this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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This is a followup to @[email protected] 's recent thread for completeness' sake.

I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.

So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

just so they could have him be a cynical centrist

It's kind of a red flag for me when some freeze-gamer says that the writing is, quote, "smart" or even "nonpolitical." The brainworms 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.

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.

Of fucking course. debord-tired

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've only read a couple of the books, I should probably get 'round to reading the rest one day.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.