I’m a Borderlands fan, but it absolutely isn’t even in the same universe of quality as BG3. Borderlands is dumb, pretty shitty and lost quality with each game. It’s mindless fun, like B movie popcorn flicks.
I would absolutely disagree. Fun, maybe. Mindless fun? No. I’m fine with games that are mindless fun, but it isn’t what all games should strive for. I personally much prefer games that require your focus and consideration.
Mindless fun is cheap and easy. Making a game that sits in people minds for years is difficult and takes effort, but is much more rewarding. BG3, for example, is anything but mindless, which is why it’s been able to still be in conversations for so long after it released. How much do people talk about Call of Duty, even though it sells like crazy?
i hear talk about call of duty all the time, and especially in its heyday it was talked about pretty much everywhere. meanwhile i only hear BG3 talked about online or from my brother who’s currently playing it. so i think you just proved your own self wrong there. CoD and borderlands are 2 game franchises that are already talked about a lot. hell just look at this own post, its about borderlands
People talk about playing CoD. They don’t discuss the game really, and also this is being discussed because it’s news, and also because they’re being greedy and stupid. Again, it isn’t the game being discussed.
BG3 people talk about the story, the writing, the gameplay, etc. They talk about how the game is something actually made for players, to be enjoyed, not by business people to make money. They talk about the game.
Saying “do you want to play CoD tonight” is different than discussing why the gameplay of CoD is good/new/innovative/whatever.
I actually did see people discuss the campaign of the new CoD (or maybe the one before) because it was actually fairly unique for them. Other than that, the only time I hear about CoD is people talking about how much money it makes, how bad the skins are, or things like that. It holds almost no relevance in game discussion circles because everything they did well has been innovated on since then.
People talked about how smooth and responsive CoD 4 was, because it was innovating. People don’t talk about the mechanics of whatever the latest CoD is, because it’s not doing anything worth copying.
I also see posts about it often on !games, although admittedly I don’t pay attention to the usernames of the people who make those posts, or the usernames of the people commenting. But I’d doubt the comments are all just @Cethin talking to themselves ;)
Eh, I wouldn’t say even mindless fun is easy, from what I hear game dev is hard and a lot of effort and hard work can still end up in something unfun. Probably not your intention but I don’t want to devalue the efforts of people who probably want to make something to help other people enjoy a bit, that I probably don’t have the skill to make myself.
I’m a hobbyist game dev, and I have friends in the industry, and yeah it hard to make anything at all. I meant more that it’s easy to conceptualize mindless fun. Implementing either is just as hard really.
But that type of fun is something I can get from many other games, making borderlands way less desirable if it’s $80. On the other hand if larian says that their next game is $80, I already know that I won’t find that type of experience anywhere else and I might just splurge.
what game would you consider “not pure dogshit”? seriously, what games? give me a list, because if an acclaimed franchise that was widely praised and birthed a literal genre is considered dogshit, then what isnt dogshit?
kind of, it’s more like it starts a geralt’s story, but becomes ciri’s story. the first two books are all geralt. after that it’s about geralt and ciri’s relationship. then by the last book we barely even see geralt.
then after the series was finished he started writing more little stories from earlier in geralt’s life.
as i said in another comment. it’s downright bizarre that ciri doesn’t get mentioned until the third game. she almost makes more sense as the protag anyway.
Came here to say this. Anyone that’s played Witcher 3 should have already known that Ciri was going to be the protagonist in the next game. I can’t wait. Ciri is badass.
Yeah, there were a couple of tiny decisions, any of which failed you out if you got them wrong, and several of them had deceptive descriptions during the QTE.
anyone who has read the books was likely surprised that ciri wasn’t the main character of any of the games when they first started coming out :::especially since geralt dies at the end of the books :::
ciri was more the mc than geralt for most of the books. she’s the child of destiny. she’s the young character that grows up as we follow their journey. she’s the one that finds herself and shows major character development throughout the books. the only character development geralt goes through is accepting his bond with ciri.
the first two games never mentioning ciri was outright bizarre tbh. only even remotely possibly because geralt lost his memory. like, with where geralt as at by the end of the books the only thing you could possibly expect him to do on regaining his memory is frantically search for signs of his adopted daughter
to a longtime book reader my reaction to ciri being the protag of the next game was “FINALLY”
my only curiosity at this point is how much she’ll be like book ciri. does she know magic? in the books ciri goes to sorceress school and then gets trained in primal magic by unicorns and immortal space elves. can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.
tangent: sapkowski’s politics occasionally bleed through in weird ways in the books. like three’s a scene where a woman finds out she’s pregnant mid way through a literal war that our band wades through on their journey to save the world. the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it. it was so randomly out of character for everyone involved. but hey, that’s catholics for you i guess… /tangent
i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise. ooh, i wonder if she’ll make quips about cyberpunk and/or other worlds she’s traveled to. like, she spent Decent bit of time in Arthurian legend. she shows up briefly in Victorian London.
also, what will the world at large look like? they can’t do it like the last time where your previous save could alter the new game based on your decisions. you were simply able to do too much. they’d need to make like 3 entirely separate stories at the very least. like, who rules the north? are you the empress of nilfguard? is the church burning all the nonhumans at record pace? you can basically decide the entire fate of the northern realms and all of its people in multiple ways… unless it just takes place elsewhere. maybe we’ll be in zerrikania this time or some shit. there are many distant lands that the games never take us. it would be much more doable that way. then you’d just have to change dialogue and maybe swap out a few characters.
aaaanyway… yeah, anyone mad about her being the mc is a dumbass that doesn’t know shit about the story.
I was under the impression that it wasn’t Victorian London, but The Plague Year. IIRC she, canonically, brings a blanket infested with plague lice from here to there, and ends up dropping it next to the ship Catriona, which is how the Catriona plague actually gets started. It was one of those “oh shit, yes, that explains everything” moments for me when I first read the books.
She does also extremely briefly travel to Edwardian or Victorian London (I forget exactly what year it was). It’s mostly depicted through a newspaper clipping from The Sun and a rebuttle from another newspaper calling out their quoted witness for trespassing and strongly implying he was inebriated at the time and being an unreliable source. It’s quite comically written really
no, but she kind of wanted to… but it’s also way more fucked than that. please don’t make me type it out here. I’ll just say it involves violent rape while she’s still under age. it could be construed as a trauma response, but it’s debatable… I’m not convinced that sapkowski would have known what a trauma response was when he wrote that scene in the… 90s?
can’t actuality remember which book that happened in.
By thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world’s description I know what scene they’re talking about. It’s not great but it’s not as bad as they make out. Basically she ends up traveling for a bit with this really smarmy dude. Think incel used car salesman. He’s described as having greasy hair, he’s clearly not trustworthy and acts only in his own best interest, and is constantly trying to get into Ciri’s pants. But, he’s riding this incredible horse the likes of which Ciri has never seen before (and it turns out to in fact be a magical horse) and Ciri is just entranced by this incredible and majestic horse, and smarmy dude can tell, so he makes sure to use the horse to get Ciri to interact with him even though they both know she wants nothing to do with him and only gives him the light of day to see his horse.
Anyways smarmy dude and Ciri end up running from some bandits, smarmy dude is injured but plays down how badly, and basically uses this plus gifting her the horse she’s so entranced by to manipulate and guilt her into agreeing to sleep with him (from her perspective it’s been made clear how curious but nervous she is about sex, so she’s not entirely opposed, but it’s also implied up to this point that she’s far more into women than men) and then just as she’s starting to potentially enjoy the pity sex with the asshole but before either of them can actually get their pants off, he fucking dies!
can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.
Uhhh which book is that? If it’s the section I’m thinking of with Kelpie the horse, she’s entranced by its beauty and it’s rider/owner tries to use that to get into her pants (and ultimately died before he was successful) but I don’t believe she ever expressed sexual attraction at all to it by my memory from reading the books a couple of months ago.
the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it
The party is trying to find Ciri after her disappearance. Geralt and Cahir are having visions indicating that she’s presently in great danger and suffering (and at that she was!). Finding out while practically at the front lines of the great war that their incredible archer, Milva is pregnant completely derails their entire journey because she can’t ride, shouldn’t travel, and will need to rest in a safe area for a while (which they are at this point constantly far from anywhere safe), plus they can’t exactly bring a baby onto the battlefield they’re actively crossing. It’s one moral quandry wrapped in another. Ultimately Geralt and Cahir leave it to Milva’s decision, as does Regis the barber-surgeon/vampire who created the abortion potion.
Also it wasn’t rape. While guiding a group of elves to safety, they hid in a thicket for a night with Nilfgaurdians surrounding them and searching for them. The elves decided that since they were likely to die a horrible death at any moment that they should take the time they have to find what enjoyment they can, and Milva decided to join in. It just so happened they did not die that night and now Milva is carring a halfling for whom she does not know the fathers name (for safety no names were shared with the elves she guided)
i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise.
She gave up her magic after trying to use fire as a source of power out of desperation while navigating out of the “Frying Pan” desert. She wanted to save Little Horse the unicorn after an unfortunate battle with a monster she hadn’t yet learned of, but no other sources were available. My understanding is fire as a magical source is all consuming so it is forbidden to pull from for safety reasons, but that was largely left up to interpretation.
Upon pulling from fire, she saw the imense power that presented her, the ability to rule the entire world, but also how that would hurt those she cared so deeply about, so she instead gave up her sourceress’ powers.
If you want anything to complain about in the books it should be Milva’s winging about being an illiterate farm girl that honestly was out of character and just seemed written in so she wouldn’t outshine the others
Edit: Cahir’s attraction to Ciri is also creepy as hell the way it’s written, but that might be intentional, since that’s at a point where she’s coming to realize that everyone wants something from her, everyone will tell her why she should want to give them what they want from her but nobody ever seems to care or ask what she actually wants.
I mean, I prayed to the nether gods that we’d get a Letho game. He’s the perfect protagonist if they wanted to move away from the books and more firmly into their own OC. Always had huge main character energy, and would be perfectly suited for exploring the morally grey areas of the Witcher world.
If anything, Ciri's the character whose story is wrapped up by the end of Witcher 3, she saved the world and fulfilled her destiny. Unlike Geralt or the sorceresses, she does get old too.
It's definitely understandable that a lot of players would feel betrayed at having Ciri becoming the MC after 3 games of Geralt. People would riot if you made someone else than Lara Croft the MC of tomb raider. A better solution would probably be a character creator for a new generation of witchers. Ciri is too powerful to be the MC.
Isn’t the good ending geralt giving her a Witcher blade and calling her an official witcher? That to me sets up part 4. End of the day im glad geralt gets a rest. Besides they’re remaking 1 and 2 so the geralt fix will come
There's plenty of different endings, but yeah that's probably the one they'll make canon.
The thing is Geralt is The Witcher, making Ciri the protagonist is a bastardization of the saga. Imagine that J.K rowling came up with a new book, titled it Harry Potter 8, and made the protagonist Hermione. To me this shows a real lack of understanding of their audience, people play The Witcher for the fantasy of being Geralt, of being a monster killer, of hooking up with every sorceress. But obviously IP sells, and they aren't gonna change the title of the saga to something like "child of the elder blood".
I wish them the best of luck, maybe they'll pull off a fallout 3 and reinvent themselves. But I personally will be passing on this spinoff.
ROFL I guess these dudes want to live a power fantasy through Geralt instead of accepting the natural next step; since they are following the Witcher Books for the most part, Ciri was bound to be the lead character. I feel the Witcher 4 will be an excellent game, there’s interesting ground to cover with Ciri. The only bad thing will be if there is no first person mode, as I tend to avoid games with women as leads…I like to look at men from behind, not ladies. I hope the art team chose a design that doesn’t try to make her into a thirst trap (as that low-key makes me not want to play games with female leads).
ROFL Never, good looking male butts are so rare in video games… I could never do that to Astarion, as I don’t find it particularly overwhelming. I see so many guys that have occasionally well-defined cheeks in pants, it’s a feature, not a bug. This was a Kinsey Scale 2 guy who was way too uncomfortable with how often his eyes drifted to Asatrion’s rear, as that digital man has a whole bakery.
That’s why drag personally believes all RPGs with character customisation should have gender selection unless there’s a very good reason why not. The one good exception drag has seen is Pentiment - in that game you’re a mediaeval writer who hangs out with the monks at the Abbey. That story can’t be authentic with a woman player character. But that’s a very rare situation. Even games with named main characters can have gender select. Look at Prey and Mass Effect. It’s an accessibility feature.
In first person, there is no issue playing a female lead for me. I just have an issue with the common thirst trap design which has been a default design choice in games. As a gay dude, I find that sort of objectification is gross (the same is true for lead men in games. Except in the games that’s the point).
Especially when the camera does that pan to that lady lead’s ass in third person…Its not the vibe I seek when playing a game. 🙃
Any game with a leading lady that is serving cunt without the objectification I can easily play. Bayonetta is an example of one such game, she’s a force of nature, it feels as if she has a strong sense of agency. She’s not been made just for the male gaze.
The death cutscenes were absolutely gratitudous in the first entry, but honestly, if you can get past that the whole series is quite good and it’s really great storytelling and acting watching Laura arc from terrified recent college graduate put into unthinkable situations that she must find a way to survive all the way to cocky know-it-all who must literally nearly end the entire world and accidentally kill many countless innocent people to finally find hubris and actually start being a decent human being
I did watch someone else play it (they cut out a lot of the death scenes). I liked the evolution of the character, as she grew despite being put in situations that were wilder than what any normal college graduate would face in the real world. Learning from her decisions, and not being broken by them, is something that I admire about the character building of Laura. I hope any future games won’t have those gratuitous as fuck death scenes or that lead dev dude who wanted players to feel ‘protective’ over Laura (dude was a weirdo).
lead dev dude who wanted players to feel ‘protective’ over Laura (dude was a weirdo).
Oh yuck!
The good news is past the first game the death cutscenes are far less gratuitous, and honestly as long as you’ve got decent enough reactions you don’t see very many of them. The third game in particular puts a ton of effort into being respectful, including for example, actually having NPCs speak in local languages with English subtitles rather than a crowd in Mexico City all speaking English for example
That’s another detail that I loved, natural spoken language felt like an immersive choice, which served to make me feel like I was part of the game (even though I was watching someone else play). It sucks that more games don’t do this, especially if they are set in foreign places.
As long as they remake the original Witcher(and maybe the 2nd one too) so i can experience it in a similarly cinematic way to The Witcher 3… I will be happy and excited to see what a Ciri-based game or even trilogy would look like.
Will definitely miss the masculine indulgences of TW3 in the Ciri game though…
If you’re avoiding the first two Witcher games because they’re somehow not cinematic, you’re sorely mistaken.
Both of those games are incredibly atmospheric to the point of mastery. (tbf you have to be able to forgive the character models in the first game and that can be admittedly difficult because HOLY HELL ZOLTAN ARE YOU OKAY)
Definitely not OP, but I wouldn’t mind remasters of the first game to address the wonky controls. Witcher 2 was fine, but trying to go from Witcher 3 back to Witcher 1 for the first time was not a great experience for me.
Yeah. The controls, the fighting. Even with all the patches and community stuff laid on top, it was a bit too uncomfortable to actually play through for me.
The second one was brilliant. And to this day, despite me having almost 200 hours in Witcher 3, the only Witcher game I’ve actually finished. I think second’s format was perfect. 3 is just too open and beautiful, I get lost in wandering around too easily.
They are remaking the first game, but I don’t know if there are enough details about it yet to know how extensive the overhaul will be. The second game doesn’t need one.
The second one might benefit from a remaster by the time 4 comes out, as some of the models are a bit too XBox360 era, with the strangely wide shoulders and oversized arm muscles of the time
Ciri has a relationship with a woman in the books, so I’m not sure you will miss what I assume you’re referring to as “the masculine indulgences” as much as you think you will.
On the other hand, CDPR retconned a shedload of that book so we shall see.
“You can’t just have Geralt for every single game.”
I mean… Yes. You literally can.
Mario, Sonic, Zelda, Metroid, Kirby… You can create infinite video games with the same main character over and over again. Its like an infinite money glitch if the character is popular and well liked.
What happened to him in the end? I remember her sacrificing herself to the winter, but all I remember is Geralt living and then the post game DLC. Maybe I got the really weird ending, haha
There were multiple endings depending on the choices you make throughout the game. Same for the two DLCs.
The ‘good’ endings were in the base game she confronts the winter and succeeds, returns to Geralt as a father figure, and lives on as a witcher. Then in the Blood & Wine DLC, Geralt basically retires in his own vineyard.
They need to release a fake “Witcher 4” that’s just an older Geralt moping around his vineyard bitching about how his knees hurt. All of his quests would be things like pestering his workers about how badass he used to be, going to town to return a watermelon to the fruit vendor because of a mushy spot he didn’t notice when he purchased it, shit like that.
All the while, the townsfolk would slip idle chatter about crazy shit that Ciri’s doing off camera.
Honestly, as a stopgap that just releases out of nowhere for the sole purpose of building hype for the actual Witcher 4, kinda like how Bethesda did with their random vault dweller mobile game, I’d be all for it.
Geralt could go on a Gwent tour… but what’s this? Upon entering this new land of Walachia, some bandits stole his Gwent deck while he was asleep in his camp. And he had the ultra rare nude Triss card in it, too! Open, The Witcher 4: a quest for cards and vengeance.
All of those games’ characters are essentially just mascots though (other than samus). So they’re not really an applicable comparison for continuing a character long term in a story focused world that tries to be somewhat grounded in terms of consequences and passage of time.
conservatives use it to shut down arguements, of things that they are potentially wrong about, which includes everything they dont like. but mostly refers to traditional male and female roles(no lgbtq+)
I mean Ciri does but she’s a child throughout the books.
Yennefer and Triss are almost only as independent as their insatiable lust for Geralt lets them be. Kind of like Triss and Shani in the Witcher 1 but I’d argue they’re worse in that game than in the books
Lots of respect for Doug Cockle, the VA. He could use the outcry to try to get another big deal and make more money as the main character, but instead he recognizes the witcher is bigger than him or his character and is happy to have another person take the lead role and the spotlight.
I am currently ingesting a cocktail of complex chemicals that are manipulating my sensory receptors, sending electrical impulses through my neural system and altering the balance of neurotransmitters in my brain.
Woke did not exist before 2015, so everything created before that year is, in fact, absolutely based. Including all those apolitical masterpieces I grew up with, such as Metal Gear Solid and Bioshock. I wish they still made fun games instead of insisting on shoving leftist commentary down out throats. I really want to enjoy gaming again but developers are woke leftists now :(
Lucky for us, the glorious Nippon country is untouched by woke. No, I don’t know Japan and I’ve never visited it, but i play a lot of VNs, which is basically the same thing.
the massive increase of “woke” by conservative began around the time trumps 1st term, it only amplyfied just befored the pandemic, and during the pandemic. when disney shows, movies, trek made all these right wingers all uncomfortable.
CRT is also something they couldnt grasp or understanding, i felt like that dint stick too long, like woke did. crt is meant for LAW SCHOOL graduate studies. it was harder for low-brain conservatives to comprehend then woke and dei.
DEI is the new woke, but woke still is used heavily too.
The first trailer of Breath of the Wild had a lot of people literally wondering whether that Link was a girl. I didn’t see a lot of complaining about it, I wasn’t looking for some though.
Also, Gerudo town. I’m not sure what kind of mental gymnastics you’d need to shit on “wokeness” and somehow filter out BotW completely from it.
Half the things those idiots like would be ‘woke’ if they came out today. Any movie/videogame/(I would include books but these chuds don’t read) including a female lead, a non-white person, or a disabled individual is doing virtue signalling and pandering to minorities. But back then, chuds didn’t have the internet to tell them what to hate.
There are tons of things that nobody cared about years ago that wouldn’t fly today. Fairy Oddparents having a male individual become pregnant. LOTR’s Éowyn killing the witch king on her own. Avatar: TLA has a few ‘woke’ episodes as well - for example, one where the male leads learns how to fight from a woman, and another where the female lead needs to convince a male wizard to teach her magic, which was a man-only practice.
If they were released today, you’d find them in thumbnails on YT with “cringe”, “woke” or “DEI” written in CAPS all over the place.
Absolutely. Also Power Rangers for having a diverse cast that includes girls who kick ass too, and Captain Planet for having both a diverse cast and ecological consciousness. And X-Men for the same reasons they shat on X-Men '97. And Sonic the Hedgehog for being anti-authoritarian and having little PSAs about tolerance and being a good person. And Justice League Unlimited for showcasing female heroes just as much as male heroes. Powerpuff Girls for obvious reasons.
Back then they called everything they didn’t like “satanic” or “evil” anyway. Before they realised they could trick idiot kids into joining their cause by calling it “woke” and packaging it as rebellion instead of pearl clutching and puritanical nonsense.
And Sonic the Hedgehog for being anti-authoritarian and having little PSAs about tolerance and being a good person.
That would be very funny to complain about those because those PSAs were enforced on the studios by the FCC. Lots of cartoons from that era had them, including fucking G.I. Joe (that’s where “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle” comes from).
Later Animaniacs parodied the shit out of these with absurd “wheel of morality” segments.
Many diverse characters all fighting back against their unfair economic situation.
“… and that’s terrible.”
I also remember Portal 2 being on that list for “Most male characters are being depicted as incompetent compared to female characters” or something.
Dude. There are 4 characters in the whole game, counting one that’s dead but probably has the most characterization. Two are male. One guy is definitely a moron by design, but the other was definitely not incompetent. Mad, evil, sure. But he certainly achieved stuff.
I mean, if you look up “gamergate” and see the real reason why these little whiny bitches had such a shit fit. You can see that a lot of male gamers are a bunch of whiny little bitches who throw idiotic tantrums whenever anything highlights women in the gaming world.
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