problem. This quest isn't about appeasing any in-game logic. It's just about Geralt. All that matters is if Geralt believes it. And maybe that makes much of this weirdness palatable for some of you but I find it frustrating because Geralt leaps to these conclusions without you and then sticks to them. You're in total control of this character until all of a sudden, like it's an exorcism, he starts spewing dialogue out of nowhere that you might strongly disagree with. The big punchline I haven't revealed yet is that none of your six suspects are working for Salamandra. After all of this, all of them are innocent. The true culprit? Raymond the detective that you hired to help. But it's also not Raymond. There's a wounded Salamandra bandit in the hospital that has information and is willing to cooperate as a witness. When you visit him you're attacked by Ramsmeat's thugs so all you have time to hear is the witness say the name “Kalkstein”. After you confront Kalkstein about this, and are rebuked for not having any stronger evidence, a phase change occurs in the quest and Raymond is attacked by Salamanda when you next visit him. You come to his rescue and he decides he has to leave for a while to lose their trail. And this is the last time you ever see him. When Raymond returns it's not the real Raymond. It's Azar Javed using a magical disguise. I need you to understand how difficult it is to grasp all the intricacies of this quest. I had to do a ton of testing with different suspects and quest phases to find out when this attack on Raymond occurs and I'm still not entirely sure that this Kalkstein trigger is the only one that causes it. It seems to have to be this one because when Fake-Raymond comes back he wants Geralt to perform an autopsy on the now-dead witness you spoke to in the hospital. Which is a whole other complicated mess all on its own. I had to do similar testing on every suspect to see where the progression points were. And to make it worse there's multiple ways you can clear some suspects. At this stage of the Chapter you can work out that Raymond has been replaced by exploring the cemetery. But the cemetery is so hard to get into that many people who play this game never enter it during Chapter Two on their first playthrough. You need to clear either Thaler or Vincent to gain access to the cemetery and, after doing so, you can find the corpse of the real Raymond laying in a bricked up part of a crypt. But wait, there's more. There are two other ways you can learn the truth. One is by clearing the names of enough people on the list. On my second playthrough Geralt just blurted it out after concluding that Leuvaarden was innocent. I actually screamed aloud “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT” after this happened because it makes no god damn sense. We hadn't even done the autopsy scene yet and Geralt leaps to Raymond being magically replaced. You can actually go and confront Not-Raymond after this in what is one of the funniest scenes in the whole game. It is so painfully, UTTERLY obvious that Geralt has figured out the ruse as he asks question after question and yet Azar Javed keeps providing stupidly snide answers until blatantly warning Geralt “are you sure you want to do this?” and then you die if you don't let it go. But you can still just solve the mystery with him if you do let it go like all these questions were for nothing. There's no winning this fight either you just die. Even though the main goal of the game is to defeat this guy in a fight. Something similar happens earlier in the chapter when Raymond is still Raymond. The Professor and his gang is waiting outside for Geralt and he decides to eavesdrop and then lets The Professor go—even though his main goal here is to catch The Professor. This isn't about avoiding a fight either because then you kill the whole gang immediately, just after The Professor casually gets to leave. It's bizarre. The final way to learn that Raymond has been replaced is the autopsy. This is also the way you clear Ramsmeat and Kalkstein from your suspect list. Apart from actually finding the corpse of the real Raymond of course. The autopsy is a perfect specimen to sum up Witcher 1 since it's both brilliant and terrible at the same time. The idea behind it is so good and its implementation mostly succeeds, but the flaws are glaring. Let's begin. Shani is required to act as your coroner. You also need to retrieve the body from the grave digger in exchange for a bottle of dwarven alcohol. There are multiple ways that you can prepare for this procedure. You can purchase a book on forensic science and, unbeknownst to you on your first time through, another book called Zerrikanian Insects and Other Vermin. There are also NPC sources for this information from these books—the constant gardener outside the hospital can fill the same hole in Geralt's memory about the foreign insects—and, in what is by far one of the most strange things in the whole game, simply asking the gravedigger about the corpse in a different option than the one that you use to get the corpse delivered to the hospital somehow grants Geralt extensive enough knowledge about autopsies that it unlocks options to direct Shani. The last of the bad stuff here is that you can become locked into progression paths during this autopsy. You may think you're exploring options but some of them push you down the path of a conclusion that you've already started. It's completely different to the other autopsies that you do in Witcher 3 where you can explore every option. This isn't just a standard investigation—this corpse is a piece of theater prepared by Azar Javed. That quality of the setpiece is really good and why I think the autopsy is so impressive, but it feels unfair that you can be deceived just from exploring dialogue options. Also, asking Not-Raymond for autopsy tips provides information to nudge Geralt into getting the conclusion that Javed wants you to make, which is a part of this quest that I really like. In any other game this would be an NPC providing you with enough information so you can understand the context of this autopsy that you're doing without having any forensic medical background yourself as a player of course. But here it masquerades as that quality and is instead pushing you deeper into Javed's deception if you follow his advice. It's great. If you only defer to Shani's expertise throughout this you will fall for that trap, but there are two layers to this. If you don't choose your inspections carefully enough or don't have the required knowledge to open up those inspection choices you will conclude that Ramsmeat had the man killed with a stab to the heart. If you push further then you will think Kalkstein did it instead—the man has been poisoned. The cirrhotic liver and his missing tongue prove it. And this is so clever on Javed's part since the first layer of deception that he put on the corpse's story now looks like Kalkstein trying to cover his tracks instead of Javed. Instead there's another layer that requires knowledge of an insect from a distant land—Zerrikania, where Azar Javed happens to come from. The eggs of a species of fly looks like fisstech—which is the witcher world equivalent of cocaine and is snorted in the same way. It's also a drug that has come up quite a few times in the game so far. There's a guard in the city jail that's addicted to the stuff and keeps sniffing whenever you talk to him. The flies usually lay their eggs in the noses of their victims and they hatch and then burrow into the brain to kill them. On the day that the witness died, Shani was given fisstech by Raymond since she didn't have anything else to give the dying man as a painkiller, which was his way of having the witness killed before he could talk and then he tampered with the corpse later. If you have this knowledge then you confirm this out by having Shani crack open the man's skull to determine the true cause of death and conclude that Raymond has been replaced. I really do appreciate how conniving this section is since most games would have only one deception to see through. It's yet another example of the thought processes of the characters in this game being taken further than most. However I can't ignore the problems here. Azar Javed is a supremely powerful sorcerer. He could have had this witness killed in a much easier way via his magic that still implicated a different suspect. Teleportation is also one of the easiest abilities magic-users have in this world and yet Javed left the real Raymond's corpse in too easy of a place to find. Yeah it isn't that easy for most people to enter the cemetery but Geralt is a resourceful witcher—a profession that is often hired to go hunting through crypts on ghoulish contracts. Javed could wave his hand and have this corpse be sent hundreds of miles away. Then there's the importance of the witness. Geralt has killed dozens of Salamandra's men by now and he's more than capable of capturing one to interrogate, just like Vincent Meis tries to do in an optional side bit in the slums, and yet this witness is the only one that remains important. If you're deceived during this autopsy then Not-Raymond has you attack and kill Ramsmeat, even if you concluded it was Kalkstein. This makes sense since Geralt is fooled enough by having a guilty target that he believes Not-Raymond's claims about Ramsmeat being involved as part of them successfully cracking the case. This is Javed using Geralt as a tool now to eliminate a rival gang in Vizima since Salamandra wants to take over the drug trade in the city. This is why Javed is going to all the trouble to deceive Geralt now when he could just flick his wrist and kill Geralt on the spot. If you're not fooled then you lie to Not-Raymond by saying the autopsy was a bust. Not-Raymond tries to sell you the same lie about Ramsmeat being involved with Salamandra and instead of killing him you tell Ramsmeat the truth and have him go into hiding so you can both trick Javed. Kalkstein also helps and suggests that you lure Not-Raymond to a tower in the swamp—where the nearby water will weaken Javed's powers because he is a fire mage, and because the secrets they can recover from the tower will be a good lure to get him there. If you are fooled then Not-Raymond suggests pretty much the exact same thing but as a trap for Kalkstein instead. Which makes me realize I've barely spoken about the swamp section and the other half of the main quest in Chapter Two. This is fitting because every time I played through the game I also completely forgot about this quest line: gathering the ten sephirot stones for Kalkstein's research. These stones seem to be a reference to the 10 sefirot of the Kabbalah in Jewish mysticism. Like with most real world references in this series, the original its based on has been twisted over time, likely as it was passed down through many generations from the first humans that arrived in this world from Earth. Similarly, Sapkowski's The Tower of Swallows has a character quote a morphed version of the bible that's also called “The Good Book”. In the swamp there is an altar to match each of the sephirot stones. This quest is here to give you a reason to explore. It's a Chapter-wide scavenger hunt and the sole reason why you enter this cave system, help these villagers, defeat this golem, and so on. All the while you're being pushed into finding new NPCs and new quests and new things to do in the game. It's also an example of the strangely spiritual side of this world since once the quest to find all the stones has properly started—and researched via books you get from Golan Vivaldi—you learn that one of the stones must be found purely by chance. When you're not looking for it. This ends up being in Azar Javed's possession and you're given it before the final showdown as a way to keep the tower locked until you've completed these two halves of this main quest for this chapter. For side quests there are more in chapter two that are independent from the main story than there were in chapter one. They still add some backstory to the city but quests like clearing a house of monsters for rare wine or a group of bandits stupidly trying to mug a witcher are clearly their own separate thing. Curiously there are a handful of stories that appear irrelevant to the main quest that are actually set up for main quest content later in the game. Gathering these flowers for the leader of the lumberjacks in the swamp seems about as far removed from the main quest as you could possibly get, but it's showing you that the swamp is a source of ingredients for drug production that Salamandra will be here for later. Same for helping the brickmakers in this area which leads you to discovering that Berengar was probably killed by Salamandra near their village. Their request that you try to find one of their lost children also seems firmly side content but it's something that can't be resolved until a main quest in Chapter Three. There are also side-tasks given to you by main quest characters that give you more insight about them. Then there's the quest chain about the origins of your silver sword that you got in the opening which ends up not being Berengar's after all. It belonged to someone named Coen, a witcher that dies in the books. A death that Shani witnessed and you can talk about it with her. Shani also hosts her party after the autopsy is complete, because there's no better way to forget performing an illegal corpse rummage than getting drunk with some of your friends. Social events like this, where Geralt is paired with a love interest, happen quite often throughout these games. Witcher 2 is the exception and doesn't have one. Witcher 1 has two. Witcher 3—if you include the DLC—has four. You can choose to bring one of three people as your guest and this decision surprisingly matters quite a lot. Your potential party goers are: Zoltan, who can be found stomping through the streets during Chapter Two. Siegfried who is usually in his room next to the Order's stronghold. Or Carmen, who is outside her brothel. You have to pay for her though, whereas the other two will come just because you ask them. No matter who you bring, Dandelion shows up as Shani's guest and there is always romantic tension between her and Geralt. If Siegfried is your guest then he and Shani hit it off and Geralt appears to be a tiny bit jealous. If Carmen is your guest then she makes Shani a little jealous, which prompts some funny dialogue when Dandelion defends Carmen's honor as an escort—and rightfully so, imo. Zoltan is the most benign guest and the one that fits with the group the most, but no matter who is present here you are given the sneaky task to go downstairs and steal something. Shani rents the top floor of this house from an old woman who is one of the first “dialogue boss fights” in the series. She also blocks one of the hardest romance cards to get in the game. If Carmen is present you're tasked with Solid Snaking downstairs to steal the old woman's diary. If it's Siegfried then you go down for some more drinks. And if it's Zoltan he wants her pickles and lard to munch on cause all the drinking has made him hungry. Incredibly at the end of the night Dandelion performs a unique song determined by who is the guest—as he attempts to either push Shani and Geralt together or keep the peace if the guest has spurred some jealousy in one of them. This doesn't stop Siegfried from also singing or Carmen and Shani getting catty. No matter what you can return after the party and, assuming you can get past the grandmother downstairs, you can present a rose to Shani. Which begins a relationship between her and Geralt. A sex card shows up to confirm this relationship, just like what happens in real life. There are some hiccups here. Shani and Geralt almost slept together once before in the books. Dandelion accidentally interrupted them and that event is referenced here before Shani and Geralt finish what they started, years later. The problem is that Geralt brings this up as if in response to Dandelion telling the story during the party—and that only happens if Carmen is the guest. Dandelion doesn't bring this up if Zoltan or Siegfried are there, and so this line Geralt speaks is going to make no god damn sense for most people who play this part. And Geralt shouldn't even know about it unless Dandelion brought it up. The much bigger problem is that Dandelion talks about Regis the Vampire in this scene. In the books Geralt befriends this higher vampire and learns that they only drink blood the same way that humans recreationally eat sweets or drink alcohol. Regis dies in the books helping Geralt—this is also something Dandelion explains during the party so don't shout spoilers at me just yet. But the problem is he doesn't talk about anything else. If you've read the books or played Witcher 3 then you know how important Yennefer and Ciri are to not just Geralt, but also Dandelion, Triss, Vesemir, the other witchers, and even Zoltan a little bit. This is a Top Tier issue in the series: how the first two games just ignore Yennefer and Ciri. We're going to talk about it far more in-depth in the Witcher 3 section but it's worth acknowledging now because it calls into question whether Witcher 1 is even canon, or should be considered an unreliable source of Geralt's story for this game just to abolish this gaping flaw. But for now let's talk about sex. Shani isn't the only opportunity you have in Chapter Two to expand your deck, but she is the most serious about it. Shani and Triss's attitude toward Geralt make me uncomfortable about how the game treats sexual encounters with other women. Most of the time it's heavily implied that Geralt is always in an open relationship and it's only serious “could fall in love” romances with other women that's a problem—Triss seems to enjoy this benefit as well from what she says in Witcher 2, and she reads Geralt's mind enough to know about all the women he sleeps with and never tells him it's an issue—aside from Shani. As does Yennefer in Witcher 3—aside from Triss. But then every so often something happens to call these open relationships into question. Even worse is that not all of the sexual encounters are consensual. For the minor controversy that the sex cards made when this game was first released, at least no one can claim that any of the women Geralt sleeps with are being taken advantage of by him. All the women that have sex with Geralt in this game want to have sex with Geralt. However the opposite is not true, and there are at least two times in later chapters when sex is arguably forced on Geralt. Back in Chapter Two there's a half-elf that you can rescue and accidentally have sex with while you think you're just learning about the elfish language and Geralt is recovering some memories. You're probably picking up on how many times I've said “accidental sex” by now and it really does feel like that as you play—sometimes the dialogue options don't appear like they're building to a sexual encounter that just appears. If you treated sex as a fail state then Witcher 1 could be a horror game. You can pay for some quality time with some of Carmen's girls. Convince a dryad that sex can be something pleasurable and not necessarily only for procreation, you devil you. There's a Gossip in town that has one of the funniest romance cards with her choking a chicken. And then there's the hidden romance card with Shani. Grandma is one of those quirky parts of Witcher 1 that can be annoying when you play but then becomes retroactively entertaining. There's something funny about the frustration of this old lady blocking you from seeing Shani again and again. There are two ways to permanently resolve the “problem” and both are extreme. The first is that you answer her questions incorrectly enough times, and then snap at her harshly after the party, that she drops down dead. The second is one of the best hidden secrets of the game: that you convince her you're such a polite dashing young man with the best intentions that she accepts your coming and going and no longer harasses you at the door. Just be aware that this is a line you have to walk carefully since, as Grandma's diary proves, the old lady has quite a storied history. Wine and shine her a little too much and you'll have one of the strangest cards added to your collection. To close out Chapter Two let's look at choices. So much of what we just saw is optional. The party. Taking pity on the kitty. Many side quests. The cemetery. Even the autopsy. You don't need to clear every suspect—although talking to Shani after the party is another way to get Thaler off your list, since the two of them were once dating and she learned that he's a spy. He's a lot younger than his Witcher 1 model makes him out to be as you can see from how he looks in Witcher 3. This revelation from Shani is another cool way that side content isn't really side content. Most of it feeds into each other. As we spoke about earlier, skipping content isn't always something the game is prepared for. Another example—also with Shani—is that if you avoid speaking to her throughout Chapter Two, never do the autopsy and don't even learn she's planning a party, she still thinks you're dating her in Chapter Three as if it still all happened, including keeping Grandma up all night. So it's not exactly fair that one of the answers to an important quest in Chapter Two is to abstain. Yaevinn wants you to help the Scoia'tael by delivering a message to Golan Vivaldi asking for financial aid. If you do this then Siegfried appears in the swamp with a group of knights to scout the area. There will be a battle—the first of many—between the Order and Scoia'tael because of this. Both Yaevinn and Siegfried ask for your help and you don't really know what you're getting into here—and that's a good thing, not every decision should be broadcast to you. Nevertheless this choice will make you gain or lose favor with each of these groups. The blacksmiths that both sides have in Vizima will either start or stop accepting you as a customer depending on your choice. But here simply staying out of it is a valid decision and the game is prepared for you to do that. Remaining neutral—for the only time you can avoid fighting either of these factions. Your choice with the Scoia'tael in Chapter One will also come back to haunt you by impeding your investigation with Raymond. If you let them have the supplies outside Haren Brogg's house then Captain Vincent's informant, Coleman, will be killed in the Hairy Bear shortly into the Chapter. This is one of the best ways to clear the Captain from your suspect list that's gone forever, as is completing a delivery quest if you don't turn it in early enough. If you don't allow the Scoia'tael to have these supplies then you will have to kill them. This causes Haren Brogg to fear revenge by the rest of the unit they belong to and so he sells them out to the city authorities—and still dies in the process. Vivaldi's nephew happens to be a part of this unit and so the banker is arrested under the suspicion of collaborating with them in Chapter Two. You'll need to bail him out of jail if you want to use him and the books he has to progress the main quest with Kalkstein. I really enjoy this butterfly effect style of choices and consequences. This was also one that caught me by surprise on my third playthrough because I usually give the supplies to the Scoia'tael, and I thought the only consequence from that was whether Coleman lives or dies. Unfortunately the main choice at the end of this chapter is weak. Whether you ambush Azar Javed at the tower after seeing through his deception, or being fooled by his ruse and being ambushed yourself, the outcome is largely the same. This is especially disappointing considering that Kalkstein suggests attacking Javed here because his fire mage abilities would be weakened by all the water around the tower—which is a true thing and even confirmed by Javed himself in this battle. And yet Javed still attacks you here even if he's successfully fooled you. It's not like the fight is easier either since The Professor is called to help him no matter what. The cinematic that plays before the fight is the only change—although I guess any players that are actually fooled by this their first time through also have the shock that they've been duped. The story of Raymond ends quite tragically and I wish the game paid a little more attention to that. His real corpse vanishes from the crypt after this. It also vanishes if you attack Ramsmeat after the autopsy so that's the cutoff. For some reason you're locked into being duped by Javed's disguise if you take things this far and I think it's a bit lame that the corpse just vanishes for no reason that's linked to this attack. There is one other consequence tied to whether you get tricked or not but it doesn't happen until the end of Chapter Three. For now, no matter what choices you made Geralt is defeated by a poison smoke bomb. For some reason The Professor and Javed don't use this opportunity to kill the witcher and instead flee, which is a forced way to have Geralt black out at the end of the Chapter so we can transition to the next phase of the story—and so Triss can kind of rape Geralt. The complexities of Geralt's relationship with Triss require full knowledge of the books and all three games to understand. Especially when it comes to judging her actions in this game. There is a section of this video series devoted to just that, including Yennefer's side of it all, in the Witcher 3 portion. We're not ready to discuss it right now but I think it's important to mention, as we see this scene with Triss pouncing on Geralt play out, that you can make a very strong argument that she is raping him here. Triss is lying to Geralt in more ways than one and even admits to at least some guilt in Witcher 3. And she will exert herself onto Geralt in this scene whether you initiated sex with her in Kaer Morhen or not. However, the fact that Dandelion, Zoltan, or any other witcher does not bring up Yennefer or Ciri either make it equally possible to argue that there's nothing wrong with this scene. Triss and Geralt have a strange but healthy relationship. But it's hard to buy in to that completely seeing as, if we rewind this part, another sorceress kind of tells Triss off for what she's doing. Who this is, and what they mean, is never confirmed. It could relate to cut content or was a line that was planned to link to something in the sequel and that CD Projekt changed their minds. To me, I think it's clear that this sorceress in the mirror is Philipa Eilhart, an astoundingly complex character from the books and one we will be meeting in Witcher 2. And I think it's equally clear that “what you're hiding” is that Geralt was madly in love with Yennefer before he supposedly died and still would be if it weren't for his amnesia. Which makes this... ...disgusting. However it's more complicated than that and so I find it difficult to judge Triss—even in this scene she's encouraging him to regain his memory on his own and doesn't want him to be too influenced by “her vision of Geralt”. For the sake of finishing the Witcher 1 portion of this video without opening the can of worms that is the book comparisons, let's move on with the assumption that Triss is not a rapist. Chapter Three is when you get a new area of Vizima to explore—the trade quarter with its new crowd of NPCs, stories, and side quests. At night the peace of the streets in the Temple Quarter of Chapter Two could be interrupted by bandits and lesser vampires. In the Trade Quarter there's a kikimore problem. You can still go back to visit the Temple Quarter, the Swamp, the sewers, and the game even has main quests that make you do that. The game alleviates some of the tedium of doing so by having the Trade Quarter be another map that has multiple paths to get around, and you now have access to three fast travel points that link major locations instead of just the one you had in Chapter Two that linked back to Kalkstein's Lab. Nevertheless this is where the game retreads the same ground (literally). I still found it interesting but some people may find that boring. Chapter Three is when the final parts of the foundation are laid down for the ending and many people seem to dislike these narrative set up sections in media, so I'm going to propose that—aside from the god awful Prologue—Chapter Three is probably the worst part of the game for most players. Chapter Four is a break from that and serves as time for the major characters of the story to assemble for the final showdown in Chapter Five. For that reason there is blissfully less to speak about in Chapter Three. The main quest is a series of assaults on Salamandra's operations that are some of the most dull in the game: attack their base in the sewers, stop their harvesting groups in the swamp, and then coordinate with the city guards to break into their secret base in the Trade Quarter. Geralt himself criticizes the way the investigation has become routine when Leuvaarden gives him his “orders”. It's everything else outside of Salamandra that makes Chapter Three interesting for me. This is a constant problem throughout the game—the main villains simply aren't compelling. I'd go as far as saying this is a problem the entire series has, including the books. The forces that stand against Geralt have the potential to be great adversaries, especially The Wild Hunt, ******, and Letho, but they just aren't done well. Worst among them is probably Salamandra and it significantly dulls what I consider to be the fantastic ending of this game. There's a big reveal at the end that re-contextualizes the antagonists in a meaningful way but it comes after so many hours of boring interactions that I understand why some people wouldn't care anymore. One of the best results of Witcher 1's structure is that it becomes episodic. There's a time jump as well as movement to a new location with each Chapter and that allows for development of most characters you meet and interact with. Something similar to this can be found in many other RPGs with characters in your party having sections of their stories reserved for release after the completion of each mission, but Witcher 1 stands out by having characters go through change independently of whatever the player is doing—because the world itself is going through progress marching on. Dragon Age 2 also did this with its sections using time jumps and staying rooted in the same city setting of Kirkwall. This makes the world built around the game feel much more credible but it goes beyond just simple immersion. I enjoyed getting to know many of these characters and seeing that they were going through development, no matter how minor, made me more attached to them. I looked forward to seeing what would happen next and it had the side-effect of making me pay more attention to future characters when they showed up since I had learned to view them as more than disposable dialogue dispensers. An example being Carmen and Vincent Meis. This story could have easily had new characters appear to be these lovers in conflict who are trying to overcome the curse of lycanthropy, but instead it builds on previous established characters and deepens the story through that choice. It also enriches your second playthrough too when you interact with these characters before getting to Chapter Three and learning this about them. This is what makes the writing in Witcher 1 so god damn strange—there are so many instances that I can point out genuine brilliance, like this philosophical conversation you can have with Zoltan in Chapter Two about witchers and their place in the world and their future when there are fewer and fewer monsters to kill. But then there are moments like this that sound like they were written by aliens. This progress on some characters is carried right to the end of the game but sadly that's not the case for the majority of them. For now though, in Chapter Three events are being built on everything that's happened so far: you fight more Salamandra than ever. Triss is back. So is Alvin, which may be a surprise since he was absent for all of Chapter Two and you might have thought he was only a Chapter One character. Things escalate between the Scoia'tael and the Order but hopefully not before you get to do quests for them. You also have a chance to meet with Radovid, the King of Redania, in quite a modest way for a character who becomes one of the most important in the whole series. Like in every chapter, some side quests here are filler witcher work—collect monster parts to prove you killed a bunch of beasties, as well as two mini-bosses that are still just normal monsters with larger health bars. In this chapter your game-wide total of hours spent in this swamp will likely reach double digits. There are so many monster fights here, including an optional nest of wyverns that guard a sword upgrade, that I think it's a good time to finally finish discussing how combat works in this game now that we've seen so much of it. The best way to understand the swordplay in Witcher 1 is to think of every click of an attack as a spell being cast. You still need to be roughly in melee range for the spell to begin but the damage and any other effects that it has are entirely independent of the attack animation. You can see this best when Geralt starts an attack that will hit multiple times from just one click but is interrupted in the middle of it. The “strikes” that he has been prevented from animating still complete and deal damage—without the animation. In this way sword attacks aren't much different to signs—except that they have a much shorter wind up animation and they don't require stamina to use. This is a fine system for this game which, we must remember, only looks like an action game. I would prefer action combat of course but it's easy for me to accept Witcher 1 was intended to be a classic RPG first. But it still has some problems within this limitation that stem from this choice: the worst being that sometimes attacks will fail to start because the conditions for the “spell” to begin aren't being met—usually that there isn't a viable target since Geralt can't swing his sword at nothing sort of like hotbar abilities in MMOs like World of Warcraft also need viable targets to function. This results in frustration when Geralt snaps in and out of these failed sword swings and you're not sure if you did something wrong or not. The worst of the worst is when this happens in the middle of a chain attack when you get the continuation timing right but the game still resets your combo. Sometimes enemies will enter states of invulnerability that don't make sense but it's not really invulnerability it's more like they're an invalid target to get the spell system going—like when they first emerge from a burrowed state, or when they're knocked onto the floor, or if there's another enemy nearby that can block an attack even if they're not the ones being targeted. However it's been about two hours since I first said this so I do want to reiterate that this combat system is mostly acceptable for providing context to encounters and allowing character progression for Geralt through his ability unlocks. Plus this is the only game in this series that uses this system, because there's no way that Witcher 2 and 3 would have the same “melee swings are actually spells with the animations synchronized to when damage is dealt” right? Outside of the swamp, Chapter Three is strange. It has some of the most important decisions in the game as well as some equally important moments of reflection for Geralt. Despite this, there's only one Impactful Choice consequence from previous chapters that makes any difference in Chapter Three—and even then it's really an insignificant change that happens right at the end. Naturally, that means we have to speak about free will. How else do you think I got this video series to be so long? There's an ongoing debate about determinism. My flawed summary of the question is: do humans have free will or are we walking algorithms? There's no denying that you do in fact make choices. Or for the sake of discussion and just living in reality—it's axiomatic. We all assess the situations we're in, weigh all the information we have available to us, and then make conclusions based on all of that data—whether our decisions end up being poorly made or badly informed is irrelevant. We still undeniably make the decisions even if we don't always have the power to act on them. But here's the killer hypothetical. Imagine you find a djinn in a bottle—a genie in a lamp. If you're watching this you're probably a millennial so you don't like how your life has gone so far, so you wish to start over and be born again for a second shot—same parents, same life, same year. It's a big rewind. However the devious genie gives you your wish literally and also wipes your memory of your first go around. So you are placed back in the exact same start at life unaware that it's your second time. Maybe it's already happened as you're listening to me right now. The question is would that second version of you make the exact same decisions you did the first time? Would you end up, however many years later, literally holding the same lamp asking for literally the same wish while the genie patiently waits for two more cycles to be over so it can confound you by saying “you've already had your three wishes, go away.” If your answer to this question is “no, some decisions would be made differently” then you believe more in free will. If your answer is “yes, nothing would change” then you believe everything is predetermined by past actions and that we are more like algorithms that have tricked ourselves into thinking we have more freedom of choice than we actually do. The unsettling thing about the deterministic argument is that with a theoretically (and probably supernaturally) powerful enough computer, you could calculate the future. Of course the calculations by the computer would also then be accounted for by your decision algorithm when you read them but then the computer would also account for that too as well as retroactively factoring in its own creation and away it goes repeating to infinity forever. Fun. This all sounds so lofty for a critique on a video game series, but games with decisions to make can provide some potent commentary on the nature of free will and consciousness. We saw it in SOMA. A little bit in Prey. Sonic the Hedgehog—of course, it goes without saying. And now the Witcher series. This is one of the more interesting parts of the games for me that gets better as you import save files between them but it's also something that many people dislike about the series: that Geralt is a predetermined character. Ironically though, despite this, the games support the idea of free will. Decisions can only be made within the bounds of what Geralt would consider to be a reasonable reaction in these moments. Of course there's a difference between Book-Geralt, Amnesia-Geralt, and Post-Amnesia-Geralt. But within those confines all the possibilities make sense. Almost all of the time. There's no extremely evil or extremely righteous options. When Geralt is choosing whether to help the Order, the Scoia'tael, or remain neutral it really is an internal deliberation that could tip one of those three ways, along with whether or not he's happy or regrets his decision later. Over the course of these three games we see a canonical exploration of free will being expressed because the players get to resolve that internal struggle—of course that still doesn't prove anything regarding determinism because the players themselves are replacing Geralt's algorithm for decisions with their own. Assuming that's the side you view as correct, of course. I can't think of another game that does this with meaningful, impactful decisions. Those that try usually provide far too much variance in the options that the player character can swing rapidly between two opposed extremes. There's of course some commentary to be made there about the dreaded DUALITY OF MAN, but the Witcher's narrower scope on decisions which still end up with greater consequences than in most games is much more interesting to me. That's not to say that the series is pristine about this as we'll see in Witcher 2, but I think the way this acts as an anchor to every decision makes the changes that result from said choices much more interesting—even if I usually prefer having a blank slate character in RPGs. Geralt verbalizes this process in Chapter Three as he speaks to Triss. He's concerned about his amnesia and wants her advice about his decisions since he believes that she's his most trustworthy source on the Geralt of yesteryear. And she reinforces this idea that every decision you make is within the bounds of the Geralt-Sphere because she always understands what you do no matter the side you take. Aside from one. So maybe it's not ironic that there's only one Impactful Consequence in this chapter. Maybe it's intentional. A checkpoint on where Geralt views himself and also where the most important decisions begin. Do you choose Shani or Triss to be your girl? Do you choose Siegfried or Yaevinn to be your boy? And a handful more. The main quest involves attending a party hosted by Leuvaarden which is where you will meet Princess Adda, who is the fourth major female character in a row with red hair that wants to romance Geralt. I guess that's why they called themselves CD Projekt RED. Adda is the Striga from the opening cinematic. This can be a little confusing because in the books the Striga doesn't have a name and the Striga's mother was named Adda. She was the sister of Foltest, who is the King of Temeria, and so this Striga is a product of incest but that's not why she became a monster. There was a separate curse placed on them by a jealous noble who loved Mother Adda and didn't fully understand what the results of said curse would be. That noble is the man Geralt uses as bait in the cinematic before he breaks the curse and the surviving girl is presumably then named Adda in honor of her departed mother some time later. Which is super weird considering the King was in love her but... it's a different time. This Adda wants to have sex with Geralt, because of course she does. Who doesn't? It's one of the other sexual encounters that skirts dangerously close to rape to me but you can turn her down—risking the anger of the Princess and an execution by doing so. Before this you have to entertain her and have Triss conjure her some raw meat—she has unusual appetites and that's one of the lingering effects of the curse that Geralt warned could return. This is the first of two romance cards linked to Adda—you can only get the second one if you don't give her the raw meat and avoid the sex decision altogether. If you do go along with her demands then you get some ominous imagery when Geralt's wolf medallion starts to vibrate—which is a sign he's in danger—after Adda knocks it across in the room. It's foreplay and foreshadowing at the same time. And it's good that Adda doesn't see it vibrating cause she probably would have wanted to use it with Geralt. King Foltest is currently away from the city and it's in this party scene that you properly learn about the chaos that that's causing. Thaler is here and has one of the best conversations in the game—he maintains the charade of being less than a spy by speaking through a noble knight proxy that has taken a vow of silence. If you're carrying enough of the right type of alcohol you can break through his vow and show Thaler up. Regardless, later on he will switch character—and the voice he uses—in such a smooth way that he immediately became one of my favorite people in the series. So you understand that it hurt to kill him right after this on my third playthrough. Someone is issuing fake royal edicts while the King is away. Spoilers: it's Adda who is being used by a knight of the Order named De Wett—who is also a Nilfgaardian. Confused yet? Hopefully not. For the sake of clarity think “Empire from Star Wars” whenever you hear Nilfgaard although if you read the books it's more morally gray than that. They're an expanding empire from south of where the Witcher stories take place. Think of it as like Rome taking over the rest of Europe. They've already been fended off from conquering the Northern Realms twice before now—that's what the intro speech was referencing—but they were defeated just barely. Killing Thaler is a choice that I think most players are going to refuse. De Wett is the one pushing you to do it and his villainy is so blunt that you can tell he's one of Bad News Bears. Despite that I killed Thaler on my Order playthrough because I wanted to see what would happen—if he lives then you get a message from him in Witcher 2, and he also shows up again in Witcher 3 for one of the most important quests in that game. I wanted to see how those moments would change if Geralt killed him in Witcher 1. So stay tuned if you want to find out if you're also curious. (one of you watching just audibly let out an ooooohhhhhh nooooooo in response to this, I know it) Surprisingly this choice changes very little in this game. De Wett doesn't trust you any more than before, and even if saved Thaler will go into hiding and won't return in later chapters. This feels like content CD Projekt ran out of time to include and it's not the only one. We'll get to that. The choice between the Scoia'tael and the Order matters much more. They each have their own separate side quests in Chapter 3. The Scoia'tael want you to clear a powerful monster from elven ruins beneath the city—every major human city in this world is built on the ruins of an elven one like this, because again this planet belonged to elves before the humans got here. Doing this for them awakens a teleporter that acts as a secret entrance for the Scoia'tael to enter the city. Meanwhile the Order want you to investigate what's killing people in the cemetery. Initially it appears to be a ghoul but then you meet the monster and it can talk! Turns out this special ghoul is sentient and doesn't kill people—it's feasting on the victims of a Scoia'tael group that operate in the area. Nearby you can find them back at it again at Krispy Kreme murdering people right now and are given a choice—either kill the murderous terrorists but not have enough time to save the group of humans that have been trapped by them in the nearby crypt. Or let the Scoia'tael go and save the people inside instead. This is ignoring the choice you have when you speak to the ghoul—do you believe it or choose to kill it? If you choose violence then the decision causes one of those dimensional ripples and the Scoia'tael vanish from the cemetery and the crypt situation doesn't happen for no reason that's tied to this decision. Regardless, you can report back to Siegfried and finish this quest in three ways. He's most happy if you let the Scoia'tael go and instead save the people they trapped in the crypt. Siegfried marches off in search of the terrorists and, sometimes, this triggers main quest progression. See these aren't really side quests even though they're optional because this game is a beautiful bastard mess that seems to actively resist attempts at people analyzing it by being so god damn complicated. The Scoia'tael are planning a bank robbery. In Chapter Two Vivaldi turns down Yaevinn when you deliver that note, but Yaevinn reads between the lines and understands Vivaldi has lost control of his bank—which is how you cleared him of working with Salamandra earlier. So the Scoia'tael use this portal under the city as a staging ground to climb through the sewers into the bank to rob it to fund their war against humans. The Order are called in to handle the situation after Yaevinn and his people take hostages in the bank during the botched robbery. The conflict you've been seeing throughout the game so far has built to this, and will explode even more a little later. At some point in Chapter Three, if you do enough quests and the party scene with Leuvaarden, time will pass and the heist begins. The Scoia'tael want the witcher's help clearing those ruins in the sewers but they don't need it. If you don't offer your services soon enough they presumably just go for it and lose more people fighting this monster in the process. And the Scoia'tael you can meet in the cemetery on the Order quest are also a part of this unit. Geralt is called in and you can either try to negotiate alone or enter with Siegfried. This is the only time in the game that you are forced to pick a side, even if it is begrudgingly. There are “innocent” people held hostage. The Order is trying to restore the status quo. The Scoia'tael want to fight against the tyranny that is the human ruling class. So pick a side. No matter who you go with you will fight your way through those same ruins in the sewers—either in defense of the Scoia'tael or against them. This is yet another minor way that the game changes things in reaction to your decisions even though what you decided shouldn't make these changes. The presence of these enemies has nothing to do with what you've done with Yaevinn in the bank but it happens anyway. The results of these decisions are seen at the end of Chapter Three and Four. Here it determines which group will work with you to attack the Salamandra base that you discover with Leuvaarden. In Chapter Four it's about who won't work with you. The side you go against here is permanently pissed off and won't work with you for the rest of the game. Before we can get to that Jolly Cooperation, two other things need to be resolved in Vizima. The first is about a werewolf. Triss can't teleport Geralt and his chosen husbando Yaevinn or Siegfried without a clear source of Salamandra's base. Geralt finds this sneaking through the sewers with some of Leuvaarden's men in the city guard. This attack is where you see Salamandra asking Radovid for aid, and when a werewolf interrupts your assault. This is another example of the side content not really being side content but in a bad way. If you don't speak to Carmen in the swamp in Chapter Three then this werewolf just comes out of nowhere and you'll likely be left looking at it like what the hell why is there suddenly a werewolf huh? Of course there's also another clue in Chapter Two if you speak to Vincent enough. Good luck solving that mystery. Like just imagine being Vincent and saying that to a famous witcher and hoping he doesn't crack the code. Helping Carmen lift this curse is a multi-stage quest line. There's a lot of misinformation about curing lycanthropy and Geralt hasn't recovered enough of his memories to know what is and isn't bullshit. You try to make a potion with the tears of a virgin—which rewards remembering that Siegfried has taken a vow of celibacy when he joined the order. You gather fool's parsley leaves for Carmen to weave a shirt that, if worn, supposedly prevents the werewolf transformation. And after that all fails you convince her to lay out her true feelings to “Totally Not Vincent” since the power of true love can work miracles. Said miracles can't happen before this fight, though. You have three options here. You can be a by-the-book Witcher and kill Vincent since he is a monster, or you can be a by-the-game's-main-theme Witcher and decide that intent and actions make a monster. Not appearances. The third option, if you've progressed Carmen's quest line enough but not to its conclusion, is to try work a bit of Witcher love to see if it succeeds more than true love. This comes across as a fun Easter Egg though since you need to drink a Full Moon potion ahead of time to get this scene and there's no indicator whatsoever for that doing anything other than the name linking it to the werewolf. The game also never acknowledges this happening afterward. Weird, but I think it's cool that the shirt made of leaves is on the card though. After this you can track down Radovid and I want to use this conversation with him to contrast another with an unnamed Butcher you unceremoniously meet in the streets nearby. Both of these men have multiple conversation paths. They speak about the state of the world—politics, magic, major nobles in the city, and both of them even talk about something called The Lodge of Sorceresses of which Triss is a member. I like Radovid as a character in this game but the conversation with the Butcher is the more interesting one to me. These two characters are very close to each other in the city and I find the juxtaposition of them so telling about the priorities CD Projekt had when building this game. Care went into the low level details of this world. You get a perspective from a King. You get a perspective about the same topics from a Butcher and second-hand information from his wife through him. Any character in this world is going to have opinions about the state of it—even misinformed ones—and the delivery of those opinions change depending on the source. Then there are little details like the blacksmith in the marketplace nearby needing a gemstone for a sword he's making for De Wett. This could have easily just been “I need a gemstone for something, go get one for me” but instead it's a small, neat way to tie this back into the story around you. The game is full of things like this that enrich its world, and you are better rewarded for engaging with its characters because of it. After all of this you may rightfully wonder why Alvin is so important to the main quest that you can't finish this chapter without finding him. He's just a kid so how is he on the same level as super werewolf and Kings? Surprisingly the game has prepared for players doing this section last and justifies it through Triss: she has to use a spell to teleport you and Siegfried/Yaevinn into the Salamandra base and, before you investigate, Alvin's presence is a major magical question mark. Remember they don't know it's Alvin yet and Triss is just detecting a large source of magic that could disrupt her spellcraft and so you need to track down the source. Which turns out to be A Source—Alvin, a child with incredible powers that are out of his control. He has the exact same abilities that we'll see Ciri use in Witcher 3, although it's not clear if he's as strong as she is. Like Alvin, Ciri is also called A Source. Shani has decided to take care of the boy but she's not doing a good job because he's already been kidnapped by Salamandra. It's never stated why exactly Salamandra wants the kid so bad. My guess is that this kidnapping has nothing specifically to do with his powers and it's just another child they were going to use for witcher mutation experiments, and through that they learn he's important to Geralt and try to get him again as leverage. Either way you save him with a smidgen of help from Dandelion and then have a choice. Shani or Triss? This is both choosing who is the best guardian for Alvin and who you want to pursue in a more serious relationship. The problem here is that you can turn down their advances and even ignore them, but both of these women still think you're dating them. It's like being back in high school right fellas? This is most awkward with Shani since she casually asks you for a romantic mid-relationship tier kiss earlier in Chapter Three and, if you've avoided her for the most part until now, you may start flapping your arms at your monitor making confused crazy noises as it happens. Or maybe that's just me. So you're torn between two sorceresses. Who will you choose? Yep that's right. Two sorceresses are vying for your attention. Triss the sorceress. And Shani the sorceress. There are two sorceresses. Did any of you pause the video and write out a comment correcting me yet? I've noticed this is a thing that Witcher 1 fans love to go wild about—Shani isn't a sorceress she's just a medic what the hell she doesn't use magic pay attention! Did you even play the game? Did he even play the game? He doesn't know. He doesn't know. He didn't play this game he doesn't know. The other is saying Geralt's swords are—silver for monsters. Steel for humans. This is apparently unforgivably wrong. Even though Post-Amnesia-Geralt says it himself in Witcher 3: Are you going to correct him, too? As for Shani I don't think this is fair. You are correct of course—Shani is not a sorceress. She is just a medic. But she does use magic to heal you because Witcher 1 is a celebration of a holiday Todd Howard likes to call “Happy Janksgiving”. A holiday that moves to a new day whenever Bethesda releases a new game (there's your “Found a Way to Criticize Bethesda even though the video has nothing to do with them” bingo space for this video). This magic she uses is probably just the game's way of responding to a healing aura buff that both Triss and Shani give off—you can see same effect here from both women and so I think it's more than forgivable that some players might think Shani can use magic. It's not made crystal clear that “healing” in this world is also done the mundane way when magic is so common. It is made clear in the books and in Witcher 3 though. This choice is a significant Impactful Decision that has several consequences. I mostly prefer Shani as a person to Triss but I think Triss is the better choice as a guardian since Alvin needs an education for his magical capabilities. But rejecting either of these women makes them become stunningly petty and vile. Especially Shani—doubly so considering how levelheaded she is in Witcher 3. It's so stark a change it's out of character. Triss is not without her own vindictive streak and out of character moments. If you give her Alvin then she still won't proceed with the teleport spell to assault the Salamandra base until you've “ended it” with Shani—even though you may not even be in a relationship with either of these women and Geralt becomes too much of a “Whipped Man Trope” to speak up for himself, which is also quite out of character. Again, though, this is a symptom of the disease the game has in assuming you did all the side content that ties back into the main story when you might have skipped it. “Ending it” with Shani has nothing to do with the teleport and yet Triss still makes you do it because she has the leverage to do so and is roleplaying as Yennefer this game. Whoops did I just say that? Please ignore. Let's move on. In a related bout of awkwardness Geralt goes out with Dandelion and Zoltan here to get trashed. This can possibly be the second time you ever speak to Dandelion and the first time you ever speak to Zoltan but let's not repeat the whole point. This scene is important to the book discussion we'll have later so I want to point it out so you can make a mental note of it. Afterward you go home drunk off your ass to either Triss or Shani—depending on who you chose. You can pursue your choice for a second romance card if you prove your commitment to them—with a ring for Shani or a positive “fatherly” interaction with Alvin for Triss. Then you're finally ready to fight Salamandra with either a satisfied sorceress or one that has decided to deal with you in a professional capacity only from now on. Instantly gone is the helping hand to guide Geralt through his amnesia and we'll have to see how awkward this choice can make things in Witcher 2. Whether Triss is happy or angry isn't the only main plot line that becomes entangled at the conclusion of Chapter Three. You meet her with Leuvaarden and your chosen fighter at the New Narakort Inn. Somehow Salamandra has gotten wind of your attack only after you progress this quest in a private conversation with Triss and they're waiting to ambush you at the entrance. If you did not kill Vincent Meis then he will also be there to help you—as a man or a werewolf, again depending on your choices earlier when it comes to helping Carmen. Either way he considers himself a werewolf avenger that has come to your aid. And I love the line Geralt says here if you fight alongside him in this form. If you killed Vincent then this battle is probably the second most difficult in the game. Or at least I was getting unlucky with failed attacks and stuns when I did it. After getting upstairs, De Wett will try smashing down the door to stop Triss's teleport which makes things awkward if Siegfried is the one helping you since De Wett is a superior commander in their Order. He ignores this proving once again to be a great Siegfriend and you teleport away earlier than planned. Whether the Scoia'tael or the Order help you largely doesn't matter for the battle. It ends up being a Flavorful Consequence. You clear out some Salamandra goons and, if you try to fight without activating the teleport gate nearby for reinforcements, you will learn that Salamandra has an infinitely spawning fighting force that will trap you here forever. Reinforcements help you solve this problem and after a large brawl you confront The Professor and Azar Javed. Again. For the third or fourth time at this point. This is where the only Impactful Consequence is found in the whole of Chapter Three that is a result of a decision not from this Chapter—whether you got duped by Azar Javed's performance as Raymond. This is a strange one because the fight at the tower goes the exact same way regardless of whether you figure out the mystery or not. Geralt is left there dying and the Saturday Morning Cartoon villains get away no matter what. But the “Decision Recap” here retcons this and makes the “got duped defeat” far more serious even though both paths are identical. Apparently if you get tricked then Azar Javed steals a book from you and/or the tower. One that you got from a chest when you went in or... I don't really know how it works to be honest. If you're not tricked Triss takes it instead when she saves you after detecting the magic Javed uses. She doesn't tell you that she took this book from you when you were unconscious and so it's a surprise she's able to cast a very powerful shielding spell on you that she's learned from it. This is set up as a moderate mystery that is never brought up again. The immediate effect is that Azar Javed is helpless against Triss's shield spell in this encounter at the end of Chapter Three. Despite also being a capable swordsman he freaks out and runs away, leaving you to fight The Professor with this strong shield buff arcing out attacks from you against all the enemies in the area. If you were tricked at the end of chapter two then Javed has this spell because he took the book even though that didn't happen at all. You're not immune to his attacks so you get wrecked but in true shitty Cartoon Villain fashion they don't kill you when they have the chance for what is the second, third, or even fourth time now. Instead you're allowed to recover and then he leaves you to fight The Professor who has the shielding spell instead of you, making the fight slightly more difficult. Neither Triss nor Javed ever cast this spell ever again after this. I've been hard on these villains throughout this video and I will continue to do so while being condescendingly righteous about it because Azar Javed isn't even the real antagonist of the game. However I do want to praise the only good thing that comes from them because it was set up in the Prologue and finally pays off here. The Professor kills Leo with a jeer about how the legend of witchers being able to “parry bolts in flight” turning out to be “just another fairy tale”. Leo is still in training and hasn't been mutated like the other witchers. So he fails to do this, dying. Geralt performs the feat in this scene and The Professor, about to be killed, is still impressed. I appreciate when things like this are set up and then called back in a way that isn't obvious—when you can't know for sure that “oh yeah this will come back up later”. This also gets bonus points for being a book reference. They also lovingly call attention to it in the first episode of the Netflix show. The Professor is not the real boss fight here. When you defeat him he causes an explosion that makes you both fall deeper into the kikimore caves. You're both quite deep underneath Vizima at this point. After the dust clears there's a kikimore queen that eats The Professor except that she doesn't eat him she just mimes it and tosses his body aside you can even see it but later on you gut the queen's corpse to get at The Professor's body and I am very sorry that I am sick enough that this bothers me but it's jank that I can't ignore. I've been trying my best not to comment on bugs and the overall poor state of this game's polish so far but it's impossible to ignore here. You cannot fight the kikimore queen via conventional methods. You fight much larger and much more dangerous monsters later in the series but apparently Amnesia-Geralt doesn't have the moves yet. Get close and you die instantly. Instead you have to run away through these caves and use aard to collapse support struts to slow the queen down, and then eventually kill it in the same way. So let's end Chapter Three with the jankstravaganza, which I want to stress shouldn't damn the game as being shit. This was not a pristine AAA funded title like Witcher 3—which is certainly relatively bug free compared to this right? Hair flapping as it tries to escape. Beards flapping as they try to escape. Characters get looped in animations. Characters getting locked into no animations. Characters walking when they should be standing still. Geralt can't speak to innkeepers across the bar and has to walk all the way around. Missing doors. Invisible doors. Whole cooked chickens found in barrels. Stealing things right in front of people. They don't care. Enemies teleporting next to you. NPCs teleporting next to you. NPCs teleporting out of the game until you restart. Characters teleporting out of frame as they speak. NPCs forgetting that you exist. Geralt is surprised when a character named “CONARTIST” tricks him. Raymond says he has to go into hiding but then he immediately creeps back in and won't let you continue the quest until you reboot the house by leaving and entering again. Every load screen has a chance to make you get stuck in a lower run speed until you load again. A dice player demands high bets only but he's one of the lowest in the game. Geralt can jump like an acrobat in cutscenes but not when you're in control. NPCs drinking through their necks. Almost every elf is a receding hairline conehead monster. Subtitles don't match the voiced lines. Voice actors changing between lines. They forgot to put the water under this bridge. This NPC's face becomes the monster from Amnesia: The Dark Descent. NPCs won't talk to you. Random invincibility while fighting. Random lack of invincibility in cut scenes. Sometimes quests are inactive and can't currently be progressed but still show up as active in your journal. This happens: And aarding down the walls in this cave to kill the Kikimore Queen fails more times than it doesn't. The kikimores can despawn and never come back. But the quest doesn't complete. You have to reload and try again. The ceiling doesn't fall no matter how many times you aard or where you aim. Then it does fall down and you die. Run down the tunnel like you're supposed to? You still die. Run so far down the tunnel you're twerking into the wall? You still die. I appreciate the attempt at a different type of boss encounter here, especially against a big monster, but this part is so poorly rigged that I dread it every time that I get here because I know I'm going to have to try multiple times before I get through it, like I'm glitching through the glitches. Witcher 2 is worse than this by the way. If successful you get some incriminating papers from the body of The Professor who is totally not in the stomach of the kikimore queen but who gives a shit, and then you climb out to be ambushed by Princess Adda and her entourage. She sentences Geralt to death to silence him since he's now learned the truth that she's working to overthrow her father with De Wett. Geralt invokes the sacred custom of a final wish before his death—one of many of these types of romantic rules in this world—by asking her for a kiss. Regardless of whether they slept together in the party earlier, Adda reacts in the same way and accepts. And again whether Triss is currently angry with you or not about Shani, we cut to her magically spying giving a sly remark before she teleports Geralt to safety. We cut away and enter the next chapter. Which is I believe a fan favorite. Chapter Four. Where to start? It's almost entirely quarantined from the rest of the game. You could replace it with text on a black screen that says “Geralt laid low for a month” and then only show the last hour of the chapter and not much would change. It's that disconnected from the rest of the story. Yet it's probably my favorite section of the game. I always look forward to getting to this part. Triss has sent you south from Vizima across the water. You are in Lakeside at the village of Murky Waters. I think it's obvious by now that I think the atmosphere is the real star of the Witcher series. I enjoy most of the characters, Geralt himself, and much of the writing, but it's the setting and character of the world that I appreciate the most. So far, in just this game, that world has been a terrible gritty nightmare. Geralt can't even have a few weeks of peace to recover from being brought back from the dead. This is the kind of place that throws him into fighting for his life and then dealing with horrible places with horrible people doing horrible things. Usually to each other. I've seen people criticize this series for its portrayal of women and I strongly disagree with that assessment. Yes women are treated unfairly as an underclass to men in this society. But this isn't done as some sort of idealized fantasy—it's part of this ugly world where most men are portrayed as disgusting brutes that fight and drink and rape, shit and piss in the streets, seem to have an endless amount of phlegm to hawk up at Geralt, and wife beating is such an accepted norm that it's brought up casually in conversation. Racism and sexism isn't something we're close to solving today, in our own world, and so it's little wonder that it runs rampant in a recreation of medieval society. That's not to say that all women in this setting are abused angels that would do so much better if they were in power—or that all men are tyrants that only care about drinking and whoring. Most characters fall on the spectrum between bad and good within the relative morality of this setting. It's not fair to hold them to our real life modern standards, just like you better pray that future generations are just as courteous to you when they look back at our era through the lens of their future enlightened policies. But that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't still find much of what goes on in these games repulsive. We spoke earlier about Shrekification—even though that's an unfair term since the Witcher books predate Shrek. This gritty brutality is the biggest difference between them. It's a fantasy smorgasbord of some of our most charming and romantic fairytales but with the most violent bigoted tendencies of our species thrown right in with it all. It's not quite the extreme of the best we can imagine stirred in with the worst of our reality, but it's pretty close. Lakeside in Chapter Four is where we finally get to see a place in the Witcher world where the “good” side reigns as ruler. But I need to be careful with how I say this because “good” doesn't mean everything here is peachy. It means that the fairytale and folklore side is the dominating force. The further genius of this Chapter, that you can start to piece together immediately with the shimmering image of this fantastical city over the lake in its introductory cinematic, is that it's a reflection of everything we've seen so far on top of this Shrekified land. It's a mirror image that's an improvement of every Chapter we've seen so far. Just like an enchanted mirror in which everything looks prettier than it actually is. If you've played Witcher 3 and its expansion Blood and Wine then the best way to understand Lakeside is to think of it as a pocket of Toussaint. The Lady of the Lake is even another commonality between them, although she has much more of a presence in Lakeside. The goddess Lady of the Lake is also probably a post-conjunction refugee that has been stranded in this world for 1,500 years. The unanswered question that her residency in both of these locations prompts is whether she is what makes these regions have their overbearing fairytale flourish, or if the Lady is attracted to places that naturally become like this. Toussaint is a much more prosperous place than Murky Waters—although with that greatly expanded success comes an equally powerful shadow—and I wonder if given enough time the Lady's influence could expand from Lakeside in the same way. Or maybe the Lake itself is where most of her positive effects are saturated. The Outskirts are a barnacle on the wall of a corrupt city. Plague and evil have infested here and have manifested into a monster like a festival of reckoning. Murky Waters is balanced within beautiful nature and their biggest current event is celebrating a wedding. The people of Vizima are in a steaming pile of pollution and even more plague—its victims piled in the middle of the city—and are doing their best to steal any advantage they can from each other. The people of Murky Waters seem to be unaware that there's even a plague to fear, and its people ask you to solve a problem they have with pygmies destroying their bridge by getting them a harness so they can ride around on a cat like a horse. One woman asks you to convince the local baker to make her a sugar doll which is apparently a scandal. The blacksmith has a monster problem but it's that he's having fun with a succubus not fearing for his life—much to the dismay of his wife. Who doesn't want to kill him for this she just wants the succubus to be driven away so she can have her husband back. She kinda seems equally amused and annoyed by it if anything. The vodyanoi that the Brickmakers in the swamp have brainwashed themselves into viewing as Lovecraftian deities—The Water Lords that are even ruled over by a Dagon—are also here but the citizens of Murky Waters are much closer to considering them as equals. There's no worship, no brainwashing. If they do worship anything it's their prized cow named Strawberry, which they pamper and protect during the day. Here there is no conflict between the Order and the Scoia'tael. There is a band of elves nearby but the villagers offered them aid, not hate. Which the elves took to be too-pity soaked a handout to take and so they hide, rejected by their own pride, in a cave. There's something about the beautiful naivety of this place that makes my soul ache. The Outskirts is repugnant and I want to see it bleed and be redeemed. Murky Waters hurts like seeing a baby that you know isn't going to make it through their life without something deeply damaging them. I just want to bundle this place up and keep it safe. Which of course is impossible. It's this game. An unwarranted slaughter arrives at the end. If you thought any different then you haven't been paying attention. Geralt's role is also inverted in this chapter. You're not here to kill monsters. You're here to kill time. There is a continuation from the previous stories—Alvin teleported himself here at the end of Chapter Three which is why Triss sent you here and not anywhere else. Same for Dandelion who was teleported to aid you. But your goals in Chapter Four are much more languorous. No Salamandra. No big monster—at least at first. Just roam around and take it all in. That's not to say that this is a perfect place and there aren't more serious monsters around here. There are noon wraiths that stalk the fields by day and devourers that roam around at night. The local crypts have the usual undead suspects, and there are the drowned dead that seem to crawl out of any body of water in this world. There are jobs for a witcher but more than any place in this game Murky Waters appears to be living in harmony by working within the limitations these monsters create. Let's talk about these areas some more. Chapter Four is probably the largest of the five in terms of new zones that are introduced. There are three interconnected areas, an island that you get to by boat, two crypts, and some other small interior locations. The fields in particular are quite large and, while I dislike how it can be difficult to see through the tall wheat, it's really nice that the big area isn't a swamp again. It's another reason why Chapter Four is my favorite—it's so refreshing to be out in the open after two chapters in a row in the city. If we stitch these maps together we can see that Lakeside has the same circuit-style structure as the Outskirts. Yet it doesn't become nearly as tedious to walk through because it's much more cleverly arranged. Take, for example, that despite being at least three times larger than the Outskirts it takes less than four minutes to walk a full circuit whereas in Chapter One it took five. The reason why this works is that the path running through these three central locations is kept tight with the important landmarks branching off of it instead of being placed along a road that would need to be much longer to accommodate it all. It's a good thing that they didn't repeat the problems of the Outskirts because there is quite a bit of running around to do in this chapter. As usual the Inn is your base of operations and it is more centrally located than ever. Some quests are optional but the most effective way to push progress is to simply do everything available to you. You are here to kill time after all. That said the specific must-do tasks are: Meet the Lady of the Lake. Broker an agreement between the people of Murky Waters and the Vodyanoi in the underwater city. Speak to Berengar, a fellow witcher, and find out what he knows about Salamandra. Look after Alvin. And solve the issue of the dead ghost bride when the planned wedding goes awry. Keeping true with the state of the quests in the game so far, all of these threads are tangled together. The Lady of the Lake wishes to keep the peace between the humans and the vodyanoi. Berengar was contracted to solve this problem before you arrive and take it over. Alvin is currently being looked after by Alina, who is the bride-to-be in town that dies. And her fiance is Julian who is leading the group planning to plunder the lake of riches which is why the conflict between humans and the vodyanoi has occurred to begin with. It's all neatly tied together. Isn't it lovely? It's also weird. This huge statue feels so out of place. There's talking gas-mask fish people. This mysterious little girl is left to seemingly live on the coast and the monsters never bother her even at night. The Lady of the Lake is of course from Arthurian legend. She has her mute helper the Fisher King and a hermit that lives in the southern ends of the fields. You can learn about her prior party of devoted knights who were searching for the Holy Grail and trying to do so yourself is the wrong answer. Doing so will make the Lady displeased and grant you the title of Sir Bonehead because what she really wanted from Geralt was to bone his head—a goddess-with-benefits situation. I'm not kidding. She's lonely. The King of the Wild Hunt is here and he's just chilling in a field. I can't focus attention to this yet because in the context of Witcher 1 you have no idea how baffling it is for this character to be here vibin like this but since you've probably played Witcher 3 you likely understand why I'm so flabbergasted. Dealing with this inexplicable Wild Hunt invasion for the Hermit gives you the choice of three rewards. One of which can be used to resolve something in the main quest but you might not know that when you have to choose, and there's no going back on it. The wreath of immortelles is the item you want. Meanwhile the other two are useless, especially the Wild Hut. You can't even rest in it. The wreath is used to break the curse that is placed on Celina, Alina's sister. Yeah they actually named them Alina and Celina. There's also Julian and Adam and way too many characters that begin with “A”. I thought this was going to be a love diamond you needed to resolve—Adam loves Alina but she maybe loves Julian who Celina also possibly loves while Julian seems here primarily to marry into a family of the village so he can launch his lake plundering operation. That's being a little too harsh on Julian but he's not exactly broken up about the deaths of these two sisters. To his credit he does go along with the Lady's plans for a peace treaty rather than killing the vodyanoi—he also appreciates the work of witchers and has a good story about one that helped his family. So how do the sisters die? You don't see Alina's death. Celina is so bitterly envious of her sister getting married that she's acting crazy. She'll throw herself at you if you gift her any old ring or as she says “I'll give myself to you right now, on the nearest rock.” Which is ironic seeing as she shoves her sister in a moment of rage, head first onto a rock, which kills her. Again this is weird. The way it all happens so fast with Alina transforming into a zombie sunburnt prune version of Catherine, then Adam kills Celina in revenge and she turns into a pale moonwraith to Alina's midday bride. I really like the names of these monsters and how they look but it feels like it comes out of nowhere because you're not directly involved with it. Instead it's speaking to other characters like Alvin, and progressing the so-called “main quests” of this chapter that cause these unrelated characters to move toward their doom. Here's where it gets complicated. Adam can also die—and come back as a Scooby Doo ghost. If you saved her in Chapter One then Abigail is in Murky Waters. She's collecting the villager's secrets and brewing date rape potions to sell to them—and that's only the things she'll admit to you. You can ask her to recall the romantic time you spent together in the cave at the end of Chapter One... even if you turned her down and it didn't happen. You can also ask her for help resolving the issue with the midday bride. The first thing you try is to assemble a magical mirror that Alina had by collecting shards of it from other noonwraiths in the fields. She must have had this incredibly powerful magical artifact on her her when she died and only the wraiths collected the pieces. I know weird. I think even the game says it's weird—so I guess they're lampshading it or something. After getting the blacksmith to fix it you get dead-Alina to ponder her own reflection but it doesn't break the curse as was planned. If you let Abigail die in Chapter One then you can get the same advice about the mirror from either the Lady of the Lake or a healer that lives in the same house—an old unnamed lady that just magically replaces Abigail, and is nowhere to be found in the village if Abigail survived and is living here. In this progression path the mirror still fails except now, because Abigail died, it fails due to her “innocent blood” being on your hands that I spoke about earlier. I want to repeat it still fails even if you save innocent Abigail. Who, again, is so innocently scheming and conniving her way into a place of power and prominence in Murky Waters. The bigger difference is that if Abigail is killed the old lady replacement healer suggests that only the dead can reach the dead. Which unravels into Adam having to be freed of his imprisonment if you've told Julian he's guilty for killing Celina, which ultimately leads to Adam killing himself in order to reach Alina and then their spirits leave in peace. I'm getting confused reading Alina and Celina out right now so I'm really sorry the game chose those two similar names. If Abigail is alive then you can ask Dandelion to compose a ballad, which you must help him rhyme on the spot—hilariously messing up as many times as you like—for the song to reach her so she moves on. After this you can use the Wreath of Immortelles to break the curse on Celina. If you chose wrong then she's just stuck like this forever, I guess. Or until the next witcher comes along. You can't go back to the Hermit and tell him what happened and change your answer or trade the useless hut for the Wreath. That's all she wrote. The other main quests build on the events of the previous chapters. If you left Alvin with Shani then he can be found at the side of the river with a new dog he's adopted. You rescue him from a devourer and then Geralt has a moment of reflection where he realizes that a future with Shani is impossible because his witchering profession is too dangerous. He also has a lapse in amnesia which causes him to say: If you left Alvin with Triss, then in Murky Waters you find him at some ruins talking to a ghost—because Triss was teaching Alvin to use magic and Alvin heard the ruins had magical properties, so now he's curious and he wants to go check it out. This is one of those little differences that actually makes sense when you think about it so I really like that. You can either beat the ghost at dice or use your sword to get rid of him. Geralt's thoughts are more favorable toward a relationship with Triss but he still considers himself unfit to be a father. Then he has the same lapse in amnesia: Geralt's amnesia breaks like this quite often in the game and I'm not sure it's intentional or if CD Projekt wrote some lines before settling on the amnesia plot device or if they ironically... forgot when they were writing some sections. This happens as early as Chapter One. Geralt will comment that he usually gets ripped off when he hands in drowner kills when he's never done that before so there is no usual experience that he has a reference for. He says things like he “usually works alone” when he's only a few weeks old and hasn't been working alone for all that time. There are other comments like “I've heard so many high and mighty speeches that yours doesn't impress me” which again just isn't true. He hasn't. He can still be unimpressed but his reasons are just incorrect. This could be explained as his imperfect amnesia waxing and waning in strength. It's acceptable but it can be odd to experience. In the case of these internal monologues after finding Alvin, I think this is a deliberate seeping of his memories of Yennefer and Ciri. Geralt doesn't really know himself who he's speaking about here. It's an emotion he's feeling that's true and raw and powerful but he doesn't know what it is. Chapter Four is also the only place in the entire game that mentions Ciri. The Innkeeper, who must recognize Geralt but knows not to overload an amnesiac with too much personal information or maybe he's trying to test if this is the real Geralt or an imposter, will recount much of Ciri's story from the books without triggering a scrap of recognition from Geralt. Like many things in the game it's rather sad, Geralt loves Ciri like a daughter, but at least we know they'll find each other eventually. Right? Alvin is like a boy version of Ciri in many ways. He has most of the same powers which is how he ended up in Murky Waters to begin with—by instinctively teleporting here in a moment of strong emotion. To combat this Triss sends a dimeritium amulet for him to wear. Dimeritium is a special material that dampens any use of magic—shackles made of the stuff can be seen in later games to render sorceresses useless. Curiously wearing anything made of dimeritium doesn't seem to effect Geralt's ability to cast signs, although this may just be an oversight—nor is he restricted by dampening locations like other magic users. Alvin agrees to wear the amulet only after Geralt compares it to the wolf medallion that he wears. Real quick I'd like to point out that this amulet has two settings you can swap between upon meditating, which is something I think many people who played the game might not know about. There's no real purpose for doing this, nor do I remember it ever being mentioned in the books, but you can still switch between detecting magic and danger. Speaking of things you might not notice it took me until my third playthrough—and close to one hundred hours of playtime if we include when I played Witcher 1 in 2008—before I learned that you can hold down Ctrl when you click on things to loot them without opening a window. Same for discovering that when Geralt is drunk, which can last for about 10 real world minutes unless you rest or drink a potion to get rid of it—you can circumvent his stumbling low movement speed by strafing to walk about twice as fast. About a hundred hours before I noticed that too. Feel free to laugh at me. It's like learning that you can hold down E to drink water sources in Fallout 3 and New Vegas all over again—after hundreds of hours of playing those games too. From this point on Alvin will follow you around in most of the areas in Chapter Four. This begins before Alina dies and his prophetic channeling is the only real warning that you get that disaster is about to strike. It's never explained who or what is speaking through Alvin. It could be some collective unconscious of all the dead elves of this world, or some ancestor of Lara Dorren's. Sometimes I think it's the King of the Wild Hunt. Whatever it is, it refers to Geralt as a “d'hoine” which is elfish for human and possibly a slur when used by them. At least it comes across that way to me. It's one of the reasons why elves and humans can never get along because elves will never be able to understand them—as they say it takes d'hoine to know d'hoine. For now I just need to point out that there are two moments during which Alvin follows you that he asks you a question and you have a choice of three answers. Then he asks a third question right at the end of the Chapter before he disappears forever. It's important to know these for later. Similarly I have to mention something about the elves in the cave system at the lake. If you've only played the games you may be shocked to learn that Toruviel is not the only elf here that's from the books—I know what a shock huh, dun dun dun. This casually introduced elf named Chireadan is also a book character—from The Last Wish specifically. I'm sorry I have to do this so much but the amount of topics and points in this video series that require set up are so many that it's unavoidable—I can't speak about why his presence is important yet but I still need to acknowledge it while we're here. At least we can finally speak about Berengar. This was one of the most disappointing parts of the game for me on my first playthrough. I don't know how the game managed to make me feel like a witcher so successfully but it was strong enough that I instinctively viewed Berengar as “a friend, find him and work together” as soon as I heard about him. You could find out bits and pieces about his story in the previous chapters and probably conclude that he's dead. Turns out he managed to survive his fight against Salamandra and has been hiding here in Lakeside ever since. And he does not like you. Not one bit. So here we are almost three hours into this mess and only now finally speaking about what a witcher even is. Which, in my defense, the game also keeps from you until now. Witchers are basically fantasy Jedi. They have super powers but they're mostly focused on feats of agility, knowledge, and some magic. They're stronger than most humans but not by much. The witcher sign Aard is pretty much Force Push. In Witcher 2 and 3, and in the books, the sign Axii is identical to the force hand wave suggestion/persuade power. <you will like this video> Thankfully I don't know enough about Star Wars to say if force-sensitive children are forcibly removed from their parents or not. Witcher candidates sometimes are. There are very few “volunteers” to become mutants like Geralt. They're often orphans and occasionally taken from families through what is called The Law of Surprise. Witchers never work for free while they're roaming the world looking for monsters—what they call “The Path”. Any would be freelancers that are out there listening to this, take this lesson from the witchers: they don't work for exposure, neither should you. I take this to be an attempt for witchers to always return to their Witcher Schools with more resources to contribute to their guild—Kaer Morhen in the case of the Northern Realms, at least before it was ransacked. Sometimes those suffering from a monster problem or a curse don't have any coin and instead can pay the witcher through The Law of Surprise. This is usually a verbal contract that goes along the lines of “You will give me the first thing you see when you return home that you did not expect to find there.” Sometimes this can be something worthless, or a new dog or a horse, or it could be that someone in the house is pregnant and the Law of Surprise means the child now belongs to the witcher. It's also worthwhile to know that this Law of Surprise is not something that's exclusive to witchers. It's a part of this world and other people can invoke it too. Along with many other such laws. Remember that emotions and promises and love and willpower are tangible forces on this planet. So when characters speak about “destiny” and how it's too powerful an entity to fight against, what they actually mean is the power of promise. The power of keeping your word. The power of karmic retribution. It's one of the things I enjoy most about the rules of the Witcher universe because I hate how destiny is usually used in fiction. It's an excuse to have the writer's plans forced into the story. Why does X Y and Z happen? Because the writer says so and look it's justified as a prophecy that a character says in the universe that the writer placed there so that the prophecy could justify that the writer says so. And round and round it goes often shamelessly depicted in-universe as a wheel or an ouroboros. In Witcher-world, the power of a promise can link individuals and cause destruction if a promise of enough power and prominence is ignored or broken. Quite a few problems in the books arise from characters trying to weasel out of these promises—even some that previously benefited from them and even argued against angering “destiny”. Importantly, this reluctance does not always come from the side of the party that agreed to give the surprise over. Sometimes it's the person who invoked the Law of Surprise who doesn't want to continue with it when it turns out said surprise is a child. Yet they must or else they risk the wrath provoked by breaking a contract. Destiny isn't “destiny” in this world. It's a promise bond. It's part of the emotional resonance that consciousness has with the fabric of reality. It's not clear if Berengar was taken to be a witcher through the Law of Surprise or if he was an orphan. Either way he bitterly resents the choices that were stripped away from him against his will. Witchers are made sterile through the multiple stages of mutations that they are subjected to. This is after rigorous training, much of which is painful and can result in death, while being indoctrinated into a life of monsters, monsters, and more monsters. Then there is the Trial of the Grasses which kills more would-be witcher trainees than it enhances. Geralt is special among witchers for reacting abnormally well to the mutagens—possibly because his mother was a sorceress—and he was chosen for an advanced treatment which may be why he is even more capable than most other witchers. That's also why his hair is white. Geralt doesn't remember any of this. Berengar does. At the risk of spoiling the book discussion later, Geralt also doesn't remember that a few years prior he renounced being a witcher in part for the same reasons that Berengar has for becoming disillusioned with them. Berengar has been working with Salamandra but he doesn't commit to whether it was against his will or not. It's probably a mix of both. He didn't need to be coerced that badly. This is a stumble in the story because this is honestly quite compelling. Salamandra is doing exactly what the old witcher schools did at their conception, you just don't know that yet because you learn about it in the next chapter. So this fairly powerful scene and revelation that comes from Berengar has little impact. Salamandra is subjecting children against their will—just like the old rulers of Kaer Morhen once did—to create super humans to fight against what they think is an unbeatable opponent for regular humans to handle. They're not evil. They have the best intentions. They're doing it for the greater good—just like those that founded the Witchers when the world was overrun with monsters. This planet used to be a much, much worse place to live before the witchers were created to spread out and do their exterminations. The last choice you make in Lakeside, before the troubles of the previous chapters come marching into ruin the peace, is whether you spare Berengar. And I think if you feel strongly about condemning him that you should ask yourself why you were so easy to accept what felt like Geralt's natural place in this world. Are the witchers beyond suspicion just because they're the first people you interacted with, needed your help, and that Geralt has a history with them? A history that can be traced back through a lineage of abuse, torture, murder, and has its roots in an organization that may very well have been worse than Salamandra? It's hard to know, but surprisingly The Witcher 3 explores this more in its main quest and has side content that goes even deeper into the possible torture that the Witcher Schools forced onto children. Lambert was taken from his family through the Law of Surprise and is often just as bitter as Berengar. Eskel has his doubts and misgivings, in his own lumbering way, and there are moments when even Vesemir—possibly the oldest living witcher in the world—seems ashamed by the actions of the witchers of the past. There's a reluctance in him that presents as formality that occasionally breaks—an adherence to the only trait that every witcher seems to share: going along with the lie that “the mutations witchers go through stunts their emotions”. This couldn't be further from the truth, even if many of them act like they wish it were true. And after what they possibly witnessed when they were children with other children that didn't make it to full witchers, can you really blame them? The desperate need for the witchers to have their secrets returned in this game makes more sense when you view it as them keeping a horrible secret to themselves so it can never be used on someone else. They should really destroy the secrets but they're still, on some level I think, indoctrinated. I don't think you, through amnesiac Geralt, should be on the side of the witcher schools. But you should be on the side of your friends—your terribly damaged friends, broken by what these schools put them through. I let Berengar go. My disappointment in another witcher being grumpy and uncooperative lingered until I played the game again and better considered his side. I wanted Geralt to find, not an ally, but a friend in someone else that shares his profession. And now that I've soaked in so many stories and details about this universe I understand now how fitting it is that Berengar could never be that. Nor could Geralt be so to him. This decision comes after you resolve the conflict between the humans of Murky Waters and Vodyanoi of Ys, the city you see in this chapter's introduction. A city that you never get to visit yourself, and I have to wonder if that's how CD Projekt wanted it to be. In previous videos I throw around the term “Cut Content” too loosely. I'd like to apologise for that because the tone that that often carried was that of a mystery being solved and a suspect apprehended. “Cut content! I noticed cut content! Part of this game is missing and it's lesser because of it. It's because of cut content!” The reality is that in nearly every case that something is lesser because of a “cut” it's due to financial restraints. No artist is going to cut something out of their work in a way that actively harms it without there being a good reason and, yes, sometimes those cuts will be mistakes for small things but when huge chunks of a game feel to be missing it's because something couldn't be done not that the creators wouldn't do it. Chapter Four is where parts of this game begin to feel rushed. Chapter Five is even worse. The other two games suffer in the same way here and there and especially in their last thirds and I don't know if that's a good thing. In Witcher 1's case I think it's a problem we spoke about at the beginning of the video—the ambition on display here is like a three year old trying to climb to the top of a fridge. You can only be impressed by the nearly successful attempt. For Witcher 2 and 3 I think it's a mix of ambition but also some poor placement of development time on things that weren't quite worth it. I'm saying all this because in Witcher 1's case I think it's a sympathetic shortcoming. I can't say for sure that the original plan was to have this underwater city be an area you could explore with its own vodyanoi NPCs and side quests—it would certainly fit considering how much the species was built up in Chapter Two and Three. But what I can say for certain is that this quest about their conflict with Murky Waters feels incomplete. Only the human half is explored. You have their reasons for diving—to gather treasures. They have a leader in Julian. Their sacrifice in Strawberry the cow—yes the cow is actually important. Whereas the vodyanoi have only one NPC you can speak to and it's easy to miss that there are two different factions of the water people and it's the zealots that are causing the issue. The Lady of the Lake stresses the need for compromise but it doesn't matter. It doesn't even make sense. You need a blood sacrifice to summon Dagon—the leader and also barely developed cause of the trouble who may or may not be a god. And also with the way the Conjunction of Spheres works in this universe this may literally be the same entity from Lovecraft's stories. If you go along with the Lady's plans you need to collect a sacrifice from both Julian and the vodyanoi priest that adheres to the inscription on her statue. Asking for the correct items and presenting them to the Lady will prompt her to grant a droplet of her blood. Either as a reward for proving that these two races can work together, or she just really wants these items for some reason. You can use this to draw Dagon to the temple for Geralt to fight him. But any blood works. Side with the vodyanoi and you lure Strawberry the cow here and sacrifice her to summon Dagon. Side with the humans and you kill one of his acolytes who is already at the temple. I don't understand why Geralt thinks he has to go through all this trouble though when there are wyverns filled with blood on the island that you kill just while walking around and, to top it off, even if you do go the compromise route you still kill this Dagon acolyte and about a dozen more in the boss battle. The Lady of the Lake's plan seems to only make sense if there was more of a back and forth between the two races to give more context to it. As it is now it just falls flat. This fight has one of the best introductions in the game. I think the visuals hold up fairly well when it comes to water and lighting and it shows here. This is also quite possibly the most “mystical fantasy” that the whole game series ever gets, save for when the Lady presents you with a sword here a little later. But the combat of this boss fight is a boring series of the same rhythm timing against underlings while Dagon passively wades around seeming not to care. You don't actually kill Dagon himself you just kill enough of his underlings that draws life force from him I guess. And then he dies. Or is weakened for a while and goes away. I don't know actually. Then, no matter which side you choose, the Lady still celebrates you for a job well done. You get presented with the magical silver sword Aerondight and are even knighted. The real difference that comes from the choice is either a big diamond from Julian to sell, a crappy steel sword from the vodyanoi, or a silver talent from the Lady. This is teased as her restoring a portion of Geralt's memory and instead it ends up being this useless talent that you probably have too many of by now. It's a shame because this could have been a rare story reward with part of Geralt's lost history being unlocked and you get to see a hint of why he is the way he is. But no it's just a minor gameplay thing. I sincerely doubt that CD Projekt is happy with the conclusion here. It weakens the rest of the chapter and I'm a bit heartbroken that it doesn't seem to be fully realized. I'm even more heartbroken about what was possibly cut in Chapter Five. But I think it also stands as a testament to how well done this Chapter still is that it remains a good time despite missing what feels like a third of its planned content. This was also a missed opportunity for another morally gray, difficult choice. If you could explore the vodyanoi side of the conflict then enough information could be presented for most players to be persuaded into thinking either the humans or the vodyanoi are in the wrong, depending on their own moral convictions and how much time they spend thinking about it. Ideally the struggle would be understanding that the Lady's solution is the morally correct one but that you feel strongly that one of the sides doesn't deserve it and you still want to punish them. As it is now I can't even say the Lady's way is the clear best option—it just doesn't matter. Everyone gets want they want no matter what you do. Having said that it's time for me to uncomfortably bring up one the points I know will be among the most controversial in this video series but it won't be the most controversial—that'll be in the Witcher 3 part, don't you worry. These three games don't actually have many morally ambiguous decisions. It definitely has a world and stories and many characters that are difficult to classify as good or evil. But choices? There aren't many that qualify. For me the most difficult one is with Abigail in Chapter One and the game ruins that quality if you let her die. I need to quickly clarify that I'm not saying that the quests and decisions you make don't spiral into morally ambiguous situations. That definitely happens and much of the time you're left trying to make the best of a bad situation with the intentional foil of not knowing all of the facts. Like giving the Scoia'tael the supplies at the river in Chapter One—you don't have enough information to truly know what you're doing. But I think the praise this series gets for its “morally difficult decisions” is overblown or maybe misunderstood or misappropriated from the wrong parts of it. Even in Witcher 2 and 3 most of the decisions you make have obvious “morally superior” options when you are presented enough information. Gramps in the swamps is clearly a cannibalistic monster. That's 100% confirmed when a jungle of evil monster plants come to his defense if you attack him. Meanwhile Vincent is just as clearly not a monster. Adam deserves some punishment for what he did to Celina—who also deserves some punishment but not eternal damnation for manslaughter. Alvin should be with Triss for his own safety. And as we just went through I think you'd be hard pressed to justify why Berengar deserves death even if you do think he should be punished. I know it may come across as narrow-minded that I think I've “solved” all of these moral dilemmas, but I really do think that even if I'm wrong on some of them that the vast majority of the choices in these games have clear right and wrong answers. Some of them do require you to think about them for a while though to reach those conclusions—at which point I become uncomfortable and start to wonder if maybe these are holes in the writing of some of these situations and they're meant to be a morally ambiguous decision but it turns out it isn't because it just wasn't crafted carefully enough. There's an encounter with a werewolf in Witcher 3 that I think is supposed to be a difficult decision—you're not supposed to know what the right or wrong answer is—but if you think about it for a little bit I think you do come to a very clear answer for what is morally correct. And I'm not sure, again, if that's intentional or if it just wasn't put together well enough. For an example of something like that happening in this game: in Chapter Three there's a difficult decision because of jank, not morality. It's in a side quest about vampires running a brothel. One of the new women there is a runaway and has been declared missing from a noble family. Her brother hires Geralt to find her and after a, uh, romantic investigation you can conclude correctly that the blue eyed woman is who he's looking for. The conclusion that seems like the correct one, which also ties into the theme of monsters not always being monsters, is that the woman is here of her own free will after dreaming of freedom from her old life of comfortable captivity. The vampire matriarch has granted her greatest wish and empowered her through vampirism and this is a good thing. Except the woman is clearly in some sort of trance just like every other woman here—thralls to this “higher vampire” who all sound the same and act the same. And call the matriarch “mummy” which is creepy. The lead vampire also lies to you about knowing Geralt from Regis—a true higher vampire that we learned about earlier that Geralt befriends in the books. Regis didn't have any opportunity to tell this other vampire about his time with Geralt. She couldn't possibly know about it. But then it loops back into itself to become jank: if she couldn't know about it then she also couldn't know enough to even lie so it's probably just a mistake so it could be meant to be the truth. And are all the women here really in a trance or is it just copy and pasted NPCs that give that impression? The romance card you get here initially made me think I had made the wrong decision by siding with them, but the tone of the conclusion in either path heavily implies that the vampire brothel is doing nothing wrong and all the women are free agents that all just coincidentally decided to remain in soft servitude and worship this vampire matriarch. So this becomes hard to judge because of the game's production values and numerous inconsistencies with the books, not from moral debate. Choosing between killing the Scoia'tael or saving the hostages in the cemetery is a better example and might be the best one in the game that's also difficult to decide which is better. But this also makes it clear that the Scoia'tael are almost always killing civilians and are tough to morally justify as anything better than evil with good-intentions. Even in Chapter One, you'll remember if you turn them away from the supplies at the river they'll attack you instead of looking for a peaceful alternative, or going into Haren Brogg's house to clear up the confusion that's caused by him not being present at the drop off. His house is right next to you when this happens but no they just jump straight to killing. And they're back at it again at the end of Chapter Four. After lifting the curse on Alina, fighting Dagon, receiving Aerondight, and deciding whether Berengar lives or dies, you return to Lakeside to find it under attack. The Scoia'tael group that were too proud to accept food and help from Murky Waters has decided they're not too proud to use them as hostages instead. The Order has arrived led by a woman and book character named White Rayla. And this is really the beginning of Chapter Five but that won't officially happen for another 30 minutes. Many of your decisions come together in this section to form one of a few possible giant snowballs that you ride down the mountain that is this game's conclusion. Check it out it's even snowy in the last location, what a great metaphor this is. Toruviel is holding Murky Waters ransom, including their children, to force the Order to leave them alone. Because you've had dealings with both groups before you are sent in to defuse the situation—and also to save Alvin who is among the hostages. If you helped the Order in the bank heist then both White Rayla and a Knight advise that you hit the elves hard and help them save the villagers. If you helped the Scoia'tael then the Order want little to do with you, and Toruviel will be more willing to accept your presence when you arrive to negotiate. No matter what you've done, however, she initially refuses—quite rudely—to allow you to take Alvin to safety. The boy asks his last question here, about the elves and their actions, and you select your final answer. This is the last time you ever speak to Alvin. No matter which side you choose in this conflict the Order will attack and Alvin, frightened by the bloodbath that sprays to life around you, instinctively uses his powers to teleport away—not even the dimeritium amulet is enough to stop him. Alvin is never seen again and all those questions he asked turned out to be a way to shape your version of Geralt—they have no meaningful consequences outside of his Identity story. They were red herrings or whatever was planned for Alvin ended up being another chunk of “cut content” from what I can tell. It's a shame. Let's rewind to what does matter though. Your choice here is determined by what you did in Chapter Three. Remaining neutral is always a possibility but whether you can help the Order or the Scoia'tael is only determined by who you helped in the bank. Did you scorn Yaevinn? If so then you can only go Neutral or Order. Did you betray Siegfried? If so you can only go Neutral or Scoia'tael. I've read that some people choose to be neutral here and still end up pushed into a faction but this seems like a glitch rather than an intended consequence of prior actions. The only two that mattered on my playthroughs were the bank heist and then committing to who you chose again in this scene or backing off into neutrality. Going neutral is the more difficult decision for gameplay and also results in the most death—ironically. With your swords and facts and logic you have to slaughter both sides—the dream of every twitter centrist. Meanwhile if you join a group you inflict half of the amount of death upon the world at the cost of perhaps some of your principles. This is the end of your time in Murky Waters. It is, in most ways, the polar opposite of the Outskirts. An inverted reflection. A modestly prospering place of serenity in a tumultuous world. The story of the Outskirts is already a tragedy when you arrive, deepens further into tragedy as you're there, and is left better off from your visit—even if it may not feel like it as you're leaving. Murky Waters becomes a tragedy because of your presence. And while not everything that goes wrong here is directly your fault, you still leave it in a far worse state than when you arrived. It's strange in a way that I was just speaking about the lack of moral choices a minute ago. The ending here calls into question one of the smallest and seemingly most benign decisions that's in the game—maybe even the most selflessly charitable. Buying bread for the starving elves from the oblivious villagers that they take as hostage mere days later. After proving the ferocity of witchers, you leave with Dandelion to the Lake. No matter what you choose both Toruviel and White Rayla survive the end of Chapter Four. Neither of them come with you as you ride the boat back to Vizima and, even though the proper start of Chapter Five strangely does not begin until the next cinematic, I'm going to cut it here while Alvin's dog howls out a goodbye. This is the most complicated part of the game to speak about. Wish me luck. Zoltan, Dandelion, Siegfried, Yaevinn, Triss, Shani, Toruviel, Rayla, Kalkstein, Carmen, and Vincent. All these characters and more return in Chapter Five and have various possible states and roles depending on all of your previous choices. Many of these characters will be in different places and demand different things of you depending on all of your previous choices. Some of these are those inter-dimensional jump type of ramifications where the change isn't directly linked to what you did but happens anyway to make the events more interesting. Sometimes I think that's cheating. Sometimes I like it because it really does make things more interesting on multiple playthroughs. I still can't decide. Did you kill Vincent in Chapter Three? If not then he's here to take Dandelion off your hands. If you did then another guard more awkwardly relieves you of bard-sitting duty. Carmen will also be here and hate you for killing her beloved werewolf. If you didn't then later you'll learn they got married. Zoltan is also here at the dock. If you go Scoia'tael then he is pleased with you and, in what becomes a trend, professes that he's totally not on the Scoia'tael's side but still wants to help them fight because they're his people. Like someone going vegan but not calling themselves one. If you go Order then he pretends to sneeze and then says: Because this totally-not-a-Scoia'tael supports the terrorist group using children as hostages and getting them killed, and is willing to berate his friend that's suffering from amnesia for not helping them with that. No matter what you do Zoltan forgets all about this in Witcher 2. The next location is Old Vizima and there is a ton of fighting here no matter which faction you went with. Your genocide of both sides continues if you chose the neutral path as endless waves of the Order and Scoia'tael throw themselves at you, like they're roleplaying as half of the women in this game. Returning to the Temple Quarter of Vizima isn't possible yet. Instead you have to go to the previously quarantined part of the city and finally get the proper introduction to Chapter Five. King Foltest is back. Here he is. He almost dies. But then a brand new character Jacques de Aldersberg shows up to save him. He's the Grandmaster of the Order of the Flaming Rose and there's no possible way that this, at the eleventh hour of the game's story all the way at the end in chapter five, could be the real true villain finally introduced out of nowhere like this. There's no way the game would do that. Instead of being able to explore Old Vizima instead you are snatched away with Foltest to the castle. This throne room is fairly impressive in scale and detail and it pays off in the long run to take the time to soak it all in, and by the long run I mean like all the way into Witcher 3. This isn't the first time Geralt has dealt with Foltest and I think the games captured his personality from the books much more faithfully than the Netflix show did. Princess Adda has reverted to her Striga form and is once again eating her subjects. Pretty bad timing considering that most of Vizima is burning in the riots and war between Order and Scoia'tael, humans and non-humans. Most of the characters from Chapter 2 and 3 return here but there are some notable exceptions that begin to demonstrate how rushed the ending is in many ways—but I quickly want to point out that Chapter Five and the Epilogue got enough development time where it really mattered. Still it's a shame that Thaler doesn't come back at this point if you let him live. This is a problem that many games have with characters being killed off—actually some books and TV shows have the same issue. A character that fills a specific type of role is killed and then immediately replaced with someone new very much like them and fulfills the same role only with a slightly new backstory. Mass Effect is guilty of doing this with characters dying and then being replaced by similar NPCs in the spots the original would have filled if they lived. Kinda like what happens with the replacement for Abigail in Chapter Four. This is still better than what games like Until Dawn do with character deaths and what Witcher 2 and 3 do with Adda—after the point that a character could die but don't they mysteriously and conveniently stop mattering, stop talking, and might even cease to exist but “still live” in the background because accounting for both outcomes was too much work. Leuvaarden's absence is even more curious an omission than Thaler. He was in Chapter One, Two, and Three. Was so vitally important in orchestrating the defense of Foltest's rule and taking down Salamandra. And then he's gone without a word. Cut content? Maybe. We'll talk about it at the end section of this Chapter. De Wett and Velerad are also here and Geralt once again finds himself in the strained position of the King's nobles asking him to kill the Striga instead of lifting the curse. Meanwhile Triss might still be pissed depending on if you gave Alvin to Shani or not. If you chose the sorceress she'll be her usual friendly flirty self—if a bit more serious considering the kingdom she was assigned to manage by the Council of Mages might crumble down around her. Either way she'll still work with you in Chapter Five if you need her—which is dependent on other choices. Foltest also inquires about some of your decisions. His spies have reported on your activities while he was away which again calls into question where Thaler is right now. The king is a surprisingly respectable character—which we'll see more of in Witcher 2's opening—and I sometimes wonder if that's the correct take. I genuinely wonder if he's written so well that I've been won over by his charisma and don't properly see that he's as corrupt as any other ruler in this game. Of all the monarchs you do meet, save maybe Queen Meve in Thronebreaker, he seems like the most fair. In this conversation he even stresses to Geralt that if he must kill Adda to save his own life in the fight then you can do so without fear of the King's wrath. Which is something he also said to Geralt in the books. Unexpectedly Foltest also asks you for a game of dice—if you've been completing that mini-game quest throughout all the chapters and have earned the reputation of a player. Of dice. Not this. No one else at court will give Foltest a proper match—they let him win out of fear or respect—and so Geralt is a special opportunity for the king to have a proper game while the city is burning. You can win and face no repercussions for doing so. Dice is one of three mini-games in Witcher 1 if you include seeking out all of the romance cards. All three are tied into the game's economy—dice and fistfighting are ways for you to always make money. Meanwhile seeking out some of the romance cards is a way to always spend it. As a final economic safety net, in what is one of the most frustrating features if you like to obsessively loot things as you walk around, all the plants you can harvest in all areas respawn whenever you go through a load screen. Even as briefly as going into a house and then back out again. Most of these plants don't sell for much but the game was still careful to make sure you couldn't permanently hit 0 gold. There are a couple of quests that require you to spend some cash to make progress on them, but money is largely useless outside of those few instances. It doesn't feel that way at the start though. I'd argue books are the most important things to buy so you can better act like a witcher, learn about the monsters, and have more components to harvest after killing them. Everything else doesn't matter. You will find better swords than your starting two naturally as you play. Forging meteorite blades isn't necessary nor is it worth it. Neither is the expensive set of armor although it is fun to have a high purchase goal to save for. Your unlocked talents are much bigger increases, Aerondight is given to you no matter what, and as we demonstrated earlier potions aren't important. What I haven't spoken about yet is the inventory system. Witcher 1 uses slots instead of weight. So it's like Stardew Valley, not Skyrim. I hate almost all forms of inventory limitations and Witcher 1 definitely commits some of the same crimes. I will say I appreciate that alchemy reagents have their own separate set of slots and that most items you can pick up automatically stack to high enough numbers to not feel too cluttered. The main problem is found in just the sheer volume of different types of crap you can find and how, with weapons especially, you will have to sort through piles of corpses for loot checking the same bundles multiple times because they don't despawn if you leave something on them even if you never want to pick it up. The worst times this can occur is when you've wiped out a whole encampment of enemies and have to fish around through the identical loot lumps for the one that has the quest item on it so you can prompt the next stage of the quest to begin. Even holding down Ctrl while looting doesn't save you here because if there's something you can't pick up on a pile it brings up the interface as a way to announce the problem to you—and there will usually be so many weapons on these corpses that are impossible to loot since weapons can only be carried in a limited inventory slot. Stash space is infinite and you can collect quite the impressive pile of treasures throughout the entire game. This isn't worth more time discussing so I'll just end by saying that this kind of thoughtless inclusion of inventory limitations can only work to bring a game down. Your book collection especially can become overly cluttered. Inventory limitations must always have a specific reason to exist. Unfortunately Witcher 2 is worse. Fortunately Witcher 3 is far better. Dice poker and fistfighting are still fairly enjoyable mini-games that heighten the atmosphere of the world. Every tavern has a brawling room where men say “we foight for munny”. Shockingly fistfighting has more depth than sword combat since in addition to the broken rhythm game you have a manual block. This is tricky to figure out since the block only works if you are already in a guard state before the enemy begins their attack—again remember it's spell based melee combat. So I think it's fair to say most players conclude it doesn't work and spam attacks instead. Drinking contests may also be seen as a mini-game by some but the only thing involved here is carrying enough weak alcohol to match your opponent's chugs without passing out. Sometimes opponents will reject drinks they dislike, and I think it's a wildly unnecessary but still a unique aspect of the game that you have to plan ahead for the possibility of a drinking contest and keep a stock of appropriate booze on you at all times. Playing dice allows you to interact with some quest characters a little more and it's interesting to see a different side of them. I am almost certain Thaler cheats and I even wrote an angry accusation about it in my notes ending with “do an analysis of all the dice games to find out!” but to hell with that Past-Joe, I'm not wasting my time. You can also cheat by save scumming if you like, which saves some time literally rolling dice to get the right numbers, but my experience was that I won far more often on my first match against most opponents. So I wonder if on first matches the dice are loaded in your favor, so you don't have to quick load in your favor. Real quick: it's dice poker so you are trying to get multiples of each number or a string of them in order. You roll the dice twice each round for three rounds, with the option to ante up if you have a strong hand. Unlike poker this has nothing to do with bluffing because both players can see what the other has rolled. So it becomes a gamble if your opponent rolled better than you and you're willing to continue raising the stakes for a bigger reward if you think you can close the gap with your next roll. This is done by only rolling some of your dice again while keeping numbers you want to build on. The interface is the best part about this. Rolling is quick and easy to select. Everything about it is clear—how much money is being added to the pot, what current “hands” each player has—and it even looks great with different backgrounds to match the setting that you found your opponent in. It's no Witcher 3 card game but it is a fun distraction and, dare I say, I think its visual presentation is much better than Gwent. Not the music though. It's still good but there's no beating Gwent's bangers. Foltest is by far the most loaded opponent. If you're lucky enough for him to roll a much better hand against you that he continues to ante up and up, and then if you win the best of three you can walk away thousands of orens richer. I think the highest I ever got was 7000, which is only a thousand off your famous reward for solving the whole crisis for Foltest in his city. After this you return to Old Vizima and the game immediately splits into three different paths like prongs on a pitchfork. If you go neutral then you will meet two nurses that require an escort to Shani's makeshift hospital in the middle of the war zone. If you went Order then White Rayla is here and Geralt becomes a type of witcher that switches to a silver sword when it's time to kill elves. If you go Scoia'tael then Zoltan “Totally-Not-A-Scoia'tael” Chivay asks you to help him rescue some non-human civilians in the area. All roads lead to Shani's hospital and an optional romance encounter exclusive to each path—the nurses, Toruviel, or White Rayla. But there's more than exclusive content here. The paths warp and change around your decision. White Rayla and Zoltan aren't here if you go neutral. Neither are the stranded nurses around if you commit to either faction. If you go Order then White Rayla tells you that she tracked down Toruviel handed her over to the boys and then hung her, because the games do not shy away from the revolting brutality of war. If you go neutral or Scoia'tael then Toruviel lives because White Rayla just... doesn't do this. Toruviel isn't here even though she should be if you killed the Order unit that may or may not have hunted her and she dies much later in an undisclosed way. And Zoltan decides that he doesn't care about rescuing civilians if Geralt isn't on the side of the non-humans. Some of this could be explained by unmentioned, butterfly effect style ripples from your decision but most of them can't be. Shani is another prime example. Her hospital is raided while you're here. If you went Order then it's only Scoia'tael. If you go Scoia'tael then it's only Order. If you go neutral then both show up, one at a time right after the other, like they queued outside and waited for their turn like it's a line for a rollercoaster. This continues to your journey to the next area. Still-Not-a-Scoia'tael-He-Swears Zoltan replaces Toruviel after you sleep with her and wants to break through the Order's blockade to the Swamp outside Old Vizima. Siegfried replaces White Rayla after you sleep with her and wants to fight through the non-humans that control the same area instead in this version of reality. Meanwhile if you go Neutral, regardless of whether you chose Triss or Shani, she suddenly desperately needs to get to that Swamp too and you escort her through a nightmare alley swarming with necrophages that are feasting on the dead left in the wake of the battle. These situations phase in and out of existence depending on your choice even though they have nothing to do with it. If you go Scoia'tael or Order then Shani never leaves this hospital. The only difference that makes perfect sense is the Witcher armor quest. There are three versions of this because you're being instructed by three different craftsmen to get some of the materials—either the Order or Scoia'tael smiths, or Kalkstein for the neutral path. He conveniently has a second home in Old Vizima and he's in the area to inspect the mutants Salamandra has begun to unleash in the battle, which is a cool callback to Chapter One when he asked Geralt if he could reserved the rights to autopsy his mutant body if he ever dies. You find the first Salamandra creation during this sequence and I think you're meant to initially think it's the Striga. I'd like to briefly point out that these armor sets are a cool visual upgrade and I especially like the extra potion and equipment slots it provides. However it's not necessary at all to beat the game and it feels like a fun vanity quest than anything else. There are similar sword rewards if you complete side quests for the Huntsman and the Dentist. These are spread over multiple chapters—complete all the monster contracts for a choice between a silver or a steel sword. And bring the dentist enough unusual teeth to add to his collection. Including one from completing the fistfighting quest chain and, for my favorite “a-ha!” interaction in the entire game, a barghest skull full of teeth that I was so surprised CD Projekt included as an acceptable specimen. These swords and the armor set can be imported to Witcher 2. I'll be a Bitcher Too about that when we get there. No matter the path you're on, White Rayla will end up standing out in the open at the conclusion of this area and will be assassinated by Yaevinn, who is the only person in this world that can climb. Then you go through the wall to another swamp outside the city and are saved by Grand Master Jacques de Aldersberg even though you could quite easily clear these monsters all on your own. You have a short conversation in which he does a little bit of secret villain posturing, then you lose whichever of the three companions you had along for this section and you're free to explore the new swamp. So far this chapter has mostly been a recap because it's quite difficult to speak about how the game works when there's so many possibilities that they become the game, which is why the Witcher 2 video is longer than this one despite the game itself being shorter. These branching paths are what really makes Chapter Five, and the conclusion of this game, stand out. The same areas are used but the ramifications of your choices are important enough that it feels like the whole game is coming together. In reality, as you can see, the choices don't change all that much but it's definitely not something I can call bad or even mediocre. It's enjoyable to see the game react as much as it does and you get to see different sides of this conflict. I also think it's an analytical trap to focus on only the differences when, even if there was only one choice here, the culmination of these different plot lines that have now burst into literal flames in Vizima is quite satisfying. Think of our first encounters with the Scoia'tael and then the Order a short time later. No matter what you've done it's come to this and you understand why. You've been involved even if you tried to stay Neutral. And for Geralt's larger story throughout this trilogy, this is just the beginning for how he can get swept into things beyond his control. Chapter Five is also a dramatic departure from the structure and tone of the previous sections. Gone is the central tavern as your calm sanctuary. Frustratingly, you even lose access to your stash for most of this Chapter. You can roam around a little in Old Vizima after fighting through the blockade, and there are some quick detours in the new Swamp, but for the most part Chapter Five is a linear romp through new content with its own unique story built on foundations that were laid down in earlier Chapters. It's extremely fortunate that, despite how much content that seems to be cut here, that CD Projekt still managed to make each major area a new one. Old Vizima's streets. The swamp that feels distinct from the first in the game—far more untamed and dangerous. Then the lost manor and its interior. The only shame is that the crypt with the Striga in it is the same as the others you've already explored in every chapter before now. The urgency of the story here is matched by the urgency inflicted by these changes in structure and the lower amount of side quests. Funnily enough I don't consider this a sign of missing content—I like this sharper focus on the story's conclusion. It's other parts of Chapter Five and the Epilogue that feel lacking. Something that I do feel is missing but is a mistake rather than absent due to production restraints are more interactions with Adda and De Wett. I think the game could have benefited greatly from one more major interaction each with Yaevinn and Siegfried and they're already in the game a fair amount. Adda and De Wett are arguably just as important pieces of this story but before Chapter Five you only see them once in a major scene, and then briefly again later. Another side quest in Chapter Three would have been a great way to build more familiarity with these two, perhaps showing a side of De Wett that isn't just “I'm such a villian muwaha!”. When you see him in Chapter Five you may think to yourself “who is he again?” which is a bad reaction to have for someone who has caused so much trouble in the story and for Adda to return to her Striga form. As for the Princess herself I think you possibly may be familiar enough with her if you follow her orders at Leuvaarden's party but another major interaction between this and her attempt at executing you certainly wouldn't have hurt—especially since you can skip much of the party bit. Regardless, I still think most players are going to choose to cleanse this curse instead of killing her since 1) it seems like the right thing to do based on the game's themes so far 2) it follows what happens in the opening cinematic 3) you will probably be more sympathetic to Foltest than the nobles telling you to kill her 4) she didn't kill you immediately when she had the chance to earlier and 5) even if you want to it can be a challenge to kill her before the sun comes up depending on your difficulty and build decisions. All of this makes it strange that killing her seems to be the “canon” decision—she disappears forever after this. She marries King Radovid, who is in both Witcher 2 and 3, and she never shows up again even though she has plenty of reasons to. Of which we'll speak about in those sections. Fighting the Striga is one of the most lackluster moments in the game and it's one of the rare times that I have little sympathy for CD Projekt. They shot themselves in both feet by leading with such a fantastic opening cinematic, and creating themselves the unfavorable comparison that every player will make when they get to this fight. This is a rematch of that battle in the opening and I want to take a moment here to demonstrate how this works even as a love letter to Sapkowski's version in the books. They did make significant changes but—well, judge for yourself. Now expecting the fight in the game to match this isn't fair, although CD Projekt also didn't have to have a rematch against this exact same monster either. Tragically I think that not killing her fares even worse. You just run around the sarcophagus for what is meant to be the entire night—preventing a Striga from sleeping in their “home” until dawn is what breaks the curse. In reality you only do this for a few minutes and less than a few in-game hours. The candles go out to mark the passage of time that's disjointed from the in-game clock. Then it's over. It's a shame an area couldn't have been built for this fight that involves setting traps and using signs to interact with the environment to keep her busy until the morning, like a more complicated version of the Kikimore Queen but hopefully not as buggy. Also, while I know this is petty, I don't understand why after all the times in the game that they didn't censor nudity that they chose to do so here—one of the few times that it could have been used for impact instead of mostly titillation. Adda could have been soaked in blood or filth and looking still inhuman after reverting. Instead she looks like she just woke up from a nice sleep. Having brought up titillation there is a third way to get through this encounter and an alternative way to keep her out of the casket—ironically it may be better than the fake fight but it's also so hidden that it comes across as another Easter Egg. This is one of the favorite secrets fans of this game have found and I was lucky enough that someone shared it with me because it's so unknown. In Chapter Two you can get a quest from a drunk to raid a nearby cellar of special wine from Toussaint. He offers you money but then reveals he lied—he doesn't have any. There are three bottles. The deal he wants is that you can give him one as payment for telling you where they are and keep two yourself or tell him to piss off for lying and keep all three. If you keep one in your inventory and—here's the tricky part—also keep the meat that Triss summons at the party in Chapter Three, then you can stage a romantic lure for Adda-as-Striga when you inspect her sarcophagus. Plant both of these items, give it some time, and... ...Wait, is this legit? Whether Adda lives or dies, you get the journal that once belonged to Ostrit from the crypt and are then allowed out. Here are some quick nitpicks I have for this section: why was the journal stashed here of all places? Why can't you confront Velerad about locking you in the crypt against your will? And why is De Wett so god damn stupid? He's waiting for you at the entrance of the next area and outs himself as the one who refreshed the curse on Adda by asking Geralt to hand over “Ostrit's journal” by name. Geralt counters by saying that “I never said whose journal I found,” implying that De Wett must be the culprit since he knew already. Why doesn't De Wett just counter-counter with “who else's journal could it possibly be since Ostrit cast the original curse to begin with?”. This is a nitpick. Sometimes having a dumb side villain is fine but it seems like such a waste. This is the guy who was scheming and managed to back someone as smart as Thaler into a corner and potentially have him killed? I really like how this zone looks. It's moody and fits right in with the foreboding finale looming ahead of you. It was also one of a few moments that I stopped to look at the wider world outside the walkable areas and got so excited to play Witcher 3 for the first time. Something about this area made me want so badly to get out of bounds and be let loose to explore this incredible world that, so far, had kept me on a fairly tight leash. I know it doesn't look like much, especially compared to the astounding beauty of the third game, but I was still struck by the thought regardless. We'll see where those expectations ended up going when we get to Witcher 3. Let's leave the scenery and go back to the ruins. Azar Javed has a surprise for you on your way there. He's gotten his hands on the corpse of White Rayla and turned her into... this. So it's mutant time. I don't know why CD Projekt used White Rayla for this. Maybe it was to take a character you just interacted with and show exactly what they're doing to people. The thing is if you don't go the Order route then you barely interact with White Rayla. Even stranger is that they put the work in to change the character's model for what amounts to less than a minute of screen time but her original model is incomplete. In the books White Rayla is called Black Rayla. You can see this in Thronebreaker as well. She's a major character in that game and it was playing that, more than anything, that makes her mutagenic transformation have weight. Black Rayla becomes White Rayla because she's ambushed by a Scoia'tael unit at the end of the war and badly mutilated by them. Her hair goes white from the stress of it—which is something Sapkowski weirdly does fairly often to some characters. She also loses a hand from this but has both of them fully functional in the game. Her hand in the romance card could possibly be a prosthetic but she has full control of both hands and all her fingers during dialogue. Before you roll your eyes right out of their sockets this isn't just a book detail. It's said in the journal entry for this game and an elf even taunts Rayla if you go the Order route. This wouldn't bother me as much if Rayla didn't get this model change as a mutant for only a blip of game time. Up ahead you fight more mutants and come to another pitchfork in the road. Go Order and Siegfried arrives with a group of knights to help you in your charge against Salamandra. Go Scoia'tael and Yaevinn is here to keep his word to assist you for what you did for him. Go Neutral and Triss shows up and is perfectly chill with you even if you chose Shani over her. Which makes me have to ask what Triss does instead when you follow the other paths. It doesn't seem like Geralt could get too much help here but let's leave it. This is the last time I'll point out these “dimensional hop changes” for this game. The inside of the ruins are quite large. There are three different entrances to match each of the three paths. It only changes how you get around a little bit, and how quickly you can find a meditation spot if you need one. There are lots of battles here against monsters, Salamandra bandits, mutants, three boss fights, and some traps that I've never seen functioning. The sequence is considerably enhanced by not being yet another crypt—this is a unique series of corridors and rooms with its own set of details and environmental touches. I can't resist saying though that there's something about this area that just screams late 90s gaming to me, even though Witcher 1 came out in 2007. I can't even tell you why but every time I get here I can't help but think about the end of Half-Life 1 or System Shock 2. One of the worst lines in the entire game is here after you kill the Koshchey. Then you're teleported to another room for the final showdown of the game. After five chapters and the prologue you finally get to fight Azar Javed for real. Meanwhile I'm wondering why if he teleported Geralt into this room why he didn't just teleport him 200 feet into the air, or why this time around the lack of water for the fight doesn't matter one bit for Javed not killing you instantly. That said there is a twist to this fight but it's presented poorly. It's about Berengar. If you let him live then he shows up to help you. Javed will kill him during the fight—even if you play perfectly you cannot kill Javed until Berengar dies first, which I think is a bit crap. If you killed Berengar then you have his wolf medallion that somehow weakens Javed but it's like there's a scene missing here. It cuts to black then Javed says he's weakened. Geralt does the troll face quote: And then there's some explanation about how Geralt has no idea where Berengar got that medallion and theorizes he was going to face off with Javed. If we rewind back to looting Berengar's corpse you'll notice that Geralt automatically picks up this medallion as part of the quest completion—but there's nothing special about its description, nor any mention of it in his note about his plans to defeat Javed. So I'm left wondering how Geralt knew this, how it even happens, and unsure if this is a glitch or jank. With Javed defeated the true villain of the game is revealed—the Order of the Flaming Rose has been behind Salamandra all along. This wasn't the final showdown. We still have about an hour of game left in the epilogue but we're going to continue this section of the video like it's just more of Chapter Five. You warn Jacques de Aldersberg that you're onto him and then leave to tell either Yaevinn, Siegfried, or Triss what you have learned. Siegfried is the most troubled by the revelation but gets over it freakishly quickly. With your chosen partner you leave by boat to get back to Vizima. As the Epilogue's opening cinematic plays I want to speak about the ridiculousness of the mutant models. I threw around the term “Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain” a bunch early in the video to describe The Professor and Javed. Jacques de Aldersberg does not fit that description but these mutant henchmen do. I understand that the intent here is that they're witchers taken to the extreme but I cannot even begin to fathom how the same dev team that showed surprising subtlety and restraint in many of its earlier sections went with these mutants as the final enemies. It does not fit at all and it's the only thing in the game that I will call laughably bad. Even that horrible koshchey line from Javed might be a bad translation or an attempt at showing that Javed isn't a natural speaker of Geralt's language. These models are just so horrendously over-the-top that I'm STUNNED by their appearance every time I get to this part in the game. The only way I see this as a success is if the intent is to make the player think that this is how normal humans view witcher mutations—these are witchers to the witchers. But I doubt that's true. Witchers are so much closer to human and are mainly ostracized for reasons other than their looks. This section reuses the Temple Quarter which I think is fantastic. You spent so much time here and so seeing it torn apart by this battle should have more impact than Old Vizima. Speaking of Impact many such decisions come to a head here: Radovid, King of Redania, and Foltest, King of Temeria, are having a meeting in the burning streets. Foltest learns that Adda is dead if you killed her, and he keeps his word but is understandably not happy with you. If Adda has been cured then she becomes part of the king's bartering and also probably to get her out of the city after she just tried a hostile takeover. Radovid will help keep the peace and in exchange Adda is betrothed to him—in the painting recap she seems content enough with that but who can say for sure. The kings haggle over the terms of their newly strengthened alliance no matter what and Foltest makes it clear he knows the entire kingdom of Temeria might fall to Radovid through this marriage, or at the very least large chunks of it. I think it's worth pointing out how much nicer and uplifting this ending is for Radovid and Adda if you play Witcher 1 before Witcher 2 or 3. Knowing what Radovid becomes ruins this scene a bit and also most of his character in this game so I'm happy I played them in order. Dandelion is here to chronicle the important meeting but so is your partner of choice. These are monumental moments for either Yaevinn or Siegfried. Foltest agrees to improved relations and terms for non-humans in his kingdom in return for Yaevinn helping bring down the Order and then withdrawing. His insurgency has been a total success. Flipped around, Foltest promotes Siegfried to the new Grand Master of the Order of the Flaming Rose in exchange for him rallying the knights to clear out the Scoia'tael and sweep away the traitors under Jacques de Aldersberg. The leader of the opposing faction can be found patrolling the streets ahead. If you go neutral with Triss then you can find them both there. You can avoid killing Siegfried—who seems supremely uncomfortable with what he's been ordered to do but is too dug in to fight against it. If you fight him it feels like Siegfried chooses Suicide By Witcher to get out of this nightmare he's found himself in. Yaevinn can be found mourning the death of Toruviel and it was quite profound to see how different the stories of these characters end depending on your choices. Geralt is definitely a King Maker for these two in this game and in both cases I find these outcomes quite sad for who doesn't get chosen. For one of them the benefits of Geralt's help even continues on in Witcher 2. There's also a chunk of wonderful cheese in these streets. A house miraculously filled with characters you interacted with throughout the game, some of which have no business being here. Vaska from the swamps. The mysterious girl from Lakeside. You get a little piece of “what happened next” to some of the supporting cast and I'm sorry but I love it. It doesn't make any sense but I still love it. The frozen wasteland sequence coming up doubles down on this and what can I say. I'm ashamed of myself but I think it's the best kind of jank there is. Even the talking ghoul is back hanging out in the basement. It's here that you can learn that Carmen is the daughter of the Reverend from the Outskirts, banished and disowned by him for becoming pregnant. This late in the game there are still connections being made to things that happened at the beginning. This continues with the final “for real this time” confrontation. Before that you have to fight a Zeugl in the sewers with your chosen partner. I have no idea why this is here. It's astonishingly unnecessary and out of place. I'm mostly positive about it because I like interesting looking monster fights and it's very Ultros from Final Fantasy 6. But... why is it here? Is it supposed to show that the city has further fallen into damnation that larger monsters are here too? Or was it a boss fight CD Projekt had planned for another location that was cut but the boss itself was finished so they decided to use it here. Or maybe they wanted a duality to the final boss fights—this is the final big monster. Jacques de Aldersberg is the final big human. I just wish this could have replaced the Dagon fight in Chapter Four since it's much better than that one. You see some more destruction and a post-apocalyptic atmosphere in the slums of the Temple Quarter before assaulting the Order's citadel. Siegfried, Yaevinn, or Triss are incapacitated before you enter and so Geralt has to continue alone. Of these three Yaevinn is the only one that you will never see again after this point. And the only way you'll see Siegfried again is if you import your save into Witcher 2. And so we're finally here. The actual last part of the game. There's nothing after this save a pre-credits cinematic that sets up Witcher 2. This is about 30 mins of Geralt versus Jacques, who has been rushed in to be the surprise mastermind of the whole thing in a way that makes me wonder who is going to give a shit. You can't introduce a new character this late, have him be so important, and expect it to be received well. This is possibly the worst bit of storytelling we've seen so far in this video and it's why the ending of this first Witcher game has such a poor reputation. Jacques is a sorcerer and he claims everything he is doing is extreme but the ends will justify the means. He's foreseen the end of the world and he shares that vision with you. Despite what he claims here this is not a time jump to the future. This is a battle of the minds between Geralt and him. As Triss explains, you're occupying a simulated space in a shared consciousness link, and Geralt's defenses manifest themselves as a reflection of the choices he's made with major characters throughout the game. Shani or Triss will be here depending on who you chose. Abigail will help you or attack you. Toruviel, Rayla, or Celina can appear. Same for Siegfried or Yaevinn—or both if you go neutral. If you saved Adda then she shows up to help. If you killed her then De Wett of all people will be here instead. It's possible that there are some other configurations that I didn't see in my three playthroughs—there could be more characters that show up than this. This is the only part of the ending that I liked. Jacques is easy to ignore as rushed nonsense to make the ending of the game feel stronger than it actually is, so it's easy to focus on this Trial by Ice as those you have judged throughout the game come back to judge you. There are also monsters here that Jacques claims are what humans evolve into in order to survive the White Frost, which is what is meant to happen in the future to this planet and why he wanted the witcher secrets. Normal witchers aren't “enough” to save humanity from this fate. More brutal, subservient hulks that are truly stripped of emotion and resistant to the weather are the only thing that can save mankind—at least according to Jacques's visions. And Ithlinne's prophecy. Ultimately you kill him in a sword fight. Then the King of the Wild Hunt shows up to demand Jacques's soul or else you'll have to fight him too. This is a choice that seems to be incredibly important but remember this isn't real. It's a simulated linked consciousness state so this is really Geralt fighting against an imagined specter that lurks in his own mind. This decision rightfully doesn't change anything going forward. And that's the ending. Dandelion wakes you up in the same place that you were in when Jacques cast his hypnotic spell. You can loot the scrolls that were stolen from Kaer Morhen and a dimeritium amulet as a keepsake of the encounter. This really makes me stop and wonder though —no one in Salamandra made copies of the witcher scrolls? Surely once they were stolen they're unleashed forever into the world from the secrets being transcribed? But ah well. You have a final conversation with Dandelion. He's planning to compose a new ballad based on everything that's happened. And then there's an ending montage based on your decisions, focusing on the state that Vizima is left in because of Geralt of Rivia. Who moves on to the next legend and the next story. If you don't mind I'd like to do just that as well. We've dwelt long enough on this first game. I wanted to give it its fair portion of this video series but now that I'm here I'm realizing just how much the ending has soured me on it. So let's just move on and introduce some Witcher 2 stuff to set up the next video. Let me explain. When I lie in videos it's either for a harmless joke or to recreate the experience of playing the game for yourself. The overwhelming majority of those who watch this video series will have not played Witcher 1 and 2. When you first experience this ending you have no idea that Jacques de Aldersberg is actually Alvin. There are some clues but it's too big of a leap in logic for most people to make and, even when the biggest indicator is revealed at the end with the time-worn dimeritium amulet on his corpse, it's still not 100% confirmed. Even Geralt and Dandelion, who have both seen the amulet before it was given to Alvin and comment that it looks like the same one but older, don't speculate much beyond that. Maybe because they're too afraid to confront the uncomfortable truth that they just killed the child they previously protected. In fact it wasn't universally accepted that Jacques is Alvin until Witcher 3 came out with a second rock solid clue. You find it in a bookstore in Novigrad—a book someone left here for you which is clearly from Jacques but signed with an initialed “A” for Alvin. The ending of this game is incredible with this context. It's one of the best endings to any RPG I've ever played. It's the best ending of these three games from a more mechanical, structural perspective of storytelling—Witcher 3's ending can be better from an emotional perspective. It kind of hurt me to pretend to slam it a few paragraphs back but I think it's important to recreate the baffling part of this experience so the full realization has enough fuel to support the payoff for those watching who haven't played. So how is it possible that Alvin is Jacques and why does that make the ending so good? Book knowledge helps significantly but Alvin's teleportation powers and Triss's explanations also go a long way to set it up. Alvin has the same base power set as Cirilla. Ciri is known as the “Lady of Space and Time”. Kind of like Doctor Who only with magical, genetic jumping across reality instead of using a time machine. Similar also to how Henry jumps around in The Time Traveler's Wife if you've read that book, except Ciri and Alvin bring their immediate belongings like their clothes with them. In the books Ciri travels to many different planets and time periods, mostly without any willful control of it. In Witcher 3 she's only shown moving locations with more mastery but still imprecise when it comes to moving large distances. Alvin's powers are untrained and raw but are still incredibly powerful—he presumably rarely took this dimeritium amulet off and was still capable of extraordinary feats of magic. It's unlikely that his teleport jump at the end of Chapter Four was the final emotional leap that he made as a child. I imagine he flung himself throughout time and space many more times before landing decades in the past before his own birth, and when he spent this brief period of his childhood with Geralt. Or maybe he had already time traveled before meeting Geralt for the first time. I also think it's deliberate that you never see Jacques until after the final time you see Alvin. My presumption is that time travel in the Witcher universe is a closed loop. Whatever happens happens, and that Jacques trying to interfere with his own childhood would result in a disastrous response from the continuum of the universe. Conversely, whatever actions he takes as an adult already influenced him as a child. It's paradoxical but Jacques was already here before the first iteration of Alvin ever jumped back in time. And it also explains why Geralt “coincidentally” went to the right place when he traveled to Vizima at the end of the Prologue. His presence here is part of what made the attack happen to begin with, which is why he went to Vizima, which is why the attack happened, which is why he went to Vizima, which is why the attack happened... Wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey. A twist like this, when it makes sense, is great but it's not enough on its own to make this such a fantastic ending. What elevates it are the following two key qualities: 1) that it's been seamlessly set up throughout the entire game 2) and that your choices directly contributed to the man Alvin became. We discuss monsters often throughout this video. We've seen repeated use of the idea that monsters don't always look like monsters—and inversely what does look like a monster isn't always. Some characters also loop through this—they start out looking like a stereotypical monster but they're a tragic sufferer of a curse. After they're cured and now look human they can start to act far more monstrous than they did before because of their choices and nature, not because of any curse or looking like a monster. Princess Adda fits this idea somewhat. A book character I don't want to mention, who shows up early in Witcher 3, is an even better fit. It's too big of a spoiler to say right now sorry. The big part of this theme that was difficult to avoid talking about until now is the idea of monsters being created by those that it goes on to torment. This is distinct from the trite trope “humans are the real monsters!”. Instead the stories in the Witcher games and books explore the idea that “you make your own demons” in several different ways: 1) Monsters from neglect and misguided beliefs. Not burying corpses properly, or not respecting the passing of a loved one enough. 2) A curse resulting from a spell or emotional backlash from breaking a promise or wronging someone severely enough. 3) Communal crimes that cause a monster to appear as a corrupt agent of justice. 4) Tragedy, whether intentional or otherwise. A crime of passion. Or an accident that results in a death that meets the criteria for a ritual that results in a monster being spawned. 5) Deliberate monster creation. More of a science. Witchers qualify for this. Mages as well for some people. So do Alvin's mutants. Sorcerers can also construct and/or conjure monsters like the Frightener or the Koshchey. The result of much labor. 6) Some monsters are made through powerful imagination. The Conjunction of the Spheres supports this idea—and the idea of “muses” that link realities through creative people who think they're imagining new creatures when they're actually channeling the image of something that exists in another dimension. And/Or that imagination itself is a form of creation through these same forces. 7) There are monsters made from superstition and the people of the world just deciding someone is one. Witch hunts. Children born under the Curse of the Black Sun—which are births unfortunately timed with a solar eclipse that led to rampant speculation that those born during it would be mutated. The important distinction here is that the label of the monster came first and, once that assumption took root, many of the completely normal children grew into “monsters” because society gave them no other choice. It's easy to imagine a wrongfully persecuted witch eventually snapping under the pressure of constant jabs, attacks, and speculation. Snapping and becoming the monster they all feared her to be, because they feared her to be. 8) And lastly, at least for this list right now, we have monsters created by circumstance. Not from paranoia. From grossly misguided ideals and, perhaps, an equal amount of suffering. The Scoia'tael. Maybe Berengar. Definitely Alvin. You could make a strong argument that any monster that doesn't have a creation like this isn't really a monster. Despite their fearsome appearances, many “monsters” that sit outside of this type of classification are the same as animals. They need shelter and so they protect their nests. They need food and so they hunt. There's no perversion of a human ideal or any “evil” tendencies. They're just scary looking animals. A human serial killer is much more of a monster than an arachas or a troll—or even the kayran or the zeugl. Maybe ghouls don't belong there either. Witcher 1 is the story of how Alvin became a monster—from neglect, a curse, crimes inflicted on him, tragedy, scientific gene manipulation on his ancestors which is why he has his powers, the effects of being unhinged from just one reality and seeing the doom that awaits his world, the hatred of people that he received from being seen as an “other” and already a monster because of his powers, and you. The player's choices. What's so incredible about all this is that it alters how you perceive the entire game –a new light is turned on and you see a whole new layer of details and intent that was there all along. Alvin is already an orphan when the game starts. He probably suffered through the war and saw his parents be killed. He witnesses a woman, maybe a step-mother, brutally torn apart by monstrous dogs and is almost killed himself. He later learns that it was the fault of the people around him, the adults that are meant to nurture children. He starts having intense visions and channeling voices that he doesn't understand. He's seen as a problem to be passed between guardians that don't want him. He's happy to be adopted by a witch but she uses him to her own ends, drugs him, and then promptly discards him when he's not useful anymore—after being kidnapped by a vicious gang. And then he's forgotten. For a whole Chapter. That's part of it. Did you try to find Alvin after killing The Beast? Did Shani? Did anyone care? He's just left there. “Probably just a Chapter One character, I guess”. What other awful things happen to him while Geralt is marching around the Temple Quarter in Chapter Two? And then he's kidnapped a second time only to be rescued by a man who is more preoccupied by the choice between two women, who also seem more interested in snubbing the other by gaining custody of the child and therefore access to Geralt's third sword. How does that turn out? Well this new guardian is also attacked. Alvin has to teleport away out of fear to another place where, once again, people argue over looking after him. Alina wants to adopt him. Julian doesn't want him. Then Alina dies after Alvin envisions it —another one of his guardians horrifically killed. Geralt helps a little and answers any questions the boy has but this ends with yet another violent attack, this time by elves and is punctuated with an unavoidable slaughter. Those questions show how lost Alvin is in the world. What should I try to do when I grow up, Geralt? A knight, a witcher, or a witcher-knight, Geralt? What about destiny, Geralt? What about my powers? Are they a gift or a curse, Geralt? Should I keep them a secret or use them for good? What about these elves? Are they really so bad or should we feel sorry for them, Geralt? The answers you give to these questions come back. They change what Jacques says to you when you speak to him in the Frozen Wasteland of Vizima at the end of the game. You have shaped his path through these choices. Alvin grew up to be a monster that makes other monsters—with the best intentions but monsters nonetheless. The leader of the Order of the Flaming Rose. A true Grandmaster now that hunts the elves that triggered his frightful spiral through time and space. Not the pretend one he played as in Murky Waters. Alvin intentionally never reveals his identity to you. He remembers everything and knows who you are—there's even a great pun about him having a “reliable Source” for his information on Geralt since that's the kind of magic user Alvin is. I think he wanted to convince his one-time guardian to treat him as an equal on his own merits. No appeal to emotion or a plea from the long lost child Geralt looked after. Jacques de Aldersberg made something of himself. He climbed his way out of the hell that we see in the previous chapters and the hell of the years we don't see after he vanishes. He's the savior of the world. He's foresaw the bitter end of all things in the all-consuming White Frost. The planet will be encased in ice. Let me show you it Geralt. I'm doing all of this for the right reasons. Listen to me, Geralt. Trust me like I trusted you, Geralt. Then, at the end of it all, he's momentarily that boy again. Alvin holding up his hands in a meek defense. Defeated, all he can do is blast Geralt's first sword away. And this witcher stands over him. The witcher he so idolized as a child and probably still has all this time—with all the rules and the witcher code that comes with it The witcher who inspired him with the solution to the White Frost. Make better witchers! More effective witchers. The witcher he wants to recruit to lead his new army to save humanity. This witcher he so longs to impress and to be worthy of and win over to his side. This witcher that draws his silver sword to kill him. He's a kid again, realizing in his final moment of life how grossly he has misjudged how his hero views him. How far he's strayed and become the monster that so many people and their actions made him to be. Including you. Time and time again authority failed Alvin, so he became the authority. He sought to fill the gaping hole of hypocrisy and failure. And succumbed to the same failing as those that failed him. Witcher 1 is Alvin's story as much as Geralt's. Similar to how the books become Ciri's story as much as Geralt's. What's further heartbreaking about this ending is the cut content—at least I suspect as much. There's too many little things that are off about this. Yes player choices are a factor for Alvin's journey, and they shape how he views some of the events that happen, but it's mostly the things that you can't choose that create this monster. For example you can't take Alvin with you at the end of Chapter One even if you think of doing it. Some of these decisions are baseline Geralt, others are choosing within the possibilities that foundational Geralt would likely consider. I think the intention here was originally to have Salamandra and Alvin be linked to a faction based on what you choose throughout the game. So it's much more of a monster made of your big choices. Alvin wouldn't always become Jacques de Aldersberg, Grand Master. Since he never appears until Alvin's teleported away he could be someone commanding Leuvaarden from higher up and comes in to act personally in Vizima if Geralt stays on the Neutral path. Or if Geralt goes with the Scoia'tael then Alvin is a powerful sorcerer who is sympathetic to the plight of the elves based on Geralt's actions and words during the Murky Waters situation. Then Geralt and Yaevinn are in the awkward spot of having to deal with a superior Scoia'tael force that's been working with Salamandra—does Yaevinn go against it like Siegfried does with the Order, or does he betray Geralt? Of course I'm speculating but this is exactly the kind of much more in-depth consequence that seemed to be set up but then wasn't able to be finished. Thaler and Leuvaarden vanish. White Rayla is the only companion mutated when it could have been based on which faction you go with. It just feels to me like there were meant to be many more three-possibility consequences in Chapter Five that couldn't be implemented just like the City of Ys in Chapter Four. I think that the ending we have here is already great. Arguably it's cleaner than having all of these choices but I think this “you unknowingly created a monster” idea would have only been improved by whatever plans they originally had that weren't able to make it into the game. Witcher 1 is a flawed experience but an incredible debut from CD Projekt. I have so many criticisms for Witcher 2 and 3 but it's undeniable that the games are widely celebrated for good reasons. You can already see so much of that talent and potential here, and I think it's a real shame that many people who love the Witcher 3 dismiss it because of its poor opening. And a couple of other reasons too. Yes there's jank. Yes there's glitches. It crashed the most out of these three games. The save files it makes will reach into the gigabytes. Some parts of it might not be properly translated. The combat is a waste of time. But the world here—the atmosphere and the writing. Even the characters and acting as a witcher. The rich quality of those that people adore in Witcher 3—that's already present in this first game. It's just a bit rougher and requires you to adjust your tolerances a bit. There are issues of continuity that we haven't gotten to yet but that's because the Witcher Trilogy wasn't a carefully mapped out series. There was no guarantee that there would be another game after this—I'd guess most signs pointed to that being unlikely. So I think it's forgivable that problems like this arose. Regardless of them Witcher 1 is not something you have to suffer through if you want to play the whole trilogy. It's not just impressive as a “developer's first try”. It's impressive. It is worthy of standing in the same series as Witcher 3.
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Channel: Joseph Anderson
Views: 2,813,823
Rating: 4.9160128 out of 5
Keywords: the witcher, witcher, witcher series, the witcher series, the witcher enhanced edition, the witcher series critique, witcher critique, the witcher critique, review, analysis, criticism, the witcher review, longform, funny, video game, the witcher 2, the witcher 3, witchet netflix, witcher books, gameplay analysis, story analysis
Id: NtrAx-rVgco
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Length: 258min 25sec (15505 seconds)
Published: Mon Apr 06 2020
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