Levethian said:
Gildan Bladeborn said:
Excellent and fair review - I can't say I really disagree with anything you've said in it.
Luckily for me, the aspects of the game that ultimately ended up driving you away either don't bother me or are actually things I enjoy, and thus my every minute spent with the game is a blast!
That's good to hear
You'll beat The Incredible Lockhart at Dice Poker soon. I can feel it in the wind.
Perhaps I have a fundamental problem projecting myself onto characters that are so well defined.
I think Skyrim is more my kind of level :/...
Oh I've already beaten him, twice actually - on my third run through the game at the moment, though I may hold off for a bit because the word is the next patch is slated for some time next week, and I've been looking forward to 4:3 aspect ratio support.
As for the issue with projecting oneself onto a character, that's a fair point, though if Skyrim is anything like its predecessors you don't really
have a character, you have a customized puppet that you only ever really see while looking at your inventory screen who you make do things, so it's not like it's hard to project oneself onto that avatar when there's nothing there to begin with (this is assuming they once again do not ever voice your character's lines).
But I get where you're coming from: The Witcher is really something of a rarity in the RPG world, in that you're asked to play as a pre-established character who is
actually a pre-established
character, with an actual personality and background irrespective of how you choose to play him. The overwhelming majority of western RPGs cast you into the role of... well, nobody really - "The Nameless One", "The Vault Dweller", etc - even when they give you a name/voice/character model/etc or otherwise integrate some "back story" into the works, you're still playing a character who is essentially an unknown quantity; the characters are always so ill-defined that you're essentially just playing as yourself, even when you don't get to actually create the character yourself. I've been sitting here musing while I've been typing this, and I can't remember ever playing
any western RPG (apart from this series) that has ever presented me with a fully realized protagonist; NPCs and party members sure, but the protagonist is always just you (pretending to be something).
Playing as Geralt on the other hand is a lot like sitting down with Arkham Asylum and controlling the character of Batman - he's never really going to be an extension of you, he's going to be Batman/Geralt. The appeal of playing Batman isn't gleaned from projecting yourself
onto him though (there's really no wiggle room there for you anyways), the fun is derived from experiencing what it's like to
be Batman for a while; you want yourself to be like your character, not the other way around.
Geralt isn't
quite so well known as Batman is of course (ha!), so for pretty much everyone outside of Poland their first introduction to him was sitting down with the original game or the sequel, and having been told that what they're playing is an RPG, they presumably expected him to be, well,
them, only with long white hair, funny eyes, and a nominal back story. Discovering otherwise can be a rude awakening, and I suspect the reason behind so many people saying that "the game gets so much better if you've read the books!". Usually I'd be inclined to dismiss those sorts of assertions, but in this particular case it makes perfect sense - if you've never even heard of Batman before, then the appeal of a remarkably faithful adaptation of the source material that lets you play as him is reduced to how entertaining the mechanical underpinnings and the story by themselves are; you'd probably still have fun because the game itself is still good, but someone who grew up watching The Animated Series is bound to be far more entertained by the overall experience than you would be. I'm never bothered by Batman being Batman without my intervention and not allowing me to define the role of Batman, because I know who he's supposed to be and I'm expecting him to act that way/say those things/etc.
Likewise with Geralt.
