It is looking like a busy month for me, as an offer I made to cover some hours at my branch ended up booking me for an additional 64 this month. Despite my expending vacation hours, it seems I have botched the opportunity to have a luxurious few months of five day weekends. But I was largely wasting that time anyway, it had turned the pressure down too much to produce fruition in my creative aspirations. Perhaps turning up the pressure will help.
Thanks to those vacation hours, I still get at least three days off a week, and it is looking like about half of those hours will go to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I have been putting off giving this game another serious run for awhile.
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Geralt of Rivia, monster slayer, lover,
and main protagonist of The Witcher.
For now, I am deeply immersed in the penultimate adventures of Geralt of Rivia, the titular Witcher, an order of monster slayers in a war-torn world. Though we often (rightfully) harp about how story takes a back seat in game development, The Witcher 3 is the last magnum opus of CD Projekt Red, a polish game development company who has always done a marvelous job of presenting the story of The Witcher, an equally-polish fantasy world series of books. Make all the Polish jokes you like, 1970s throwbacks: they're currently kicking the entire world's ass at storytelling, especially in computerized mediums.
It seems I have inadvertently segued into matters of obsolete racial stereotypes, I would talk more about the game, but what am I going to say that you don't already know? The Witcher 3 was released over four years ago, which frankly has largely exhausted the potential of many readers not hearing about it.
In fact, The Witcher 3 did more than merely get released, it actually did staggeringly well for itself. If I sort a list of all PC games ever released on Metacritic by user score, The Witcher 3 currently rests at #1, with over 14,000 votes. The professional critical aggregate puts it at #22, which is still quite good for a list of tens of thousands of entries. The Witcher 3 rules the XBox and PS4 lists with similar dominance, though Rockstar Games' offerings of Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto V actually seem to edge it out, but only slightly (and for a more criminally sympathetic audience than I). It appears that, for all platforms, these kinds of open world sandbox games have the potential to be basically the best electronic gaming has ever produced, at least as pertains to popular and critical opinion.
Personally, my tastes are a bit more specialized, because it is not enough for me that a game should be a compelling open world sandbox with elaborately wrought content. Instead, I want them to feature emergent gameplay where things happen for reasons other than them being scripted to. Also, I want them to feature more procedural generation in order to keep content unpredictable. Both of these things make creating content exponentially harder to do, but the trouble with going without those features is that everything becomes scripted and predictable after the first or second time you have done it in the game. That might be why I was not fully absorbed by The Witcher 3 when I last tried it, and why that blog entry largely devolved into discussing Starbound, a game with those features. There are some things that Dwarf Fortress does that The Witcher 3 can only dream of (though that would be more impressive if it was nearly as user-friendly, graphically capable, and not balanced like a perpetual train wreck).
In practice, what I ended up playing instead of Witcher 3 for the last few years was mostly Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4, both of which only had a little bit of emergence and procedural generation in radiant quests (a woefully inadequate amount) and (in the latter) building settlements (which had strong potential). However, Bethesda's offerings had another feature I enjoyed: the ability to roll up my own character. While Geralt is a badass, sympathetic character with several books of lore fleshing him out, and almost as much fun to play as Batman, he is still someone else's character. This makes playing him slightly less immersive for me than rolling my own flagrant self-insert and/or creative exercise in the invention of the primary protagonist.
Nevertheless, considering The Witcher 3's incredible critical reception, I can't help but wonder if my turning up my nose at it has resulted in missing one of the finer things in life. So it is that I intend to take a serious run at it this time, in my usual open world completionist style of leaving nary a rock unturned, and see how long that takes. It's about time! What next? Will I finally finish The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild?
Actually, at the rate it seems to be taking me to beat the game, I have plenty of enticing things coming up in the near future.
I may well end up playing The Witcher 3 long enough for Rune Factory 4 Special to come out on the Switch (January 21st, 2020), perhaps neatly transition that to Rune Factory 5 (2020).
I should be done with that just in time for Animal Crossing: New Horizons to come out (March 20th, 2020).
Somewhere in there (April 16th, 2020) CD Projekt Red's next game, Cyberpunk 2077, comes out.
If I needed something this year, we should be seeing Outer Worlds very soon (October 25th, 2019), though I expect it might need a month or two for Obsidian to work out the glitches.
Speaking of Red Dead Redemption 2, it is slated for PC release November 5th, 2019.
With games this big and compelling, my dance card is full.
"A Mouthful Of Geralt"
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