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If you think this game is just about player choice and not making a statement on the military idk what to tell you
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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That's not at all accurate, to the point that I'm struggling to even place what you're referring to. I think it's about how if you help guerilla insurgents in the first Witcher game smuggle weapons they later assassinate someone? That was a big "wait, you're telling me the rebels fighting a war use violence to accomplish their goals and aren't just heckin wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonists who win by being ontologically good and having plot armor like in every other game, movie, and book that gets mainstream attention in the US?" shock moment for western gamers whose consumption of hollywood treats left them without a framework for understanding that sometimes the materially and morally correct side in a conflict can still be doing brutal and underhanded things as a matter of material necessity.
I never got into the second game, but by the third one the overall moral tone is pretty clearly on the side of mercy and conservation, with sparing and helping magical creatures that are intelligent non-human persons that are just trying to survive being the clearly correct choice to the point that later on when you get put on trial by a werewolf for being a monster hunter a bunch of them show up as character witnesses to your defense. That's also the game where the narrator all but says "the real monsters are cruel and intolerant men" over and over, every aristocrat you encounter is some flavor of monstrous or dangerously detached from reality, and most of the plot ultimately revolves around trying to stop an extradimensional settler colonialist invasion.
CDPR are still libs, but they overall have a much more materialist understanding of how things fit together instead of the sort of mishmash of hollywood tropes American lib writers throw together based on vibes.
I also think it's worth mentioning that there are plenty of choices in Witcher 3 that have pretty obviously good and bad options. Anyone ratting out that godling to the property owner is doing so to be evil. Refusing money from poor folks is plain good and never comes back to bite you. Killing Whoreson Junior might as well have had [Everyone loved that.] pop up in the top left corner and even rewards you with a cute little easter egg later.
But all these examples don't really get remembered because they're less impactful than the choices that aren't so obvious
While this mostly holds true there is one quest I remember that annoyed the shit out of me
You had to investigate some haunted tower, and were presented with two options essentially: destroy the spirit outright or try to put it to rest gently by performing a ritual
The game was mostly chill about that style of peaceful ritual exorcism being the way to deal with spirits nonviolently, but if you do it the spirit reveals itself to be some evil spirit that murders her lover then flees, with the game implying she'll just keep killing
Can't remember it fully but that one quest did throw me
I think I got caught by that one in my first playthrough. I think it's an interesting scenario because blind compassion isn't really a feasible ethos with which to navigate life unless you like getting constantly taken advantage of. After all, we don't drain our bank accounts helping Nigerian princes in a tight spot, do we? Gerry recognizing that her story doesn't quite add up is an example of tempering compassion with scrutiny.
That's the kind of shit I ran into before giving up entirely on it.
There's plot twists and surprises, then there's feeling the heavy hand of the narrative's preferred direction.
You can like the games all you like, but my initial impressions in both CDPR-made series were that straying too far from the sometimes-obvious narrative lead (if the game even allowed it; even less choices or even potential mission path availability in CP2077) were routinely punished early on.
Call it "wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonists who win by being ontologically good" if you want (which is bullshit, I'm more than fine with surprises if it doesn't just feel like a punitive narrator), but don't bother accusing me of a bad faith position if that's what you're leading with.
I enjoyed Disco Elysium greatly, and yet at no point did I feel like I was punished by the narrator for playing Harry "wrong" and in a way unbecoming of some Revacholian equivalent of the Witcherino code or whatever. Sure, I got my comeuppance more than a few times (especially after bad die rolls) but it didn't feel like punitive soft railroading the way CDPR writes its games.
Unless you'd argue that Harry was a "wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonist who wins by being ontologically good?" That'd be a fun mind unlock in the game, maybe.
In the "bringing about meaningful change is impossible and attempting to change things outside of immediate personal fuckbuddy and adopted family circumstances is naive at best and probably worse than the status quo" way, maybe. I guess there's a sprinkle of materialism in capitalist realism propaganda.
I don't really remember any decisions clearly being punished in general, although like you said there's a lot fewer branching paths in Cyberpunk and that's the game that's freshest in my memory. What I remember of the Witcher 3 is that it pretty clearly favored helping people in general but that sometimes situations were murky and just an interpersonal dispute or everyone was awful or everyone had valid points and no matter what snap judgement you make it's going to feel bad afterwards.
That was a comment on what I remembered from how people were talking about it when it came out, like it was this big shock because of how common liberal storytelling made rebels just sort of empty wholesome underdogs who never did anything wrong and then just won by being the good guys, and then with the Witcher you had a clear hollywood "morally correct" choice of helping the downtrodden underdogs only to be confronted with the revelation that they were in fact fighting a war and following their own agenda. And there was just so much vapid commentary on how cool and edgy it was that the "good" choice could have "bad" consequences, although admittedly that was coming from a valid place of disliking the Bioware style "moral choices" where someone is either being a saint or a cartoon villain and it's all very silly because the sides are all just nice guy or mean guy vibes with no material underpinnings at all.
I just get the feeling you've mostly seen that sort of gamer discourse and are inferring the worst because of how insufferable they are and what they focus on.
Not really? In both the Witcher and Cyberpunk the player is someone on the margins, and while Geralt is involved in things that actually have big implications for the setting and do actually change things, V is a dumbass lumpen petty bourgeoisie killer for hire whose best move is just fucking off and not doing that anymore.
I haven't played the Witcherino in years, but those were my impressions when I played it way back (under massive pressure from people I knew, who expected me to be blown away and a massive fan, instantly. I won't even go into what a dull slog the actual combat was, leaving little else to try to appeal to me but a story that I simply did not enjoy and did indeed feel soft railroaded with whether you believe me or not) and CP2077 may have been more recent but was even more restrictive, giving few options in many cases except "help the cops or leave" and "if you want to do this expansion you're going to need to lick some fed boots."
To some extent, I feel like it hasn't actually stopped and it's even somewhat here in this exchange right now, especially the prior assumption that read to me as an implication that I must be a baby brained delicate snowflake idealist that wants sunshine and rainbows because I can't handle the cold hard and very mature truths waiting for me in the One True Leftist Materalist Valhalla known as Murderfuckland once I'm ready to be one of the adults in the room, or something.
Yeah it was very rough, especially early on. The Witcher 3 has one of the worst opening stretches of any game I've ever seen and I bounced off it hard the first time I tried it.
I do not remember any scene like that. Cops are antagonists with very few exceptions and those few exceptions all either quickly become ex-cops or die.
The opening to Phantom Liberty is pretty cringe, yeah, but it does take the mask off pretty quick and show them all to be vapid toadies and/or complete monsters before long. The best of the feds pretty much tells you outright "yeah I don't care about any of this, I just want a cushy retirement that gets me out of here, btw we've got an office betting pool on how long it takes you to die so pls stay alive a long time so I win it lol." The NUSA president literally sends in death squads to No Russian the Night City aerospace port in one ending and shows up in person to oversee the slaughter.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I contextualized the history of discourse around the specific plot point you seemed to be referencing. Most of that focused on the Witcher's moral choices as being dark and edgy and how cool it is that "good intentions have bad consequences" in a way that was pretty much just western gamers raised on hollywood slop drawing exactly the wrong conclusions from something that didn't follow the sort of narrative tropes they expected.
I was so worn out by that opening stretch that I may have been in a bad mood for trying to enjoy the "best part of the game" that came right after.
There was an entire side mission series that was both helping the cops and featured the extraordinary line associated with it, said by the protagonist character, of "not all cops are bastards"
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I'm sure it does, but it wallows in the "everyone's an asshole" ambiguity there the way Bioshock Infinite did with the Vox versus Columbia's old ruling class. It doesn't do much with it as far as I can tell except say "yeah everyone sucks, so pick who you want to fuck and enjoy the status quo. Again."
You also set up a straw effigy of YA protagonists defeating everything with love and friendship as the conjured up (only?) alternative to crapsack worlds where everyone with any agency or stage presence is an asshole and trying to improve society somewhat is naive/stupid/makes-things-worse. As the old saying goes, shots fired.
There are only two questlines vaguely like that that I remember: the one with River who gets fired after the first one because of his investigation into the mayor's assassination which the NCPD was involved in, and one from the DLC where a small group of crooked cops from one of the most desperately impoverished and contaminated with industrial pollution neighborhoods find their consciences and start stealing from corporations to help that community and ultimately die for their trouble. Like there's a pretty clear "the system by its nature does not allow police to be good, and if a person with a conscience becomes a cop they either quit or get forced out" theme running through all of those quests.
V is an absolute dumbass with no political education and an incredibly incoherent worldview who says cringe shit constantly. It's kind of a big structural flaw in the narrative, that they're at once trying to make a customizable RPG but also tell a tight narrative story with this one specific character who's enough of a dipshit to stumble into and facilitate that story.
It really doesn't. You choose between the FIA and Songbird and while I have no idea what the FIA route entails the Songbird route had none of the dumbass "fighting the system is as bad as the system, actually" shit that Bioshock did. Like it's clear cut enough that even V manages to chew the feds out for being empty pieces of shit doing horrible things for bad and empty reasons.
Reread the initial point I made: I drew that up as being the sort of cliched standard storytelling that contemporary commentary was judging the first Witcher game against and why they found it shocking and celebrated it. It had nothing to do with you at all and I'm sorry for not being clear enough with how I phrased and laid things out.
I appreciate the clarification for what the "YA idealist" straw effigy was intended for. As a big Disco Elysium enjoyer myself, I enjoy stories that actually can include naive idealistic bullshit plot directions as potential story paths, especially when they're fully explored, folly and all, mind.
I'd rather not have this get too heated much longer, especially because subjective like and dislike of entertainment being on trial can go places like "you didn't get it/didn't understand it if you didn't like it" and I'm not cool with that. I already admitted I quit playing the Witcherino some years ago and haven't looked back on it since because I was that unhappy the first time around, whether or not you think I incorrectly subjectively experienced what I saw before I gave up on it.
The Cyberpunkerinos I remember a little more clearly, and that includes, yes, more cop apologia than you apparently remember, including missions where you hunt down "cyberpsychosis" victims on their behalf, if I recall correctly.
I don't see it as particularly deep or good writing when the pretense is that "V" is supposed to be the player's ego-insert, fully customizable up to and including genitals, yet is required to be that absolute dumbass with no political education and an incredibly incoherent worldview who says cringe shit constantly that you just mentioned.
Yeah, their writing isn't on par with Disco Elysium by any means, but on a scale from 1-10 where 1 is Starfield and its completely empty and incoherent slop and 10 is Disco Elysium, Cyberpunk and the Witcher 3 are maybe 6s, 7s at their best. Cyberpunk at its absolute worst rock bottom writing (Sinnerman) still wasn't as bad as the best Starfield managed, for example.
Yeah, the Witcher in particular is very rough around the edges and I'd never go back to it myself, I just want to emphasize that its writing does overall handle things well, certainly better than I'd expect from a AAA studio, and that it's generally just grounded and has things happen for material reasons instead of the vibes-based narrative most AAA games run on. A lot of gamers praise it for entirely the wrong reasons or struggle to articulate why what it's doing is better and they're both insufferable and have ulterior reasons to hide how the overall moral stance it takes is diametrically opposed to their own worldview.
There's a side quest chain involving stopping what are basically active shooter situations, given to you by a fixer who used to be a journalist who wants you to keep them alive so she can enroll them in a treatment program. I don't know why everyone always thinks she's a cop.
I've talked a lot about the whole concept of "cyberpyschosis" on here before and how Pondsmith's entire idea of it is at once better than it seems but still real galaxy brained shit - which fits with how he's probably the most endearing galaxy brained lib even if he's had some wildly awful takes over the years - and I think CDPR handled it better than he does in that almost every case is someone on the margins with poor access to healthcare dealing with the ongoing nightmare of malfunctioning augments and suffering constant violence who eventually just lashes out at a real or perceived threat and then just keeps fighting because they expect to be killed for stepping out of line anyways, to the point that one can reasonably read it as "cyberpsychosis" not even being a diegetically real thing at all and instead just a pejorative term to other defensive violence from marginalized people. In one case the "cyberpsycho" is literally just a vigilante who's hunting members of an organized crime syndicate for mundane revenge reasons, and he only attacks the player because you try to stop him.
Yeah it's a problem and probably stems from their writers mostly having experience writing a predefined character, so V was their first go at making more of a blank slate for the player. V being kind of shit no matter what is narratively fitting though: they're this lumpen petty bourgeoisie killer for hire with dreams of grandeur, raised after the apocalypse in a world dominated by a hyper capitalist death cult with pervasive propaganda everywhere. Nomad V is the best and most coherent because they come from outside that system, but still not really fleshed out enough or politically educated at all.
I was trying to come up with another "1" other than Starfield that isn't just, like, Custer's Revenge on the Atari, and I came up with nothing. Damn, Starfield may really be the 1.
. It may be neither here nor there, but I'd put Cruelty Squad up there fairly high too, especially considering what one might expect from a shooter.
Starfield really is just the blandest, vibes-as-worldbuilding game I can think of. Like there's worse games and on a mechanical level it's better than I expected from Bethesda, but I can't think of a better "diametric opposite of everything Disco Elysium does well" game.
I haven't played it and don't personally like that sort of gameplay, but I've heard that its writing is good.
It was a bold move to make the entire story's purpose to pull the player into LE EPIC MULTIVERSE while providing multiplied procedural emptiness over the first bland boring universe that they had already come from.
The writing is almost Disco Elysium tier, with similar strange, grotesque, but highly thoughtful introspective ideas hidden among the gunplay. I mean, it isn't enough justification to play it if you don't like that kind of game, but watching a playthrough or a curated visit may be fun for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ4NLbIxzQ4
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: