REALLY annoyed that Ciri is quaffing potions since I thought a big deal was that she never had the witcher mutations since Triss (?) realized it was a really bad idea to give a menstruating young girl all those mutagens. So those should basically leave her in horrific pain on the ground after she chugs them.
One of the things that made her segments Work so well in TW3 was that she very clearly was NOT Geralt… she was something simultaneously less and massively more powerful. Which is why her wandering off to become a Witcher in all the good endings was so powerful. She is not a Witcher but she IS someone who can fight like one and who can do some good in the world.
But very excited. I think there is a LOT of room for Ciri to call out the misogynistic bullshit of the average medieval-ish fantasy culture (and we saw shades of that). Not entirely sure I trust CDPR for this though. Sometimes they do real good and sometimes it feels like the joke is that that woman has a dick. Time will tell.
But a few people noticed that Bluesky has Austin Walker listed as part of CDPR Boston (?). I suspect that is just an anomaly or maybe some contract work but… I trust Austin to speak Truth and convince people just how much power they have to write a ridiculously powerful female character in medieval-ish Europe.
Also, I assume CDPR is reading this because of course they are. So here is something free. Ciri is not the Butcher of Blavikan like her father. She is the “Butcher of whatever fucking town this is” if people don’t get out of her way and let her help people.
We’ll just have to see what explanation they give. Did she get herself mutated eventually? Are the potions diluted/weaker? (I remember a quest where Geralt feeds a normal human a small dose of one of his potions.)
Would it be more interesting to have a Ciri that specifically doesn’t have most of the Witcher powers? Maybe, but I can understand them wanting to keep most of the gameplay staples. It looks like they are trying to keep most of Geralt’s moves and then adding some new ones.
Whatever happens, it should be interesting! I think what I’m most excited about is Ciri has a slightly different morality and worldview - I’m excited to see how that ends up affecting the writing.
Of course I’m not taking it for granted it will be good, but I am hopeful.
Sadly, none of this denoted a happy ending. Though the wounds on Lena’s body healed, the toxins in the witcher’s brew had melted her mind. This was not the first time a cure had proven worse than the disease
Regarding the potions, I haven’t read the books, but the wiki alludes to “Children of Destiny” not needing the trials, of which Ciri is part of. Even if that’s not it, I don’t think a grown woman choosing to undergo the trials is comparable to forcing it on a child. Pretty badass, tbh.
Not sure if it was optional (I THINK I missed it my first playthrough at launch?) but as part of TW3 you put someone through the trials as an adult. And it basically liquifies their body and causes immense suffering so that magic can be used to turn a pile of Clarence Boddicker back into the person’s real form.
It wouldn’t be the first retcon or outright ignoring of lore in the CDPR series (or the author’s books for that matter…) but it just feels particularly egregious because Ciri very specifically is NOT a Witcher and her choosing to live that life was her rejecting destiny and taking control of herself. But also? She can never truly escape that destiny.
As I remember, the liquification was more so part of the curse than the trials. The immense pain and risk of death is true either way, though.
And I don’t see any conflict with Ciri here. That would be her continuing to fight to make her own life, no? The destiny she’s running from isn’t about her being a witcher. More so the opposite, as I understand it.
I always imagined a Ciri game as a more action-oriented and somewhat more over-the-top spin-off based on how she played in Witcher 3. But honestly I’ll be content as long as it’s a good game
I think they’re Witcher potions. Based on her eyes, I’d guess she underwent the mutations.
I agree the “women cannot be witchers” thing always seemed sexist, but making her a witcher is a nerf more than anything. She didn’t teleport once in the teaser. A weird but welcome flip from ‘the female character didn’t earn it’ to ‘they took away everything she earned’ that we’re seeing in the social media reactions.
Somebody pointed out to me that the witcher medallion that Ciri is wearing is feline, so possibly from the School of the Cat, which according to the wiki was known to train women as witchers. I wonder if they had a different trial than that of the grasses. She might be a full fledged mutant, like Geralt.
Yeah, my sticking point isn’t the female witchers. It’s how much less powerful she is now. She was damn near a god last game.
I remember crashing my ps4 my piling up a ridiculous number of corpses during her escape scene. Just such a badass. Hurt my heart to watch her struggle in the fight in this teaser.
Or they wanted to play off that kneejerk reaction to get you engaged. Ciri studied under Triss, Yen, and Avala’ch and knows actual magic. They could just be the more powerful actual versions of what witchers try and emulate.
It looks interesting, though it does feel a little slimy just how obvious they were about making sure all the sponsor logos were visible on screen. Like, it gave me Wayne's World flashbacks with how long they were holding on the logos, it almost felt like a parody.
Big, chunky logos are part of this specific vibe, though I can understand why it’s a turn-off (with a couple of the fictional ones being out of focus).
I wouldn’t mind if they were all fictional, but the massive Porsche logo? Come on, I’m not paying for a game just to see product placements. It’s like Death Stranding with the energy drinks again.
I read it in this particular cinematic as a choice that this is OUR world, dominated by brands and massive companies. And it’s still the same ones even in this future.
Kinda like how it’s a different feeling when you see a Coke ad and an Atari ad in Blade Runner rather than seeing a generic in-universe copyright free brand.
That and this feels like something that could easily change in the main game
Heh. The moment chat figured out it was Naughty Dog I lost most of my interest. Don’t get me wrong, I liked TLOU1 a lot and mostly liked TLOU2 (even if I wish it was like 60% as long). But I am REAL tired of Sony’s “prestige telivision” gaming bullshit.
Then we got like 5 seconds of gameplay and it is bright action game fun and I am all for it.
I really enjoyed the first one. I missed some side quests due to shooting npcs in the head when they gave me attitude, but it was worth it. It had some long sought freedom compared to most new open world sandbox rpgs.
When the game pitch is a cinematic trailer, then a whole bunch of name drops Directed By X, Starring Y, Soundtrack by Z, and not a single mention of what the heck the player is even gonna do in the game, when will AAA studios drop the pretenses and do what they actually wanna do and just make movies
I recently played uncharted 4, can confirm there is a lot of interesting gameplay mixed with the mastercrafted, often interactive, cut scenes. It was an excellent experience by any measure and the game is nearing 10 years old.
I swear people are confusing naughty dog with another dev or something, their worst game is still more fun than 90% of other studio’s best.
It's all relative. Mediocre is still better than garbage, but not necessarily interesting or innovative. It's just "fine" because the whole point of the gameplay in these games is to progress the narrative forward. Mastery is rarely, if ever, required and gameplay depth is of no interest to players or developers.
You ignore all of that and start comparing their catalog to Ubisoft pumping out generic trash for years (NGL that Prince of Persia game is sick though) and you get a much brighter picture that doesn't necessarily take all factors into account.
Personally, I play games for the hyper engagement they offer, which I expect from hobbies and cannot get from film or literature. Stories, on the other hand, I can find elsewhere, so I don't necessarily care for them that much in games.
If narrative driven games aren’t your cup of tea there’s nothing wrong saying that, but writing off the extensive gameplay provided in naughty dog games is silly. I think your take would be better directed at something like Metal Gear Solid, that actually locks you in for hour long non-interactive cut scenes.
You may wanna re-read my comment—I did not bring up cut scenes, or claim Naughty Dog games don't have enough gameplay sections.
My point was Naughty Dog's gameplay sections are uninspired, non innovative, and passable at best because they're more interested in telling a story than innovative gameplay.
Whether I like narrative-driven games or not is of no relevance.
I sure hope CDPR is up to the task. Witcher 3 is one of the greatest games ever made, but I’ve been burned by Blizzard into knowing that a great trailer doesn’t portend a great game.
I booted it up recently, and it holds up really well. It hits a perfect balance of narrative and action while largely avoiding repetitive fetch quests and the like. And both of the DLC are excellent - Hearts of Stone has the best plot line in the game while Blood and Wine has the most beautiful locations.
I played the second late and then the third. I think it simplified too much some parts of the gameplay to please the mass, but the atmosphere and writing are still really good.
The entire game is largely about deeply flawed people continuously making incredibly bad decisions that are violently consequential. It’s not necessarily bad writing, and I completely get the theme that’s trying to be gone for here, but by god it’s a frustrating mess of a situation that only gets worse. I want to like the game a lot more than I do, because technically and gameplay wise it’s incredible, but I don’t know if I ever want to go through that storyline ever again. It fills me with a deep uneasiness just thinking about it.
Yes, but as a theme goes it’s like putting too much salt in some food, at least for my taste. Don’t get me wrong, I do like a good flawed cast of characters, the theme in general is good, but the execution just didn’t land for me.
I think if I could empathize with the characters a bit better it might have landed a bit better? As an interactive medium I think the character you control and yourself needs to have some level of shared goals, or at least the ability to understand their actions. I didn’t feel that for 90% of the game, it was like watching a soap opera where the characters don’t act like people. I can forgive that of the main two in concept, who are powered by bloodlust, but frankly they don’t act enough like maladjusted revenge golems to make it believable to me that they’d continuously make these terrible decisions.
Something else was that the theme got a bit muddled towards the end in terms of revenge. The theme is that revenge bad, violence begets violence, violence corrupts you etc, but after Abby does her thing she gets such a glow up over the course of her campaign, both as a character and in her situation, that the theme feels mixed. Hell, for most of the time you could kind of forget that it’s Ellie doing all of this because there’s the internal politics and fighting completely unrelated to what’s going on. Very little of Abby’s issues actually revolve around the revenge issue. Without the theme being clear on this stuff it becomes muddy exactly what the point is, and it feels like violence for violence sake. Like someone was out to prove that humanity is garbage, instead of being a warning against doing garbage things.
I also can’t help but feel it pulls the assassins Creed 2 problem with forgiveness being learned. I think it’s a good theme in concept, but after spending an entire game mercing a bunch of people both tangentially related or unrelated, it’s a little hollow. Even then though, I could see it working, but the fight at the very end kind of ruins it for me. If she lets Abby get on the boat immediately, that works better because she made the conscious decision to forgive. If she actually kills Abby, funnily enough I think that also works. Seriously, for where the game has been the entire time I think her doing it, but the audience knowing it was wrong would actually go a long way towards making the game as a whole feel more cohesive. Hell you could have done a player choice at that point, and even that could have worked.
It’s something I’m still kind of thinking over to this day because it’s such a unique problem to encounter in a game like this. Again, I do want to like the game, it does a lot right, it’s a good game. But yeah, bit of a yuck thinking about it.
What a great breakdown on your thoughts, thank you for sharing. I’ll admit it’s not a perfect game but I think it worked for me much better than for you. When the game switched to Abby I had this sense that the writers were going to try and make me feel something besides hate/contempt for her and my immediate reaction was “Good fucking luck.”
But it really worked and as the narrative unfolded with Abby I found her to be a very sympathetic character and by the ending I was more worried about her than Ellie.
When I realized this I felt super conflicted because - who didn’t care about Ellie going into Part 2? And I think that message about having empathy for people you hate was such a powerful theme to make a whole game about that I was willing to let a lot of the smaller narrative mistakes go.
All good mate, I like being able to go through this stuff from time to time because it helps me refine my own thoughts about stuff.
I definitely feel the same way about Abby, though I think it does get off to a rocky start by kind of cliffhangering the end of Ellie’s story. Still it did totally work in the long run.
I did have empathy for Ellie going into the game definitely. I think the game using that as a starting point and was incrementally raising her actions so the audience would naturally come to the conclusions she does at the end of the game regarding violence and vengeance. How effective this is might be dependant on the point the audience comes to these conclusions. I think it might just be the exposure to these kinds of stories I’ve seen, but I kind of got what the game was going for pretty early, and it felt like it just kept kind of bludgeoning me with the moral the longer it went on, like it wanted to bathe in the horrible mess Ellie was making. That was partially why I was hoping for it to be a subversion at the end I think? Kind of have it be a tragedy of character, kill Abby, and the forgiveness that she couldn’t give to another also means she deserves no forgiveness herself. As it stands it’s kind of there, but feels like it stumbles at the end, at least for how it hit for me.
I don’t think the narrative made too many mistakes honestly. The world building in general is great, the characters are believable, maybe just didn’t resonate with me personally.
I might actually replay it at some point to see how I digest it. I feel like I might be sort of out of step with this series anyway, I know people love the first game but I can’t get over the idea that the fireflies were just going to crack open Ellie immediately, like characters we know besides, that seems like an extremely bad idea to jump immediately to that conclusion. That’s something crazy mad scientists do, not actual medical experts or researchers. I try to just assume that it’s logical somehow in the logic of the world, I think the rest of that game is actually great, but that one thing keeps nagging at my brain. Anyway, tangent over. Hope you have a good day as well!
I was actually really excited by the pre-rendered cut scene that wasn't cel-shaded. I thought they were going to ditch the cartoony aesthetic and try moving the franchise in a different direction. But then it switched to in-game footage, and it looks indistinguishable from footage of any previous BL game. Something about the art direction just looks like it's stuck in 2012, and not in a fun way.
Generally, I like cel shading. I think it's maybe the issue I have is more related to artistic choices; a lot of the designs are very chunky and low-detail. It still looks very distinctly, unmistakably like Borderlands, but it doesn't look like there's been any significant improvement since BL1. If you told me this was a DLC pack for the original 2009 game, I'd probably believe it.
The newer visuals in the cinematic had me thinking that maybe Gearbox is trying to do a soft reboot after how poorly the movie was received.
Yeah, I was very heavily into the game, playing for at least a bit every day, once the whole fiasco started I immediately stopped playing it. Some of my buddies mentioned they got rid of the requirement after that and that I should play again but honestly I don’t have any desire to touch the game after that rug pull.
Because they went back. But they added it on months after release. People outside of regions that PlayStation is in could not make accounts and straight up lost access to the game. Huge controversy and outrage. So eventually they undid it, but it was too late the damage to the game was done.
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