As excited as I want to be at the prospect of another Witcher game, the
first two having been masterpieces each in their own way, some of the data
flowing out of CD Projekt Red has me worried. In their interviews following the
announcement of the game there were a few hints of “making the game more
accessible than its predecessors” and “more like an open-world sandbox, in the
likes of Skyrim”.
Well, the “accessible” part speaks for itself, I think. One of the great
things of the first two Witcher games in my humble opinion was the limited amount
of hand-holding. Apparently the devs think that ended up hurting their bottom
line (read: “easy stuff sells more”).
I won’t bash them for that belief because recently I’ve gotten anecdotal
evidence that it might indeed be true. Some people (with fairly decent
purchasing power) are turned off by
what they heard is a “hard” game. One guy in particular was scared of Witcher 2
because he’d heard that “once you die, it’s over” (which is true only in Insane
difficulty, and even then you can always start over).
Oh well. Still, that can be gotten over. If the tutorial can be skipped,
and if there’s an engaging difficulty level, and if the mechanics aren’t too
dumbed down, it’s quite possible that a “more accessible” Witcher will still
scratch that itch for a game that you must pay attention to in order to get
through.
That’s a lot of “ifs”, and a lot can go wrong. The changes from the first
to the second Witcher game point in the direction of a lot more hand-holding. But
it’s the least of my worries. What gets me wringing my hands is the reference
to Skyrim.
Let me say that I never really got it with Bethesda games. They seem
awfully soulless. There’s plenty of ego stroking, of the cheapest variety,
without even a Fable-like hint of good-natured mockery. The characters seem mass-produced
from Ye Olde Fantasy Factory molds. The plot reeks of cliché from a mile away. It’s
also looser than pajama shorts, and it has to be, to make way for the bloated
array of side quests than have next to nothing to do with the main story. I’m
also no fan of the bajillion races – so many that none really stand out, except
for being each uglier than the last.
And to top it off... the combat system. Powers that rule this world, what
have we ever done to deserve Bethesda’s craptastic FPS-RPG hybrid? And why, why
did it have to infect Fallout? That’s as close to a cosmic gaming tragedy as it
gets. I’m still reeling at the thought of what New Vegas could have been if it
had a proper, Fallout-ish game engine.
Anyway... The Witcher 3. The first two Witcher games had at least one
strong point in common: verisimilitude, the feeling of context. Fitting the
player into that context wasn’t done so well, but there’s no denying that it
felt as though you were playing in a believable world with believable
characters, one that could conceivably go on without the player. That feeling
is much harder to accomplish in a
sandbox-style game.
If the player is limited to a certain area, as he was in both Witcher
games up to now, then auxiliary plots can be kept tied in a relatively tight
manner to the main plot. The fact that the plots weren’t “world-shattering
epics” (especially true of the first game) helped to achieve verisimilitude. “I’m
going to kill some drowners to make a buck. It’s not like the world needs
saving or something.”
In a wide-world game – particularly one where the world is on the brink
of radical change, which seems to be the case in The Witcher 3 – the only
practical way of keeping the weave of the fictional universe together, and reducing
inconsistencies, is by assuming that each location is largely isolated from the
others (Fallouts 1 and 2). Otherwise, making the NPCs in one location aware of
what’s going on elsewhere becomes harder by a factorial rate based on the
number of locations.
Or, alternatively, you can just make the weave of the world incredibly loose
and elastic... which is Bethesda’s favorite solution.
I think that has a lot to do with their games being “seamless” sandbox
experiences. When you try to create a whole world with a limited team of
developers and put it in a machine with limited resources, that world
invariably ends up seeming rather small. It’s hard to pretend that two cities
are far off and isolated when there are only a handful of miles between them, and the inhabitants of one are well aware of what's going on in the other.
Paradoxically, limiting actual gameplay to relatively small areas and
putting a world map of sorts between them is the way to go in creating a
feeling of scale. That’s what the original Fallouts did, and it worked
wonderfully. Between world map travel taking several weeks, and the positively
dangerous random encounters, there was a very real feeling that the cities were isolated.
Bethesda tries to make up for this by filling the landscape between
interesting locations with ludicrous numbers of randomly-spawning enemies. It
succeeds to some degree – you think twice before venturing out into the world,
which does create a feeling of isolation. But it’s rather gimmicky (and thus annoying). And instant
travel, another Bethesda staple, instantly defeats it.
So there you go. This one-map ‘seamless’ approach, and its implications
for plot development and side quests, is what worries me the most about the
upcoming Witcher 3. New Vegas proved to me that it’s possible to create a
relatively believable world within a sandbox, but I fear that The Witcher 3 will
inevitably sacrifice much of the cohesion and purpose of the previous games and
move towards an approach like that of MMOs: the quest giver just stands there waiting for a Hero to appear and move things along.
