I read this and all I can think of is that voice line from the first area (outside visima) where the little girl asks “can girls become witche’s too?”
I guess it doesn’t really fit within the story of the original, but if they make a new story with new themes I don’t see much of a problem. But no one really likes ret-cons
The canonical answer to “can girls become witchers” is no one properly knows. Citi was raised and trained by them but they didn’t do the other stuff (the mutagens, trial of grasses or special diet) because they both didn’t know what it would do to a girl because it had never been done to a girl and because even if it worked exactly like it would for a boy it causes sterility and she’s the last member of the royal line of Cintra.
But the time of The Witcher 3, she’s already older than it’s normally done, so any attempt to do it would additionally have unknown results because presumably they usually start changing them from childhood for a reason, rather than taking in adult trainees.
The order that they appear in MCC, which is pretty much release order. I would 1000% get the ODST and Reach campaigns as well, as those are top notch too.
CE, 2, 3, ODST, Reach. You can play 4 if you want so you can see how it started going downhill, and it has its moments.
Just play 1, 2 & 3 chronologically and if you want more play odst. I, personally, wouldn’t recommend halo 4. They’re also great games for co op if you have a friend you can convince
Spoiler-free TL;DW: Halo 4 was controversial because this was the first new mainline Halo game by 343 Industries, who changed things up from previous Halo titles.
But aside from questionable changes to the franchise in order to appeal to the CoD audience, there were a few genuine issues with the campaign (in my opinion, as a player who never finished Halo 4’s campaign).
In terms of gameplay:
The sandbox was absolutely destroyed through many changes to older weapons, to encourage you to use the new 343 weapons. The weapons were either nerfed into the ground to make them unviable, greatly reduced in ammo/availability, or outright removed. This meant that you would constantly be forced to replace your weapons, or you’d have to use the newer weapons, which still ran out of ammo. This greatly limited your options when playing the game.
The enemies would act in a way that greatly limited your options when fighting them. The most common weapons (plasma pistols and needlers) were both were used in a way that forces you to methodically take them out from a distance. Melee attacks were undodgeable instant deaths, forcing you to take them out from a distance. Then, the Promethian knights have stupid health, shields that recharge almost instantly, and the ability to fucking teleport to recover their shields (or hit you with an undodgeable melee attacks).
The result is that you are basically limited to only using long-range weapons to take out enemies. Hope you enjoy hours of Light Rifle gameplay!
In terms of other parts of the game, this is more subjective but:
The story felt incoherent, especially considering that it is a sequel to Halo 3
The sound design completely changed the iconic sound effects, and the music felt off
The characters were bland and forgettable, only Master Chief and Cortana were anywhere near fleshed-out
Overall just a poor experience compared to older Halo titles.
Fallout 4. The amount of world exploration and itty bitty stuffs almost makes me lost myself in exploration, even though the story can be really short depending how you progress the content. On my first playthrough, I clocked at ~90hrs of play time and only just passed the 1/4 of story progression just because I sucked in sidequest and exploration.
Never thought I enjoyed the base building and assisting settlements aspects, Bethesda did great job on Visual storytelling speaking as Interplay/Obsidian Fallout fan.
Another case is STALKER Anomaly mod which can gives you theoritical endless playtime as long as you creative to build your own CYOA Stalker story. Though I don’t recommend Anomaly if you’re looking for the STALKER lore (as they’re fan project) and should be treated as post-vanilla playthrough.
Developers are demonstrably not getting more efficient with their content. More content means more assets, and that’s why development timelines have only gotten longer over the years.
I do, and I miss it. I’m far more likely to feel these days like they made too much game to its own detriment than to make it a length that felt better for the game’s pacing. Baldur’s Gate 3 was phenomenal from start to finish, but games frequently come in at a third of its length and feel like they were longer than they should have been. Lots of games transitioned to open world that used to be linear, and the open world is little more than a menu that makes it take longer to select your mission, because you have to travel there. They create checklists of busy work to keep you playing worse content between the moments that you actually want to do, like the side missions that litter modern Assassin’s Creed games with progression gates. I didn’t know how good we had it when we got FPS campaigns between 8 and 12 hours in the years following Half-Life 1, because they’ve been so rare since Titanfall 2 came out 8 years ago. Games being longer now is not solving a problem that I had, and I’d argue it’s often creating problems.
Maybe you prefer your games longer, and good on you if you do, but it’s most definitely not due to developers getting more efficient with their content. For one reason or another, because you’re demanding it as the customer or because modern asset pipelines make it make the most fiscal sense, they’re just spending more time making the content.
You can still get short games, you just won’t find them from AAA developers anymore because publishers want big games with bigger profits. Titanfall 2 was a great campaign even if short, but Halo 5 was the last short game we had and people threw a shit storm (rightly, it wasn’t near the quality of TF2 and had other issues).
If you want short games, the indie space has you covered. Always small games out there releasing.
And game devs have certainly not become inefficient, it’s just the standards of quality are higher. People still want more complex, better looking games. And I don’t mean just graphics; unique art styles are all the rage. Games like Balatro and Cruelty Squad prove graphics aren’t everything as long as you keep a cohesive style and have good gameplay to back it up.
Personally though I avoid small games. I’ve had my fill of them growing up, I’d rather play big games with open worlds and all that jazz. I want to be invested in these worlds not play and forget.
I agree that AAA developers are the ones typically not making short games, and I agree that I am well-covered by indies. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. FPS games are about the only genre I feel like I used to be well-served in that indies haven’t quite picked up yet, so I can’t really just “go elsewhere” these days to scratch that itch (but games like Mouse: P.I. for Hire may be the start). But I was really just arguing against the efficiency part. I don’t think they’ve become less efficient at making content, but they’ve seemingly stayed exactly as efficient and just spent much longer doing it. I don’t find that a big open world makes a game any more memorable, especially when it exhibits the negative trends of filler and bloat I mentioned already.
I knew it was a jrpg from the beginning, but the way the stories unfolded and piled up had me confused. There was a new question every chapter and it just bwcqme bigge and bigger. Awesome game
The kinds of people that claim “wokism” in games tend to also not actually play the games they’re bitching about, so they don’t actually know what to expect.
Awhile ago my partner and I discovered there’s a combined work “Woke Advisory List” of videogames compiled by these backwards grognards. It roughly places games into categories of “Do not play, tis too woke” and “mild Trigger warning - has woke elements”
There is no small matter of quality of game that seems to influence which category the game is put in. Generally blah games with like a non sexy female protagonist and a single gay person randomly existing as a character you optionally meet might classify as “Holy shit! Too woke too WOKE!”… But then LIFE IS STRANGE is only categorized with the mildest of warnings of “some gay themes”… Like bro… “some” ?
It is equal parts hilarious and disheartening to go through and look at all the shit they decry as woke collated in one place and to recognize what counts as “exceptions” because they cannot bring themselves to cast games they love onto the burn pile.
It’s not just that they don’t want to put games they love into the pile. Their whole idiology is based on woke games failing. If a game is successful and “woke” then their idiology must be wrong. They will never admit to this being the case, so instead the game must not be that “woke” after all.
My thought was that Geralt and Ciri’s stories were over or decided, and I’m disappointed they didn’t find a way to do a Witcher story either in the future or past that enabled you to pick your own gender, appearance, Witcher school, or whatever else, maybe with creative use of the trial of the grasses or something.
I’ll happily play as Ciri to revisit the universe and maybe some familiar characters, but I just wish they’d done something newer or more original.
Beyond bored of both sides hijacking games for their identity me so specia outlooks. Get a personally FFS. Oh no she’s a bit hench for a woman. She’s been training and killing monsters most her life. On no people mad because woman in game. literally wgaf Geralt was awesome but the arc has ended for now nice and naturally.
If you read the books you’d be pretty excited about Ciri being the protagonist as in the books she just goes off into the sunset whereas now we get to see her return pick up the mantle and possibly get some new settings in France and England.
In general English usage I think you may be right.
In the world of “The Witcher” (which is translated from Polish) there are both male and female mages with inborn abilities. Sometimes they are called sorcerers and sorceresses, sometimes they are called mages, sometimes they are called something related to their specialisation of magic, and sometimes wise women who do magic but didn’t go to the academy are called witches.
Witchers, however, are not mages. They are made from ordinary humans and are gene manipulated and highly trained to be monster hunters. They have some witcher powers that are related to runes, and they make potions that have side effects only they can survive thanks to their manipulated bodies. Witchers at birth do not have special potential. Though a lot of little witcher trainees die, so you could argue they are artificially selected in that way.
Ciri is kind of neither of those, but she has special abilities related to space and time manipulation. In the new trailer it seems she drinks a witcher potion, but from what we know she never underwent the manipulation that witchers did.
Could be that she used her space time powers to find a more stable version. Or who knows all the crossovers could be canon and she grabbed some bullshit from monster hunter or some shit.
She might have done the trials with another school. In the trailer, she is wearing a feline witcher medallion, not a wolf one. I don’t think the lore ever mentions the School of the Cat having their mutagens destroyed.
Im not really into the lore, more of a Warhammer fantasy guy I was just making a guess based off of the sheer number of crossovers. Seriously that shit is absurd, its like a reverse Scooby-Doo.
I’m not too far into the lore either, but the Witcher audiobooks jsut happened to be up next in my listening queue, so I guess I’ll find out about all that pretty soon.
The Wolf school had it’s mutagens destroyed, yes. But in the trailer, it appears Ciri is wearing a feline medallion, implying that she is somehow affiliated with the School of the Cat now.
IIRC, the original polish “witcher” was made by taking word for “witch” and changing the grammatical gender to be masculine. Evidently this was not an existing word meaning “male witch”, and so was better translated as “witcher” (ie a made up word clearly derived from “witch”) instead of “witch” or “wizard”.
I haven’t seen a single complaint about Ciri being the protagonist of the next witcher game andI believe it’s because she isn’t a “let’s put a woman here for the quotas” type of character.
Is it here, or on the internet as a whole? I have already seen a TON of vitriol in the trailer’s comments on YouTube. They’re loudly skreeeing woke, and DEI, and even the less insane ones are “so disappointed in CDPR.”
EDIT - I spoke too soon, they’re even here in this very post.
Currently I split my time a bit on reddit and Lemmy, but at this point I don’t even bother with their gaming communities. Lemmy is miles better in that regard imo as far as discussions go.
Really? Can you share them? I saw the post on lemmy complaining about wanting male/female options, but there’s also this article with gems such as below.
actually pretty good analogy. like, whole generations of fucked up men come from the idea that if you just give up on the bad ones they disappear and nothing will come of it
That doesn’t really work though… You could say the same thing about any demographic, and it would be correctly called out as racist/sexist/homophobic/etc
bin.pol.social
Aktywne