this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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It's weird for that game to have such ponderous and unpleasant combat and for its big deal to be the story/characters/sidequests yet I kind of hated how those were presented every time I tried it.
Oh yeah time for the narrative rails to tell me that trying to improve society somewhat is naive and stupid and bad. Again. I didn't follow the Witcherino code closely enough, silly me. Helping those people was stupid actually. You're supposed to be enlightened in your self interest and only care about immediate family-ish relations.
The cussing and overall edginess was just... tiresome to me. There's cussing in other games and that's fine; it doesn't wear out its welcome as much.
It's so weird, because the games had to give Geralt amnesia so he forgot his character development in the books, just so they could have him be a cynical centrist and then lightly push his character back on to the path of becoming the character he was before the games.
Like, the depending on what side quests you do, Geralt is on the path to stop being such a centrist but he never returns to being who he was before (maybe he does in the DLCs, I never played them).
The sidequest chain with Triss where you help her smuggle a bunch of people out of Redania before the next wave of pogroms happen, is an example of Geralt helping people despite it not being of any benefit to him. But he only does it because Triss is dragging him into it.
It's kind of a red flag for me when some
says that the writing is, quote, "smart" or even "nonpolitical." The 
outright wriggle out and wave at me when I hear "it doesn't take a side." Because that means fucking nothing really changes except for small personal benefits for the bland power fantasy morally gray protagonist.
Of fucking course.
In a way, it feels like this is a version of Geralt that never went to Blaviken and thus never saw what the end result of following the Witcher code would lead to him doing.
There is no such thing as a witcher code, it's a thing Geralt made up when he didn't feel like doing something and didn't want to have to explain his reasoning.
Considering the way they handled the main plot, though, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody at CDPR misunderstood that and made the witcher code a real thing. Did you know that the White Frost is literally just normal climate change in the books? Nothing supernatural about it, no way to stop it, and it's not going to be a serious threat for thousands of years.
I've only read a couple of the books, I should probably get 'round to reading the rest one day.
They're pretty good if you don't mind the edgelord pseudo-grimdark stuff going on. If you've read the short stories you know about as bad as the edgelord stuff gets. Otherwise they're just fun, clever, subversive fantasy done very well.