Re: The Witcher 3
E3 Fact Sheet
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Eurogamer
E3 Fact Sheet
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Eurogamer
But it was neither the ambitious open world nor the welcoming narrative reboot that excited me most when I sat down to watch a full hour of gameplay in CD Projekt Red's suite. It was the monster hunting.
Following the trail of the Wild Hunt across a rugged, Celtic island, Geralt finds himself diverted by a village dispute. The young men of a village are quarrelling with the elders over the havoc wreaked by a monster lurking in a nearby forest, which the elders venerate as a woodland spirit and claim is only killing because the villagers have left the "old ways" behind them. (This sets up what is essentially a compulsory side-quest that interrupts the storyline, and is as elaborate and handsomely staged as you would expect an episode in the main quest to be. By using devices like this, as well as dynamic events out in the wild, CD Projekt hopes to avoid the fussy mini-maps and objective markers that bog down so many open-world games.)
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Geralt knows that the Leshen will have marked one of the villagers from which it draws power, and it won't be possible to kill it while that villager lives. In one of the morally ambiguous choices typical of the series, he must then decide whether to take this information to the weak elders or belligerent youth of the village. Our demonstrator sides with the latter - which the young men take as an excuse to slaughter the elders, even though Geralt discovers that a young woman was marked.
Potted medieval morality play over, Geralt heads into the woods by moonlight to slay the Leshen, a tall, crooked spectre with huge antlers who marks his territory with totems and commands wolves to defend him. It's a terrifically atmospheric and scary confrontation. It's a stormy night, and the rain and wind lash the trees and foliage of the woods relentlessly while Geralt engages in his fast-moving, tactical skirmish with the strange beast. After it dies and the quest is concluded, a short flash-forward narration notes melancholically that the people of the village outlived the monster that haunted them by only three months.
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Geralt knows that the Leshen will have marked one of the villagers from which it draws power, and it won't be possible to kill it while that villager lives. In one of the morally ambiguous choices typical of the series, he must then decide whether to take this information to the weak elders or belligerent youth of the village. Our demonstrator sides with the latter - which the young men take as an excuse to slaughter the elders, even though Geralt discovers that a young woman was marked.
Potted medieval morality play over, Geralt heads into the woods by moonlight to slay the Leshen, a tall, crooked spectre with huge antlers who marks his territory with totems and commands wolves to defend him. It's a terrifically atmospheric and scary confrontation. It's a stormy night, and the rain and wind lash the trees and foliage of the woods relentlessly while Geralt engages in his fast-moving, tactical skirmish with the strange beast. After it dies and the quest is concluded, a short flash-forward narration notes melancholically that the people of the village outlived the monster that haunted them by only three months.
But there's something else going on here, tying both gameplay and plot deep into the one of the oldest archetypes of storytelling. The dark and stormy night, the chilling monster design, the bitter morality evident in the way the supernatural threat seems to prey on all too human weakness; with this trip into the woods at the dead of night, the Witcher 3 is plunging its roots deep into the black, loamy, fertile soil of central European folklore. Combine this with a world that has more grit and grain to it than Skyrim's, and the renewed focus on Geralt as beast-slayer - which extends across gameplay, plot, character development and lore - and you have, for my money, the most exciting prospect in solo role-playing games for quite some time.
"If you can see it, you can go there." The open-world refrain is all well and good, but perhaps what matters more in The Witcher 3 is going after what you can't see: into the woods, into the cave, into the dark unknown, to hunt the things that haunt your dreams.
"If you can see it, you can go there." The open-world refrain is all well and good, but perhaps what matters more in The Witcher 3 is going after what you can't see: into the woods, into the cave, into the dark unknown, to hunt the things that haunt your dreams.
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