2016-02-19 at 7:50 AM UTC
Anyone played/playing it? I finished it recently. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by it. I thought it was going to be 12 hours of cute/fragile marry sue in your face and I mean that was there to a degree but I think it did a lot of things really well. It was sold as one of those "your choices matter" games but I think most of them didn't. I mean clearly good decisions early on help in terms of gameplay but as far as I can tell there were one or two and a half choices (one being contingent on the other) that effected end-game state, all roads really lead to the same place. And the ending was clearly supposed to be like an agonizing choice but it didn't take me a second to choose.
IN SPITE OF ALL THAT I actually felt emotionally invested in the end. This is probably painfully obvious to everyone who played it but I didn't notice until you revisit the opening scene of the game. One of the first lines you get is "Hitchcock called film 'little pieces of time', but he could have been talking about photography" and the clear fourth-wall-penetrating implication is that videogames are the same. With that as a mission statement I think the game made a lot of sense, it wasn't really about making choices, it was about capturing a moment in american history, framing some of our cultural anxieties, and hopefully providing some catharsis thereby. And I thought that was something it did really well. Almost all of the gameplay was trivial (at times tedious, ala the "evidence board" minigame thing, that shit was stupid) but there was something about being gently coerced into participation that lent reality to characters. Even if it was, for the most part, a series of token gestures the act of making choices did a good job of making the subjects seem more real.
2016-02-22 at 11:07 AM UTC
Sounds interesting. I like vidya games that are truly well done and their own category of art. Ill check it out.
2016-02-22 at 1:11 PM UTC
It seems something different, I would like to play it if I did not have 101 games already still to play.
2016-02-23 at 4:54 PM UTC
I have heard of it but not played. I'm still playing Witcher 3, probably the overall best game I've ever played. It is insane.
It's another "your choices matter" game and goes deep on that shit. The characters are almost on GTA level but I like them better because they aren't as comedic. The combat system is very complex and requires skill and training. On higher difficulties you really have to study your enemies. A level 2 wolf pack will eat your ass if you don't know how to fight wolves. The immersion is the best I've ever seen. I've spent about ~70 hours just playing a Dwarfen card game to Nordic tunes in old taverns. It's really great and challenging till the end. I'm not a big RPG player but this game is really great.
2016-02-24 at 2:43 PM UTC
Have you played the game?
2016-02-24 at 6:22 PM UTC
Witcher 3 is bretty good. Like the two games that came before it though, the plot is a strange thing, it really presents itself as a "pick a side" kinda thing but then works really hard to make you feel like every choice sucks pretty much equally. I guess it's part of the grey/grey morality and uber-cynicism themes. Part of it too was that the player character had an actual personality which seems like a plus but it led to some strange situations, namely every player choice had to be shoehorned into something in-character and sometimes you just didn't get to pick your position because its "uh oh, it's characterize-geralt-as-a-gruff-badass-o-clock". I'm not really complaining, it was an interesting way of doing thing, I just usually play choice-based video games as an idealist and the dissonance between choices made and the logic behind those choices was kinda grating at times. Compare and contrast Skyrim (the game W3 always gets compared to) where your character couldn't possible be more nondescript. You pretty much pick your side in the opening sequence of the game, b-line for their fortress once that's done, and that's that. It's assumed you're ideologically aligned with the faction in question my merit of standing in the right place at the right time whereas in every witcher game the best you could do is stand on one side's sidelines looking grumpy you're not over on the other side.
