I’m mad about Ciri being the main character, however the reason I’m mad is not because of her character or her being a woman. What I’m upset about is that I thought this game would take place in a completely different time period or region. Like maybe during the first witchers? Maybe in the future? But no, CDPR is just force extending existing characters and a story that clearly ended. Zzzzz
Yes. The games already retconned the ending of the books, which was pretty finalized. But whatever, the games were good. But now they’re just force extending an already forced extended storyline rofl. I was hoping for completely new characters in a completely new settings/time period. Such a fucking shame.
They made such a big deal about the witcher 4 not being about Geralt and being it’s own story, and now they’re just extending Ciri’s storyline. Pretty braindead decision in my opinion. It feels like they are just lazy and gave up on making a new character.
It’s the same bullshit that has ruined hollywood. It’s safer to just reboot some bullshit or force a sequel vs. coming up with something new and original.
I’m not saying doing another Witcher game in general is a forced sequel. But using the same damn character is definitely a forced extension.
Quite the opposite for me. Having only random ass characters in the story would kill all my hype. Also I wished for Ciri as MC in the next game ever since I player W3, so for 10 years now.
My dream witcher game is set like 150 years in the future (early industrialized time period of the witcher universe.) And there could be tension as guns are invented and witchers aren’t needed as much. How great would that be?
Wanted to mention - The Season of Storms Witcher book has a short flash forward to around 150 years in the future, and they’re starting to burn fossil fuels. That’s where I got the 150 years.
I don’t believe there are people who seriously throw the “woke” argument out there. I think it’s a sort of rage baiting by the journalists. Ffs there were 3 games with Geralt as lead. Enough is enough.
it must be out there enough to be brought to his attention. if thats the case i feel like ive started to distance myself from being online enough to not notice this shit anymore.
Maybe not here in the fediverse, but there are dozens of youtube channels that are all about whining about “the woke” ruining the gaming industry, “explaining” how every spectacular failure we’ve seen in the last few years (Starfield, Concord) are because of DEI wokeness, etc.
Just open YouTube in incognito mode and search a game title probably works. YouTube’s algorithm loves serving up manosphere style content like that like my dog loves eating my other dog’s poop. It’s disturbing on both fronts
Very true. I have its history tracking disabled, but it still suggests those videos or creators even when I’m watching something that has no relation to outrage, like a movie trailer or a GDC talk like one on Unreal Engine.
Yeah and they’re all fucking losers, it really feels like the vast majority of people don’t care about whatever these online people say ‘woke’ is. It’s the same as complaining about “political correctness gone mad”, affirmative action, etc, the same complaints they’ve had about social progress for decades. Nothing about these youtubers is new or worth dignifying with a response.
The weird loot range issue, where if you’re not standing in juuuuust the right angle, you won’t be able to loot certain corpses or containers.
The fact that, outside of combat, controlling Geralt feels like driving a boat. Weird large turn radiuses, slow start and stop, etc… The devs did this to make his movement look more natural, but it feels like the game is constantly fighting against or trying to correct your inputs.
Combine those two things together, and you get a consistently frustrating experience outside of combat. Installing a ranged loot mod was one of the biggest quality of life upgrades. You walk near a corpse or container, and it automatically gets looted.
The combat can also get repetitive at times, and the difficulty scaling is weird too. But as long as those two things and still deliver a good story, I think players will ultimately walk away happy.
I feel like the repetitive combat is more a result of combat that actually encourages dodging and using signs rather than just standing still and slicing while the enemy either hits or not based on RNG, and the fact that in combat you truly are jumping around, dodging, parrying, etc. makes it more true to the source material.
The style of combat in The Witcher 3 also makes it so that if you do find yourself in a much higher level fight than you should be you can with enough tries manage to beat it. I had one playthrough where I took on the werewolf quest while too low level for it, didn’t preserve any saves before the no turning back point for the battle. In order to save my save file I had to keep trying and failing to defeat the werewolf until I finally got the hits and dodges just perfectly enough to defeat the werewolf. It sucked but ultimately it was possible to complete and not just by an attempt with golden RNG rolls results
Morrowind is the best. Oblivion remaster is better than skyrim (in my Morrowboomer opinion) and that was just refreshing a 20 year old game. I feel like there is a lot of hype for TES6 that it may not live up to, but surpassing skyrim is definitely doable.
Honestly TES6 has one thing going for it and that’s that Skyrim is over a decade old now so matching the scale and scope of Skyrim is much more achievable.
In my opinion when a sequel falls flat or is outshined by an earlier entry in the series, it’s usually because the studio messed with the formula for the gameplay, not because of a change in characters
Oblivion and Skyrim were both massive disappointments to me.
If ES 6 comes out, it’ll have maybe three skills - magic/combat/sneak. Any interesting/complicated lore will be retconned and shoved aside. (Why wasn’t Cyrodil a jungle? Where are my river drakes? What happened to Sutch? Where is my Colovian armor set?)
He apparently worked on Oblivion (and Skyrim), so there’s a chance. He took a chance on Starfield and failed, so hopefully he learns from that instead of doubling down.
I thought the same thing about Cyberpunk, they couldn’t make lightning strike twice. But in the end, once the issues were fixed, it’s also one of my favorite modern games.
Why complicate things ? Games are not books. I see Witcher game I expect Geralt. What is wrong with this thinking ? Do I need to think everytime I play Horizon ? No when I play Horizon I expect Aloy.
There is nothing to do with woke. If you expect people to read books before they play a game there is something wrong with you not with people who want to play a game with their favourite character.
Geralt needs retirement. The ending of Blood and Wine expansion, tells you that loud and clear, and agree with that. It was a perfect ending for the Trilogy.
Ending with Ciri following the Witcher path, is Canon now. I dont agree with the decision of Ciri becoming a Witcher (not making her the protagonist, but her taking the Mutagens), but i want to see how they explain that turn of events.
That’s the problem, they want to put Ciri in same gameplay but different story and say that’s new Witcher. I would more likely play as Yenefer sorceress and slay monsters in a Witcher game than play as Ciri that somehow becomes a Witcher just to slay monsters with as sword. We already have character that slays monsters with a sword in Witcher game, he’s called Geralt.
Ending with Ciri following the Witcher path, is Canon now
It’s canon in the books too. She was trained at Ker Moren, then trained by Yennefer but ultimately she gives up her magic entirely after pulling from fire as a source out of desperation. She remains an extremely skilled swordswoman with partial mutation
I dont think its necessarily to complicate things but more that we’ve had Geralt as a main character for 3 games. His time is ending, and if you love him as a main character there are those 3 aforementioned games you can play to get what youre looking for. Switching up the main protagonist to another character that we as gamers have learned to love and accept through the series is probably the best move, both for business and canonically.
The Witcher game series is based on the book series.
The post criticizes not the expectation of players that haven’t read the books, but of the subset of people that think making Ciri the protagonist is a political message, when it’s just staying true to its source.
Your critique has nothing to do with this post.
Expectations differ from person to person. You see the games as a separate thing. They are obviously not. But it’s totally fair to want another witcher game with Gerald with his story continued. If the original creator of the story didn’t write it that way, then CD Project Red would have to come up with their own story. Straying too far from source material can end badly - see Game of Thrones seasons 6-8.
Nah the author of article asume that all people that say that Ciri can’t be a witcher it’s because they claim it’s woke and tries to turn those who disagree to say it’s political. I clearly state it’s not. I don’t want Ciri in Witcher because I want to play Geralt. That’s all. The author puts books to afirmate his claims that only people who read books are worthy to say something about Ciri being a Witcher protagonist and that everyone else says it’s woke. No I disagree. Books are not Games.
It’s a game series (and later media series) literally based on a series of books. The short stories tell Garalt’s story, but the longform books are far more about Ciri than they are Geralt. Go read them they’re brilliant books but more important to the point you’ll understand why Ciri is so important to the story that’s being told
I’m sorry, but I still can’t help but laugh about the anti-woke Asterion flat-butt mod, and now in my head I just see all anti-woke gamers as jealous flat-butters.
I don’t know if I have met anyone complaining about Ciri being the protagonist of Witcher 4. Even the most conservative people I know who are fans of the series are pumped about her being the main character because they love the story and it’s the only logical way forward. The only complaints I have heard are that in universe she’s kind of overpowered for a video game protagonist. I think people whining about this are fake fans or just agitators who don’t even play these games.
I want to believe this is just s straw man argument but sadly I know there are enough jerks out there who absolutely call everything that doesn’t cater precisely to toxic masculinity wOkE.
I think it‘s a bit of a bummer that the ending of Witcher 3 that does make the most sense in-universe isn‘t canon in favor of what I think is pure fan service. I will probably still play the shit out of this though because all of their games have been hitters for me. Even Cyberpunk at launch. Even Witcher 1.
If pre-orders ever made sense, it was when you still needed a physical cartridge or disc and the game wouldn’t get patches anyways. But those days are long gone.
It’s about time women got more accurate representation in games. How many games have you play as a man compared to playing as a woman? Technically it should be 50/50 to more accurately represent the real world.
I don’t think representation is the main issue, it is more about how they are presented.
Striding for a perfect 50/50, doesn’t really sense if they are all just stereotypes and sexual objectified. Also there are many other underrepresented population groups.
IMO, it is more important to focus good well written and complex characters, that represent real circumstances right.
I don’t complain that AAA studios have gone ‘woke’ because they now include choices to select from marginalized groups, I complain about them because they are often do not offer a deeper perspective of people in that group and are just different skins.
In some way, I can understand, games often happen in a Fantasy world, but I would wish that selecting different characters would do more than just exchanging the player mesh, texture and voice pack.
The well written part is my concern. Or we will get the same quality as a lot of recent movies and shows. Where the characters are stereotypes, poorly written, poorly developed. With plot points that are just randomly forced into the story, and that plot point has nothing to do with the rest of the story. You know the ones, where something has been added to the story and has no reason or meaning or benefit to being part of the story.
Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is “Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope.” Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn’t matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn’t matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.
Now I’m also not gonna shut down your solution without being constructive and providing my own solution, cause I don’t think quotas are the answer either. Instead we should be uplifting and empowering marginalized creators and game designers so that they can make more characters that they want to make. Which is generally characters they can relate to. If people want more characters that are women, then the game industry needs to become a safe space for women and empower them so they can provide more representation for characters. Same thing for any other demographic. That will make sure that these characters are being made in an aethentic and organic way, and not just being pumped out to meet a quota, but also isn’t restricting when marginalized demographics can be used as characters.
Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is “Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope.”
What? Where am I saying that?
Yes I would complain about all kind of stereotypes. Even the “white muscular tough guy” could be considered sexual objectification. IMO CoD is sometimes pretty gay coded.
Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn’t matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn’t matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.
I wasn’t saying that. You can have games without a single character. Or where the character doesn’t really matter, because it just an empty shell you are driving around and not more.
But IMO I mostly play story driven RPGs, where you are someone, and where you want the environment to react to you. It would be awesome if when you run around with colorful hair or tattoos, it would slightly change the disposition of the NPCs or cause them to comment on your appearance. Don’t let this stuff be just cosmetics, it should be more meaningful, and embedded into the game world.
That’s why the trailer has me so hyped for this game. It looks like the game is going to be different because Ciri is the protagonist. Her experience, reactions, and approach to saving a young woman from being sacrificed are totally different than what Geralt’s would be. I hate it when games like Mass Effect are like “Oh! You can play as FemShep! That totally counts as representation!” even though it changes literally nothing about the story.
I want more games that actually address the real and significant differences in the experiences and perspectives of different characters. I’m always disappointed when there’s a “female” option that’s just a re-skin of the male character with no changes in how the character interacts with the world and the story. (This happens a lot in non-video game media too.)
Video games are not the real world. They do not have to follow the rules of the real world. Even if parts or all of the game model the real world, video games are artwork, and artwork invents its own rules. Trying to enforce rules onto art has not worked well in the past, and will likely not work well in the future either.
Exactly. They can charge $200 if they want to but it doesn't mean people are going to buy at that price. The price point needs to be where people are okay paying for it and I don't see it happening at $80. Okay, I lied a bit, I see it happening for some games but not for BL4.
I'm willing to eat my words but I doubt I need to. In a world where Clair Obscur costs $50 I don't how see how BL could be $30 better than one of the best games released this year.
If Ubisoft can convince themselves that Skull and Bones was the first “quadruple A game” and worth $70, then I doubt most studio execs can pull their heads out their ass for long enough to properly ask themselves that. Studios have completely lost touch with what people actually want and are willing to pay.
gamesradar.com
Gorące