#grandwitchbird does game analysis kind of

[grandwitchbird]

Dragon Age has been doing a really clever thing with its protagonists and the heroic power fantasy that only fully comes together when you look at the series as a whole, so let’s do another ramble. Under a cut to save your dash.

Origins is a traditional RPG power fantasy. It likes to tell you that it’s not by gesturing at Loghain and alluding to unreliable narratives, but what it shows is the power fantasy. No matter what your warden does, they’re the hero. Are you a casual genocide enthusiast? No problem you can still ride off into the sunset looking for a cure. Also hey you have a critical weakness/flaw (the calling) that kind of dooms you or gives you cause to vaguely ride of into the sunset. Very heroic indeed. There’s a layer of textual interest added by the presence of unreliable narratives, but ultimately it’s the hero’s choices that shape and determine the world and story, right down to very gamified relationships. The origins system itself, the fact that your warden could have been anyone, is the actual textual proof that this isn’t all that’s going on. It just only really gets paid off by later games, and that’s pretty important given where this franchise ended up.

—

Enter DA2. Hawke is a champion, not a hero. Hawke fights for those who can’t fight themselves. Hawke can’t save the world. They can’t even save their family or city. It’s a battle of attrition that sees them somehow worse off no matter what. The still-gamified but now more nuanced and challenging relationships become the focus because they’re really all Hawke has. Now the power fantasy is still lurking around the edges. It’s just challenged at every turn. You can free Kirkwall, but Anders is always going to blow up a church.

—

Which brings us to Inquisition. Somehow, you’re both as much of a nobody as Hawke and you’re responsible for more than the Warden. And it’s miserable. The power fantasy is constantly undermined. No matter who your inquisitor was, by the end of the game they’ve been completely subsumed by their role: turns out power has teeth.

In a move that delivers on the unreliable narrative throughline that Origins established and DA2 strengthened, the Inquisitor must play the hero and save the world. It doesn’t matter if your Inquisitor is a kind person doing their best or a racist power-hungry asshole, and that is now a systemic issue within the world itself. The erosion of your character’s personhood is explicit within the text as characters struggle to see you as more than your role and you’re asked to shape the faith of an entire world even if you don’t share that faith. The cost of this erosion is made incredibly literal with Ameridan’s story and then in Trespasser, where the anchor, both cause and symbol of the Inquisitor’s role and power, is killing them. Relationships become somewhat less gamified but more importantly, you’re given an explicit textual mirror in Solas. He’s there to reflect your behavior but also your loss of personhood to a role. It’s essential that he’s the one to save your life at the end of Trespasser. Even if you’ve never shown him a moment’s grace, here is your mirror to see you as a person one last time.

—

And then there’s Rook. Now we play a mirror to Solas, a character who has been the hero, Mythal’s champion, and a man subsumed by his role/s. He’s really the narrative gift that keeps giving.

We walk the dreadwolf’s path this time, and the dreadwolf is a classic tragic hero. He’s stuck in a story where he must save the world and where a critical flaw will always be his downfall. We’re Varric’s second who must step up to champion his cause after the events of the introduction. And we’re barely keeping ourselves together under the burden of leadership. And here is where Veilguard finally delivers everything this franchise ever promised. Because under all that we’re truly just some guy. Just like Solas is just a guy who got stuck in situations he never wanted. His response was to become the hero or play the villain (depending on the story) because that’s easier. But if Rook can truly choose the ‘hard truth’ that the world is never going to “stay fixed” (oh hi Inquisitor… and Hawke… and Warden) and that other people can have better ideas and make hard calls and their own choices? If we don’t have to ‘win’? Rook can reconcile the inevitable tragedies of this kind of story with their very human needs and escape the story altogether. The cost, of course, is the power fantasy.

[grandwitchbird]

Veilguard is generally a well designed and well written game. I’m clear on what I think about DA as a whole, but it’s easily the best actual game in the franchise.

People are picking up, however, on a real critical flaw and mostly failing to locate the flaw while getting distracted by nonsense. It’s a flaw present in every DA game if you dig enough. Let’s talk about story bosses.

This is a tricky thing in arpgs. RGG and CDPR try to ensure that story bosses are densely interwoven into the world in a way that works thematically.

Adam Smasher would have been a problem in any universe; he’s just enabled and enshrined by this one. Hansen points us right back to the military industrial complex, the ghost of which we’ve spent the entire game wrestling with. Literally. All of that directs us right back to the systems in place in our cyberpunk world. It points us at our own motivations as V and interrogates our love of the power fantasy as a player.

In an RGG game, when you run down a corridor towards a boss, it’s a gauntlet. It’s there for fun and also to highlight the legendary clash that’s about to happen with reference to the Yakuza films the series started as an homage to. The boss may wait at the end or jump you, depending on their personality and goals. There will be mini bosses along the way because you’re generally fighting hierarchical organizations.

In Veilguard, our enemies wait at the end of a corridor. They’re powerful and don’t need to come to us. Ok good start, also a nod to ME. Occasionally you’re lucky and get story ‘minibosses’ that interrogate that very idea. The first warden is here to flesh out everyone’s motives and challenge us as the player. Sometimes you’re very lucky and the boss is Johanna Hezenkoss and she’s exclusively here to have clear motives that flesh out Emmrich’s arc and to cause problems because it’s fun. Most of the time, you get Aelia or whatserface Aelia 2.0 in Lucanis’s arc. Or the others I don’t remember after playing the game 5 times. Anaris? What did he even want? No I don’t mean power. What was under that? What was his motivation? Because I can explain the power-hunger in every Yakuza shithead or nationalist asshat I’ve fought in an RGG game. But Veilguard, like all of DA is avoiding real discussions of power and psychology and ~implications~.

I’m not a forgetful person. I’m meticulous and have the true blue autistic pattern recognition. I genuinely can’t say what made Aelia and Aelia 2.0 anything other than cosplay tyrants. Not without projecting onto the text or stretching it to breaking point by leaning hard on one specific short story.* Dragon guy and other antaam guy came out of literally nowhere. Mail order villains those two.

Even with our big bads, we get mere hints and gestures. Everyone is impressed with whatsisface doing a bad imitation of Bowie’s lines in Labyrinth. He’s a spirit of tyranny though. What does that mean. What makes the tyrants work in this world. And why are we cribbing from the Goblin King while carefully editing out the sucker punch?

We know the answer in the real world and can project that onto the game. But it’s not in the game. Not in a way the text doesn’t flinch from. And this is something people are picking up on. It’s also not been in any of the other games sorry to say. So this isn’t new. Veilguard just isn’t hiding behind obfuscating design choices and allusions to better stories. It’s still making those allusions (see gif above) but it’s a more honest text re: its limitations.

As with everything. The Mourn Watch and Grey Wardens stand heads and shoulders above the rest of the faction/companion-based conflicts. Their bosses have clear psychologies, motivations, and represent coherent and grounded goals (in hilariously disparate ways) Solas, likewise, has us/Rook as a mirror and his needs/wants and the conflict between those needs/wants are forefront and incredibly well developed. It’s not all bad. It’s actually quite good.

But when people flounder at surface details looking for the ‘problems’ with the writing. This is what’s getting missed. The problem is never ‘plot hole’ or ‘bad lore’. It’s something in the structure and conflict and motivation. And I’m afraid to say it’s old news with DA (Loghain is fine but the entire end of origins is an asspull. Don’t @ me). This game is much stronger than the others on that front. That would still be true if we had only Solas. We also got Johanna fingerguns Hezenkoss and the entire Grey Warden plot. I, for one, am counting that a win.

*the extended media is a critical weakness of the franchise. Referencing your own EU is not the same as entering a dialogue with an existing subgenre populated by works from diverse sources.

[grandwitchbird]

So let’s talk about Veilguard as an intentional subversion of the heroic power fantasy in RPGs. This is messy because I’m still thinking about it.

Generally we’ve got two approaches to crafting subversive narratives: utilizing the conventions of genre and medium to subvert expectation, and/or writing from the margins and against hegemonic interests.

Note that the audience is presumed to be informed. There’s no sense in trying to subvert uninformed expectations.

Veilguard puts the power of writing from the margins at least partly in the player’s hands. Are you a former galley slave turned pirate? Are you a cursed warden doomed to die in a world that will pay lip service to ideals it doesn’t really believe in? Maybe you’re just trans in a world that only barely even has words for what that means. It’s a collaborative narrative after all. And you can be the hero if you want! The game does not take that from you. It’s just that there are consequences to your choices, and heroes don’t get to escape their stories.*

Relationships & Characters

The subversions are there at the micro level, in archetypes and arcs turned on their heads. The noir detective is a woman. The necromancer fears death. The big damn hero guy is happier and more fulfilled as a cat dad. Most importantly though, the player cannot solve these character’s problems. We can only stay beside them while they struggle. And we’re meant to struggle too. There’s no incentive to people please to game approval. Trying to game a romance system for kisses and content isn’t even possible here. Our only motivation can be genuine interest and investment in these characters as-written, something that has finally allowed BioWare to shake off the spectre of player-sexual gamified romance arcs.**

The Narrator

Varric’s (explicitly illusory) attempts to frame the story as a schlocky hero’s journey are constantly undermined. We already know he’s spinning stories because that’s what he’s done for 3 games now. His advice to go solve your team’s problems is canned and doesn’t really help for reasons that become painfully apparent later in the game. This Varric is just whatever perception-filtered memory Rook/Solas has of the real Varric. Varric’s absence as a character then haunts every corner of the story and calls every narrative frame into question: heroes of the Veilguard as a game mechanic, Neve as folk hero or criminal collaborator to the same ends, Rook only calling themselves a hero when playing storyteller themselves, even Rook’s moniker takes on a new shade after Solas pulls his castling maneuver and the illusion is broken.

Varric being an absent narrator pushing us along the hero’s journey allows that big reveal to free us even as it frees him from the role of narrator. It also challenges us because it gives us undeniable reasons to want personal revenge against Solas. The real Varric was just a guy who did his best and was often wrong. He made his choices and can rest now. But Solas made his choices too, even if the outcome wasn’t what he intended. And now we’re free to choose between their paths. We haven’t actually fixed anything because this world is much bigger than us. We can open doors, offer a shoulder, provide backup. We can trust and be trusted. We can make mistakes. We can punch a god and die a hero. But we don’t have to be the hero.

The Hero

Solas, the dreadwolf, god of lies (depending on the story) is of course the walking narrative key to all of this. It’s a retread of his own story we escape if we refuse to play the hero. But it should be noted that the heroic path is interesting in its own right! The dreadwolf rises also in us. Sacrifice the pawns, damn the consequences. It’s a story that’s tragic and brutal and unapologetic in its classic structure. We get caught by the story and become the very hero we’ve been fighting this whole time.

It’s just at least equally interesting that we don’t have to be the hero. And it’s deeply subversive that the path to freedom is gained at the cost of the power fantasy. We can be part of a team that is more than pawns in a game. Some other guy can kill a god, and that’s actually his win, not just a step on our path. Somebody else can die for the cause, and that’s their choice more than ours. Our romances are represented by flowers because they’re alive and growing and not just beats in a story. Even the tragic hero himself can change. And that’s only possible if we let go of the power fantasy completely. Rook stops being Rook at the end of that path. It’s why we’re not in the mural. We get to escape the story.

* We’re going to get into heroes and stories and why heroes can’t escape their stories next if I don’t run out of steam.

** Or just Shepherd-sexual in Mass Effect. I want to write more about romance separately because this is a whole thing.

[grandwitchbird]

I talked about this already to some extent. But let’s round it up. Because there’s new DA people and I’m v tired but also invested at this point.

Also there’s a broader point here. Several tbh.

When people are kind of flailing around looking for the source of problems with a piece of media, particularly an unchallenging piece of media, and resorting to a shallow set of ‘criticisms’ that gesture at real issues, often there are fundamental flaws in said piece of media. They’re just being misidentified to the point of nonsense.

When something is by all metrics genuinely well done AND spectacular in execution, you do not get this. You get straightforwardly stupid people crying about Atreus acting like a child. You get transparently bigoted or immature people whining about Ellie or Joel having coherent arcs.

When something is by most metrics competently written but lacking in execution in multiple ways AND it makes ‘representation’ a selling point. It’s gonna get both column 1 and column 2 in force. This makes everything very loud and very stupid forever. I refuse to be held captive by that so I will keep talking about real things. Because in column 1 there’s an attempt to get at the actual problems, just without the needed vocabulary and experience.

And yes there’s overlap in column 1 & 2. I call it the clown show. That’s just not everything that’s happening.

The actual problems in Veilguard are the problems with BioWare as a whole. And mostly they have to do with motivation and ethics. Anyone who wants to seriously understand what’s gone so terribly wrong with every game release since Origins needs to reckon with this.

This company refuses to consistently define its storytelling values within the game world/s beyond ‘yay friendship’ and ‘trauma sad’. This is why the use of sexual violence in origins is there to shock 12 year olds. If that game were well written and actually meant for mature adults, sexual violence would just be one bad thing that can happen* to people (and if it were weighted towards women, we’d have clearly defined patriarchal systems and sexism that, again, is not there for laughs or shock value) and there would be some actual grasp of psychology and power in the text in general. This is also why people are reducing an attempt at actual mythic storytelling with Mythal to ‘abusive mother’ ‘trauma sad’. These games as texts invite reduction.

That psychology? Utterly lacking for the most part. And not lacking in the way of a story that’s doing something else. Lacking because the text willfully uses shorthand and assumed empathy** from the audience instead of laying bare the actual human motivations*** behind everything. Individual characters rise above this, and all the characters give hints of it, but that’s not the same as actually writing a story that accounts for real human motivations as part of its larger narrative. Characters in truly robust fiction are supportive functions of the larger narrative, and that narrative has clear priorities founded on strong values.****

The damn audience. These games are written for a specific audience. And that audience is really racist and pretty self indulgent. It doesn’t care about motivation. It thinks Varric is an interesting character who isn’t written like a checklist. It’s happy as long as it gets to smash its dolls together. It also likes to send death threats. This audience is an abstracted boogeyman in the writers room as far as I can tell, and it’s stealing all the motivation.

Cannot believe this site has pushed me to actually say this. It’s liberal! These are distinctly liberal games. They cannot and will not say anything truly meaningful because their whole ethos is built on pretending they’re not conservative (an ethos defined by retreat). This is why the subversion of power fantasy in DA is interesting but can ring hollow. It’s incoherent for a reason! It’s not looking its values in the eye. This is also why ME2 remains distinct. Turns out it’s easier for liberals to write villains pretending to be heroes. Take that as you will.

I’m not really interested in talking about how corny Bioware dialogue has always been. It’s always been corny. There’s actual voice direction problems in Veilguard that add a layer of technical problems to this, and that’s a bit more interesting, if frustrating to experience. This is why people are reaching for when they say ‘clunky’. I’m also not really interested in the structural issues. Which are there. Because there’s fewer structural issues in Veilguard than in any previous BioWare game. Most of these complaints are coming from people who have apparently let time soften them on how poorly built the other games are. Again. These are real problems people are flailing at with reductive takes. They’re also on brand for BioWare.

So that whole mess up there? That’s what’s going on. It’s what’s going on with the games and the actual real life audience constantly being at each others throats. It’s what’s going on with expectations and weird takes and the usual clown show.

* You can also go the Alien route of course. But this would require the violence to happen indiscriminately re: gender, and it would need to use the disgust response intelligently to interrogate something like…oh I don’t know the disgusting male power fantasy intrinsic to forced pregnancy-as horror.

** This is part of why people keep saying ‘marvel’. Marvel movies run on assumed empathy and it’s the most immediate touchstone and cheapest shot. BioWare was doing it first though. Guardians is literally riffing on DA and ME. And yes it’s cheap writing. I just don’t know why anyone expects anything else.

*** I’d be fine with mythic or purely dramatic motivations myself, but these games definitely do not know how to do more than gesture at that.

**** Something that’s gotten seriously muddled in our current publishing environment. Character-driven doesn’t mean you can reduce everything to the characters and their arcs. This is how we get shallow self-actualization narratives in place of deep explorations of what it means to be human. This is the problem at the heart of the ‘representation’ debates.

[grandwitchbird]

Am I gonna talk about Dragon Age again?

Might as well. Ok so I said before that y’all weren’t ready for my actual opinions. I’ve decided I don’t care. Because I think I’m funny. Also there’s an analytical angle to be had.

So there’s kind of a split in how people approach these games. Some have been playing dorky comedies with terrible politics this whole time. And some have apparently been playing a dark fantasy with serious world building. Both things come from the same place. Let’s get into it.

Origins is what happens when someone reads some of The Witcher stories and a lot of Wheel of Time and maybe maybe some of the actual pulp classics and doesn’t really understand why any of them do things the way they do. Or maybe they understand and don’t care because they’re busy making a Dungeons and Dragons game with cherry-picked elements from stronger stories.

On the spectrum of work I reference up there, it’s closest to Wheel of Time in quality and integrity. So. Middling. It also very specifically grabs the idea of elves in ghettos and pogroms and monster hunters who are kinda monstrous themselves complete with a ritual that usually kills them, also in-world texts for unreliable perspective… directly from The Witcher. It just completely strips those ideas of their actual context and weight. Now elves are just a really antisemitic trope. The text is flinching from its implications and landing on something ethically weak and reductive as a result. It doesn’t actually want you to think any of this through. It wants you to laugh at the funny drunk and clutch your pearls at its use of sexual violence.

DA2 isn’t better. It just cribs from Kurosawa now. But once again, we lack the material context that made Kurosawa’s storytelling so powerful. Welcome to ‘both sides are bad’ nonsense because these games as texts just don’t want to think about the implications.

Inquisition is smarter. By a lot. The Chantry was just fantasy!Catholicism and it wasn’t doing anything for the setting because of ‘both sides bad’ nonsense. Now we have Cassandra, and it’s doing something. It has something to say about faith apart from institutions. It has something to say about collective responsibility. Now we have Solas and he’s actually fae. He’s the other in self and the self in other as your narrative mirror. We have Vivienne who weaponizes her faith because the struggle to simply exist in this world is too costly. We have Cullen whose struggle with addiction balances the extremes and complicates the picture with his crimes. We have Cole who is 100% fae and also so human. It all resolves, and resists resolution, in the Inquisitor’s loss of personhood to their role. Every character balances against every other character, and we’re now saying something about the real human costs of unearned power and the need to struggle with the self that holds up under a bit of pressure. It still falters with the Templars though. It still doesn’t want you to look too hard at implications.

And now we have Veilguard. For better or worse, it’s all of this in one tidy package. This game has thought about the implications and it would like to just get rid of them thankyouverymuch. It knows it can’t handle that pressure. But it also knows it has a narrative golden goose in Solas. So it builds around him. Successfully. In its very limited capacity. This game isn’t shallower than Origins. It’s exactly as deep. It’s not safer than 2. It’s just actually finished. It doesn’t really lose anything from the tighter character arcs in Inquisition, because what Inquisition had was potential. And potential isn’t a goal in itself. This leaves us with a Dragon Age that tries to have its cake and eat it too while knowing its limits. That works for some because it’s actually good as a game. And it gives some folks indigestion. It’s not a new kind of cake though. It’s just not letting you wash it down with vague allusions to stronger narratives.

[grandwitchbird]

I ruminated a bit on the subversion of power fantasies in Veilguard here. But the more I think about it, the more I’m especially impressed by the way our impact on the environment is handled.

One of the truly neat power fantasy aspects of RPGs is our (illusory always) ability to shape the world a bit. This can, of course, be handled subversively. Witcher 3 famously gives you a lot of no-win changes that hammer home the kind of world you’re in and highlight the illusion of power. You can depose rulers, but there’s always another one ready to do what rulers do. Religious extremists will always carry out a pogrom. Someone is always waiting and ready to take advantage of chaos.

Veilguard lets you radically alter landscapes. Just as the blight crawls through and over everything, devouring the Thedas we know, we can methodically eradicate it, and flowers will grow again. The lighthouse itself, a ruin filled with dead growth, comes alive with greenery. Weisshaupt falls and is gone, but Lavendel thrives thanks to constant effort. The invaders can be repelled from Treviso or the cult routed from Minrathous. Arlathan becomes navigable.

Our efforts are rewarded not with a magically better world, but with more effort. If we leave the lighthouse, how long before it ceases to reflect our growth? Arlathan will require ongoing study and stewardship. Dorian has an uphill battle in front of him. Our power to change things is the power of a gardener. It’s power that’s more responsibility.

[grandwitchbird]

I touched on some thoughts on adaptation especially re: Nilfgaard and the political plot in the Witcher games previously. Mostly that was so I could tackle the convergent narrative that emerges across the games as a mirror or homage to the novels. To do that I have to talk about romance choices in Witcher 3. And to do that I have to talk about Triss. Buckle up.

TW: discussion of SA, nongraphic but frank

The first game specifically created some significant problems for 2-3. And no matter how I turn the issues around in my head, it really comes down to Triss. The amnesia plot is a silly contrivance, but so was Yennefer’s prison stint in the novels. If the contrivance does the job and gets a character where they need to be or out of the way for good enough reasons, we roll with it. The first game over-all has some interesting ~stuff~ happening as an rpg, but I’ve realized I mentally have it categorized as a Witcher-flavored rpg that mostly the next two games have to account for, for better or worse. It gets at some of the short stories’ charms but misses the weight of the novels. Intentionally I think. I guess we’ll see if that changes with the remake. Still, we can think of this as the kind of awkward prelude, a dip into the world in the same way the stories provide snippets of Geralt’s life before Ciri’s story really kicks off in the novels.

The second game is a bridge between this kind of standalone homage to the stories and the 3rd game’s homage and epilogue to the novels. It suffers for it. And Triss is right in the middle of that.

The Triss Problem

Triss Merigold, Yennefer’s best friend, sometime-mentor to Ciri, friend to Witchers, Geralt’s rapist. That’s the woman the first game decided could be sacrificed on the altar of characterization so Geralt could have a random red-headed love interest.

In the novels, Triss is a young sorceress with a complex about her friend Yennefer. She’s a coward. She’s sweet. She’s manipulative. She’s deeply insecure. Shes very into Witchers. She’s also a powerful mage and a pretty solid teacher and support to her Witcher friends and Ciri. Her arc in the books sees her facing herself and eventually growing a spine.

Along the way, however, she essentially magic-roofies Geralt when he’s in an off-again phase with Yennefer. He represses so hard he’s kind of just weird around Triss forever. Nobody else knows. We know why these two don’t address it. Triss is a coward and Geralt is king of repressing. It’s horrible. It’s also notably nongraphic and well-written, centered entirely on the abuse of power and trust and what that does to Geralt.

The Triss we leave behind in the novels would never repeat that choice, I think. Or any choice like it. She went and she changed on her own for her own reasons. The Triss we encounter in the second game is very much doing a retread of her novel arc. But now it’s worse because she’s literally used Geralt’s amnesia to act out her fantasy of supplanting Yen, everything is reasonably graphic, and everything after does kind of stem from the abuse of power.

In a way, I think this is the game owning the mistake while trying not to punish non-reader players for it. No matter what the player does, these two split. Geralt will go after Yennefer. Things will be weird in the 3rd game. Geralt gets back in character and being in character for him means repressing and being weird around Triss. He can’t blame her. She’s his friend. It’s painful to watch. Time is a circle I guess.

Yennefer of Vengerberg

Part elven, invisibly disabled, over a century old, absolute menace of a woman. Yennefer is mean. She’s petty. She scares the hell out of Geralt’s friends. She’s the best friend anyone could ever ask for and also intimidating as hell. She causes problems wherever she goes. This is not an rpg love interest. She is the only woman for Geralt though. And it’s obvious. The 3rd game can’t and doesn’t avoid the obvious ‘canon’ nature of this relationship. It does try to counterweight canon a bit for RP by resetting the sense of conflict and how other characters react to the relationships.

In 2, Dandelion’s narration characterizes the relationship with Yennefer as “toxic.” This goes along with the overall reset and retread the games are doing for characterization beats. In the books, we were well past this version of Dandelion. We see the same thing play out in 3 where everyone and their uncle has to weigh in on how hard Yen is to deal with and how nice Triss is. This is probably handled as well as possible. Eskel’s exasperation with the dynamic, where Geralt can actually clarify and push back, is reasonable. Vesemir is likewise just kind of put off by Yen, which is fair enough. And you essentially have to ignore Yen’s quest entirely or actively treat it as purely a gameplay mechanic to break the romance off at all. The question isn’t whether Geralt and Yen are together, it’s whether or not they can move forward. This is contrasted to all of the pressures towards Triss coming from her own desperate manipulations and people who don’t understand anything about the history the two share.

Time is a Circle:

Recreating the Convergent Narrative

At the end of 2, we find out that Yen is essentially a prisoner again (hello Vilgefortz lol) and we set out to find her. This is where W3 opens more or less. We’re tracking a Yen who has since written to Geralt and is on the run. We don’t yet know from what. She, of course, finds us instead. And we find out that Ciri is back and on the run herself. Now we’re really doing a speed run of the novels. How many times can this family separate and miss and lose each other before they find each other again. Yennefer is off to Skellige (again) and Geralt is doing a (one man this time) road trip and playing detective. Ciri is being the protagonist of a much crazier mythic story, with space elves once again causing her all kinds of problems and a tyrant trying to claim her power for himself. Time is truly a circle.

Somehow, the games have pulled all of this together in 3 via rp options for Geralt. You can play as book!Geralt and stay on theme. This will ultimately lead to the Witcher ending where Ciri takes over as not just protagonist of her own story but as the Witcher herself. This closes out the convergent narrative the game has been recreating and sets them up to carve out their own stories in future. Or you can deny your role. You can rp a random-rpg!Witcher hero and lose Ciri forever, one way or another.

All that said. The Triss Problem(tm) is a problem. It’s the biggest, most glaring flaw in the series to this day, and we’d probably all be better off if that had really been some random redhead in the first game. 3 gets some serious credit here for Geralt just being generally weird around her again, but the rp demands to counterweight the pull of canon with Yen have done nothing but confuse non-readers and frustrate readers. Narrative conveniences are fine. The Hunt becoming a plot device works to pull the mythic layer of storytelling back in, and it gives everything a solid motivation. Regis being back just stretches the lore a bit and serves a great story. The political plots can be a bit of a sticking point but flesh out the game world. We can even forgive amnesia. But The Triss Problem(tm) is forever.

Honestly, as a reader, I kind of respect the skill involved in reworking the arcs and the commitment to not just cutting Triss out after the first game. I also appreciate the effort made to bring these characters back to essentially their book-selves and to give game-Geralt a final hurrah without just wiping the slate. It shows a certain amount of integrity in the writers room that I think we’ve since seen confirmed with the additions to Cyberpunk 2077, where they committed fully to the night city experience and doubled down on it in phantom liberty.

[grandwitchbird]

Like most book readers, I have thoughts on the Witcher games’ adaptive choices.

I probably hate Triss and consequently her role in those games more than average. I’ve got nothing good to say about that choice. It’s the closest I come to agreeing with book purists that the devs fundamentally misunderstood something about these stories.

Amnesia plots are also ridiculous. But I think what we see in 2-3 is active acknowledgment and a sincere attempt to clean up the mess. So not a lot to say there. It creates problems the writers find ways to largely solve so we can get back to Ciri.

I don’t hate the Nilfgaardian choices. We see plenty of what makes Nilfgaard terrible beyond just Emhyr, and that’s important. Emhyr himself is also transparently a bastard and up to no good. He might be the least worst compared to Radovid, but that’s a low bar and still a debatable one. In 2 alone he and his entire network of ghouls were actively destabilizing the North (that was the entire plot), for all intents and purposes holding Yen captive, and exploiting the Witchers. We know about his betrayal of the Scoia’tael in the same way. It’s actively discussed in the game.

A lot of the criticisms of Nilfgaard’s portrayal come down to wanting the games to smack you over the head with a sign that says ‘empire bad’. Well. The empire is bad. We see that it’s bad. They’re not the worst when it comes to their satellite states but that’s only because this is a world full of kingdoms and those are inherently unstable. We open Witcher 3 to a countryside lined with bodies on pikes and hanged from trees. Because of the empire. The bloody fucking baron is their idea of local leadership.

The fact that Nilfgaard has knock on stabilizing effects and doesn’t allow active pogroms is smart. It’s also not ungrounded at all. Rome did build roads that people use to this day. Persia did foster education and stabilize entire regions. Empires can have some knock on ‘positive’ effects. That’s not the same as ‘empire good’. And Nilfgaard is a well-written empire. In the books and in the games. They’re not a mysterious threat come to steal your women and justify the patriotic nonsense of people like Roche. They’re a culturally advanced political entity with concrete values and goals. They’re bad news with the occasional silver lining. And it’s up to you to decide for yourself if the buckets of blood they shed are more tolerable than the buckets of blood Radovid sheds. It’s one of the smartest uses of player indulgence I’ve seen in a game. They let you choose, truly. And it sucks. Because you’re not the hero and you can’t save this world. It’s also balanced and reinforced as a commentary on player agency vs the cynicism of the setting by the fact that you can help Cerys stabilize Skellige. That’s her story. But you can play a supporting role to a net positive outcome.

Ok Emhyr himself. And the empress ending. This Emhyr is one who’s already come face to face with himself. I think that’s clear. He’s still a terror, but Geralt and Yennefer have watched him stand down from his pursuit of Ciri. I think Yennefer’s dubious alliance with him is tenuous and largely works because of the shifting political landscape of the continent. It’s an attempt to bridge between the end of Lady of the Lake and this game in a concrete way (one that nonreaders won’t even notice). I do not like the empress ending. I do like its inclusion in a perverse way. Do I think there’s any universe where Geralt would tell Ciri to hear out the man who made her life a literal hell and only wants to pawn his problems off on her? Of course not. And it’s great because Geralt can say that! If you’ve been paying attention to motivations, Geralt will tell Ciri that Emhyr obviously has plans for her. The only way you get the empress ending is by ignoring every single theme of the game and also all the red flags waving in your face about Emhyr. Over and over this game tells you to listen closely to motivations and to be wary of the powerful. It does smack you over the head with that, particularly if you’re a reader. The bittersweet fairytale framing of that ending should be a red flag in itself. Ciri isn’t going to change these systems from the inside. Emhyr himself is the way he is from existing within these systems. And no I don’t care about the dev’s opinions on it (authors are all dead). In the context of the game, that is a bad ending. And it should be.

I am sympathetic to people who haven’t read the books having to deal with the issues of the political plot. The problem for those players isn’t something as silly as ‘not like book’. Again, you open this game with bodies on pikes. Empire BAD. But Radovid is the literal worst. And we want him dead. And the other alternative is a crime lord who lost his grip on reality for a sec and decided to try to kill us and our bro if we don’t let him just kill said bro in front of us. And that’s all a game-only person knows. This isn’t bad writing* either so much as it’s the casualty of pretty normal dev issues. Like we can see that in game. And this is where I’m sympathetic. The cut threads in the political plot are highly visible. Even people who have no idea who Djikstra is or why the Scoia’tael matter or why Roche is our pal even if he is kind of a cop have spotted those cut threads. It’s very much like the truncated arc for the aldecaldos in cyberpunk 2077. You can see the edges where things had to be trimmed early on just to get the game finished. That’s an issue separate to bad writing. More of a planning and management problem and near inevitable** with games this ambitious. It’s why you don’t see any of those problems in the DLCs with their more contained stories.

And a final note. I’ve been talking about rp for a Geralt who is in character from the novels as a rule. You can make the other choices and a story emerges where he’s either hardened or changed from the books into someone who doesn’t listen. Someone who doesn’t respect all these very competent women or show awareness of motivation. And the outcomes for that are. Not great. Famously they lead to the ending most of the gamer bros got and then cried about for years. They still provide a satisfying narrative that fits that rp. And that’s a feat. It’s good RP value.

*Djikstra, I’d argue isn’t so much written out of character here as he is a bit of a casualty. This plot is banking on you just being more attached to one character or another. Geralt IS out of character because he wouldn’t have gotten involved in the plot at all. There’s a metatextual thing happening where the game gives players what they want (real world-changing choices and a chance to play the regicidal rebellious hero) and then makes a point about it. YMMV. I think it’s funny.

Also, I think the shape of this plot, had cdpr continued to workshop the Scoia’tael side, would have had Djikstra in more of a corner with both Roche/Iorveth as loose ends he had to deal with. But that didn’t happen alas. Project management casualties suck.

**The exceptions are notably Sony projects like god of war and whatever kojima gets up to now. Most devs do not have that kind of stability working for them.

[grandwitchbird]

My Rogue Trader is an iconoclast. She’s not a good person.

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a utopian city runs on the suffering of one person. The story refuses to let us be anything but complicit if we choose to engage its premise. Saving that one person might be “good” but it would wreak unimaginable suffering. Reform is not possible. The ones who walk away aren’t heroes. But there is something humane and noble in facing one’s own doom by rejecting an unjust system, in suffering the consequences of conviction. We’re invited to find pathos in a tragedy and to resist our own knee-jerk moralistic desire to be rewarded for ‘righteousness’.

WH40k Rogue Trader exists in a classic order/chaos system. Its parameters and stakes are clearly defined. There is no ‘outside’ to the systems of oppressive control in this universe because there are literal chaos gods that would very much like to devour entire worlds whole and subject everyone to an eternity of torment. The brutal regimes that form in oppositional order to chaos are exactly as reactionary and bloody and hierarchical as one would imagine. The beauty of an order/chaos system is that it inherently renders our familiar good/evil sensibilities useless. Goodness probably exists, but does it matter? Evil certainly exists and comes in all shades, and we are all complicit in it. Which evils can you live with? And do you have a real choice? These are provoking questions, and no easy answers are supplied. Your motives don’t matter to the universe. The terms of the deal are set before you ever make a choice.

My Rogue Trader isn’t a good person. She’s an honest to god mob boss with a talent for winning loyalty. She also feels a certain maternal possessiveness for ‘her’ people. And she values autonomy. She lets people make their own choices. She’s happy to give everyone a chance and grow her fucked up ‘family’ in any way possible. The hierarchy of the imperium is at frequent odds with this. She doesn’t like being told how to run her business or preached at regarding what passes for righteousness in this universe. She values freedom. Her freedom. Her people’s freedom. Whatever that means in this universe. She’ll take the consequences too. And oh boy are there consequences. She let a planet rot in eternal agony to grow her own numbers and power. She rebuilt a manufacturing center that’s already corrupted. Chaos has a stronger foothold thanks to her actions. She can’t be bothered to play politics with the nobility, and that will doubtless come back to bite her as well. But her people trust her. Many are finding real meaning in lives they’d been moving through on autopilot. They’re starting to make their own choices more freely. Autonomy is catching it seems.

There’s something of “Omelas” in this game’s morality system. The grim dark future will remain grim and dark. My Rogue Trader will remain a ‘not good’ person who is increasingly descending into her most codependent and ruthless tendencies. Anything for her fucked up family. But she’s making the choice. And it does mean something. More people are making choices because she showed them a glimpse of the freedom you can claw out of the grim dark future if you’re willing to accept the consequences. It doesn’t make them good people. But there’s something genuinely human and noble and full of pathos in this route.

[grandwitchbird]

When I talk about textual ethics and defining your values in storytelling. It’s about meaningful world building and dramatic affordances and stakes.

You don’t need to be a crunchy obsessive like Sanderson. There’s a reason Sapkowski created a world that feels far more ‘real’ than most with no actual interest in crunchy world building, and that reason is a coherent set of values.

40k isn’t clever about its world building just because of all the crunch (it’s fun to play in because of all the crunch). The grim dark world has clearly defined values. Chaos isn’t a vague threat. We know what’s at stake here. It’s an order/chaos system taken to a hilarious extreme, and it works.

The values of a fictional world are the dramatic boundaries against which everything else pushes.

[grandwitchbird]

I used to, like most people, think Y0 was a fine place to start the Yakuza/LAD journey. Watching the folks who do start there stay confused about everything over the years has changed my mind.

Here’s the thing. It’s a great game. It’s a phenomenal period piece. And it adds so many layers to Kiryu and Nishikiyama’s relationship in 1/Kiwami. It’s great. Playing as majima is also fun. But that last bit is where we run into trouble. Unfortunately 0 Majima is easily the worst thing in the series (see tags).

See, Majima was never meant to be your sad wet boyfriend (see tags). And he definitely isn’t meant to be running around doing Kiryu stuff. And it shows. It shows if you’ve played the series before getting to 0 and you notice that the game has no idea what to do with him outside of generating angst. It shows if you start with 0 and then spend the whole franchise looking for that much weaker version of the character. It shows if you’re attentive and you notice how much more nuanced his relationship with Kiryu is as it shifts across 2-3. It really really shows if you go back and replay 0 after 4-5 (which is the original release window) and you realize that everything you actually learn about him was handled better and with more nuance in 4-5 with a fraction of the screen time. Hell, his entire backstory with Saejima (which should be the contrasted arc with Kiryu/Nishiki) is relegated to the exact same footage you saw in 4. It’s rough. Equally rough is the fact that 4-5 had an entire handful of protagonists who all had content and activities tailored to their characters. 0 has… young!Kiryu and majima!kiryu.

It’s also put rgg on the back foot when it comes to using Majima since. He’s somehow more clownish than ever and also defanged, trotted out for fanservice in most of his appearances. It was always a fine line with the character, but 0 crossed it fully. We’ll see if being a pirate gives him his groove back. Should at least be as funny as the sad old man shack, so I’m hopeful this is progress. And if you’re wondering where to start with the series. My vote is Kiwami or 7. You’ll have a more fair view of what the series as a whole is about with those two.

[grandwitchbird]

Ok I collected some thoughts.

First. These are not artificial barriers. The games are not making you do anything more annoying than what you’ll do in the rest of the games. Both areas are stunningly well designed and give you exactly what you need to succeed.

The barrier comes largely from two sources, as does the resulting reward for pushing past.

1. Physics. Both of these games (rdr2 intentionally I think, W3 as a byproduct of engine issues) have a movement delay on input that grates if you’re a regular action game enjoyer. They also both enforce much slower movement and unconventional reaction systems. You either beat your head against it and whine online for years. Or you slow down and start paying attention. It’s not a pleasant experience regardless. It is a worthwhile one. The games reward you heavily for slowing down and accepting the limit.*

2. Neither game does any real handholding. You’re dropped into fully realized worlds with specific narrative priorities, and you need to figure it out. They both have solid tutorials baked in, but if you miss the mark on that deer? You have to hear it scream while you finish what you started. You run smack into high level enemies because you took a shortcut to the Nilfgaardian camp? Figure it out.

Point 2 is where it all comes together. Because once you’re past White Orchard and That Damn Mountain, everything you raged at and complained about and learned is everything you love about the game as a whole. It’s a buy-in, and a sincere one.

* For a game that afaik didn’t even have a combat designer, W3 has a fascinatingly functional system. Animations are based on proximity. If you make a choice you’re stuck with it. Geralt is not an action hero. Ciri IS an an action hero and she’s notably faster and extremely op to play. All adds up to a really cohesive combat RP once you start paying attention. RDR2 similarly, presumably, slows you down for immersive goals. Neither game is difficult. They just want you to get in character more than they want to be action games.

White Orchard and That Damn Mountain(tm) have really become tied in my mind for masterful introductions to a game world that I initially bounced off hard. Gives me thoughts about barriers to entry that ultimately enrich the experience.

[grandwitchbird]

This person left the most beautiful tags but doesn’t allow @s so I just wanted to say, absolutely yes! These are exactly the questions the text is asking you to think about.

My word choice was both a direct quote from the Inquisitor’s exhausted frustration at the end of trespasser and an allusion to the ethical frame this game is attempting (it muddies the waters for itself so nobody feel bad if you didn’t get this). ‘Fixing’ here affords us an interesting bit of linguistic slippage. To fix is to bind, to correct, to repair, to locate. It suggests an objectivity to the world that’s not actually possible as the tagger so correctly notes.

The incoherence of ‘fixing’ the world as a goal is the point. The end of history is a very real goal and seemingly sincere set of beliefs for some very real people, and it’s equally incoherent. It’s also rooted in impulses we all have. It’s our weakness to nostalgia, the push for easy answers to complex problems, the capacity to treat others as tools or inconveniences that need to be solved, the desire to see the world as a linear narrative. The end of history, the final solution, the death drive. All lenses onto the last 150 years of people trying to figure this out in ways that range from strange to horrifying.

Dragon Age is too beholden to the weak ethics fueled by these impulses. But it is pushing at them. This is what people are picking up on when they say the game/s have ‘heart’. There’s a desire in the text to be more ethically rigorous. It’s undermined by too much consideration for the audience. But it is there. And it’s especially there whenever Solas is onscreen.

Dragon Age has been doing a really clever thing with its protagonists and the heroic power fantasy that only fully comes together when you look at the series as a whole, so let’s do another ramble. Under a cut to save your dash.

Origins is a traditional RPG power fantasy. It likes to tell you that it’s not by gesturing at Loghain and alluding to unreliable narratives, but what it shows is the power fantasy. No matter what your warden does, they’re the hero. Are you a casual genocide enthusiast? No problem you can still ride off into the sunset looking for a cure. Also hey you have a critical weakness/flaw (the calling) that kind of dooms you or gives you cause to vaguely ride of into the sunset. Very heroic indeed. There’s a layer of textual interest added by the presence of unreliable narratives, but ultimately it’s the hero’s choices that shape and determine the world and story, right down to very gamified relationships. The origins system itself, the fact that your warden could have been anyone, is the actual textual proof that this isn’t all that’s going on. It just only really gets paid off by later games, and that’s pretty important given where this franchise ended up.

—

Enter DA2. Hawke is a champion, not a hero. Hawke fights for those who can’t fight themselves. Hawke can’t save the world. They can’t even save their family or city. It’s a battle of attrition that sees them somehow worse off no matter what. The still-gamified but now more nuanced and challenging relationships become the focus because they’re really all Hawke has. Now the power fantasy is still lurking around the edges. It’s just challenged at every turn. You can free Kirkwall, but Anders is always going to blow up a church.

—

Which brings us to Inquisition. Somehow, you’re both as much of a nobody as Hawke and you’re responsible for more than the Warden. And it’s miserable. The power fantasy is constantly undermined. No matter who your inquisitor was, by the end of the game they’ve been completely subsumed by their role: turns out power has teeth.

In a move that delivers on the unreliable narrative throughline that Origins established and DA2 strengthened, the Inquisitor must play the hero and save the world. It doesn’t matter if your Inquisitor is a kind person doing their best or a racist power-hungry asshole, and that is now a systemic issue within the world itself. The erosion of your character’s personhood is explicit within the text as characters struggle to see you as more than your role and you’re asked to shape the faith of an entire world even if you don’t share that faith. The cost of this erosion is made incredibly literal with Ameridan’s story and then in Trespasser, where the anchor, both cause and symbol of the Inquisitor’s role and power, is killing them. Relationships become somewhat less gamified but more importantly, you’re given an explicit textual mirror in Solas. He’s there to reflect your behavior but also your loss of personhood to a role. It’s essential that he’s the one to save your life at the end of Trespasser. Even if you’ve never shown him a moment’s grace, here is your mirror to see you as a person one last time.

—

And then there’s Rook. Now we play a mirror to Solas, a character who has been the hero, Mythal’s champion, and a man subsumed by his role/s. He’s really the narrative gift that keeps giving.

We walk the dreadwolf’s path this time, and the dreadwolf is a classic tragic hero. He’s stuck in a story where he must save the world and where a critical flaw will always be his downfall. We’re Varric’s second who must step up to champion his cause after the events of the introduction. And we’re barely keeping ourselves together under the burden of leadership. And here is where Veilguard finally delivers everything this franchise ever promised. Because under all that we’re truly just some guy. Just like Solas is just a guy who got stuck in situations he never wanted. His response was to become the hero or play the villain (depending on the story) because that’s easier. But if Rook can truly choose the ‘hard truth’ that the world is never going to “stay fixed” (oh hi Inquisitor… and Hawke… and Warden) and that other people can have better ideas and make hard calls and their own choices? If we don’t have to ‘win’? Rook can reconcile the inevitable tragedies of this kind of story with their very human needs and escape the story altogether. The cost, of course, is the power fantasy.