DA Fan gives TW3 a shot: Text Based Let's Play

For me, the Witcher sometimes teeters on the edge of the bearable but in the grand scheme of things, it's doing ok.
My problem with very dark settings is not really the darkness per se but rather that I don't find it very realistic. Often times, in very dark fictional settings, they are made dark by basically making all the characters in them behave like a bunch of selfish pricks. Maybe I have lead too much of a sheltered life but after living on 3 different continents for more than 3 years each, this is not a realistic scenario in my experience. In real life, most people want to be decent, friendly people that are trying to be helpful to each other if possible. Sure, there are a lot of issues in the world and people can get selfish and cruel when driven to the brink but only a very small minority of all the people I got to know would behave like this in a default state.

I take this issue with quite a few of the more recent SciFi films, that try to predict a dark future, such as Judge Dread or Elysium. If you pay attention, the worlds in those kinds of movies and stories would actually be way better off if not every single character in them (even including the protagonists we are supposed to root for) wouldn't be a selfish little prick all the time. I often wonder what dark kind of view these authors and screenwriters must have of humanity.

One advantage of BW games is that they usually externalize the outright evil threat to either some form of demonic supernatural force (Dragon Age) or mysterious aliens like the reapers in Mass Effect. This allows for the actual characters (even those that are not necessarily your allies) to - at the very least - have an agenda that they believe serves a greater good, while still managing a fairly dark setting with a serious threat (and my god was e.g. Mass Effect 3 dark). Some may think it's a bit of a cheap trick to externalize the darkness in this way but at least, it allows for more realistic characters while creating a threatening scenario, at least in my view.

The Witcher sometimes comes close to the first scenario. A lot of characters in this world are also acting selfish and rather gastly. But at least in the witcher, it is most of the time explained why they do so. For almost all characters that do aweful things, they do have a fairly understandable (not always good but at least understandable) reason to do so. It may be their socio-economic environment (especially in the war torn world of Witcher 3), their religious beliefs, their upbringing and education under a different moral code, the atrocities commited against their kind (especially in the case of the Scoia'tel), base needs or they may even think that they are commiting atrocities for what they percieve as the greater good.

Sure, there are genuinely bad people around as well (I would count Henselt from Witcher 2 among them or that guy who ruled Flotsome) but they are balanced out by also some genuinely "good" characters (such as Shani for example).

So the fact that, for all its darkness, the motivations and traits of characters in the Witcher is somewhat grounded in half way realistic causalities makes this world at least believable and therefore somewhat meaningful to me - in both its dark social commentary as well as the rays of hope it does choose to present us with, not very often but when it matters. And actually, one has to acknowladge that this kind of ballance is very tough to achieve in fiction (though ironically, it's common place in real life), so I ahve to give some kudos to the creators of the witcher world (meaning both, Sapkowski and the game writers) to pull it off.


But enough meta-text philosophy, phoray , I completely get why you feel a little bit up and alone against a very hostile environment at this point (and there are still some bitter pills ahead, believe me.) But as others have said, once you meet up with your long time companions (most of whom Geralt knows from the previous stories and games) and have some really heart warming dialogue with them, things change. And to some extent, this stretch where you feel rather isolated gives those later scenes even more gravitas and emotional payoff in my view. So just keep on keeping on.