Problems Combining Coherent Narrative in Third Person Open World Games, The Witcher: Wild Hunt

So I woke up this Saturday morning full of beans. The football (soccer) season was starting up again and for once my weekend was completely free of obligations. Great I thought, I’ll boot up my PS4, get a few matches of Rocket League in, get through a few races in Project Cars and then dedicate a solid six or so hours into the Witcher. I live in Ireland and so therefore can avoid the guilt of not doing more wholesome outdoor activities instead. Sounds perfect.

And Rocket League and Project Cars were just that. I got exactly what I wanted out of those two games… Fun.

BUT then I loaded up The Witcher…

Not but five minutes in I found my eyes gazing over at what my partner was reading on her computer (recipes for some kind of healthy smoothie)…

On screen Geralt was talking to some fat cockney about a bard named Dandelion… I had apparently wronged the Cockney somehow and he was a bit put out by it.

I tried to focus to try and get myself back in the game, but try as I might, my partner’s screen kept drawing me back.

So what was the issue? Was it that my mood just was’t suited to playing a fantasy style RPG on this Saturday afternoon? Was it that I just really fancied a smoothie made out of oats and kale? Or was is that I was just bored of the Witcher?

Well the truth is it was none of these.

It’s true I was bored, but I don’t think it was the Witcher itself that I was bored by.

The Witcher is a beautiful looking game and I won’t deny that I’ve had a lot of fun riding around its world exploring its various nooks and crannies over the 30+ hours I’ve spent on the game thus far. But over the course of this play time I have found myself becoming increasingly detached from the central story of the game and therefore from Geralt.

I have thought long and hard about why this is the case, and I think I have managed to work out why.

It would be too easy and unfair of me to simply dismiss the story-telling as below par, as I have certainly given games with similar or even more poorly written narratives a free-ride in the past. Sure, The Witcher isn’t Dickens, but I think that bar a few exceptions we generally set lower bars for video games than we do for other narrative mediums. That’s fine, the nature of our interaction with the medium is different and therefore our expectations are also.

What I think is really the issue with The Witcher is the disconnect between player, a third-person Geralt and a quest-based mission structure.

CD Project have clearly put a lot of thought into their side and sub quests and for the most part have done so to good effect. However, by offering the player these secondary quests (including Witcher contracts) I feel that they have inadvertently diluted the flow of the game’s main through-line.

In a first-person game, such as say Fallout or the Elder Scrolls series, this effect is largely mitigated by the perspective (and therefore by its immediacy). How you choose to tackle the game is on you. You created your character and you essentially inhabit that world as your own digital avatar. What you do is your decision. Don’t want to chase that dragon? Don’t want to hunt after your missing father? Don’t worry about it. There’s plenty of caves and vaults for you to explore instead. The world maybe coming to an end, but you can afford to be lackadaisical about it. Your accuracy with a Chinese Assault Rifle will ensure the job gets done when you’re good and ready.

But change that perspective to an authored figure and that camera to an over the shoulder one, and cracks in the mission-based structure begin to appear.

Geralt does not suffer fools gladly and pays short shrift to time-wasters. He has a girl to find after all. But these bumbling peasants and devious lords and ladies are being frustratingly tight lipped with their information. However, you’re in luck, running errands seems to be the global lip lubricator you’ve been looking for. It’s easy… head out into the fields, examine some footprints, kill a wraith, examine the remains of little Jenny and then return to divulge the whole sordid affair to the grieving mother and father. These devastating stories will pull at your heartstrings in what is ultimately a sad, sad world, but in return they will tell you that they saw the one you seek two blocks down not but three days ago. Happy days!

The hunt is back on! No time to waste!

But then, given how apparently imperative it is that Geralt finds Ciri as soon as possible, why does he insist on stopping every 100 metres to help all and sundry with menial fetch quests and their provincial murder/werewolf mysteries? It’s not like he needs the money. The main quest line offers plenty of moolah, and if financing is required in the short term then I’m sure there are some corpses he could pilfer a few florens from. Does he just have a good heart? Nope, not even that. Geralt makes it clear that witchers have severely stunted emotional growth, having barely evolved anything more complex than contempt since they were expelled from the royal stromatolite lineage of Oxenfurt many ages ago.

No, we know the reason why he does it. It’s because we, as consumers, demand that this beautiful world that CT Project have created be more than just an empty shell. We demand that we be paid recompense for spending the past 30 minutes of our humdrum lives trekking through dense virtual swamp and vegetation to the furthest reaches of the map. We want there to be a reason for us to get there other than simply the achievement of doing so. We quest for those question marks.

But then, don’t you have to find this girl before those ghost pirates do? Perhaps they’re off busy helping some old hag in the fields also? Perhaps…

You see, for me, the nature of the authored narrative in this game becomes redundant once you’ve spent more than five minutes away from it. How could it not when you’ve spent 60+ hours diving for treasure and no more than 10 on the very thing you’ve been placed in this world to do?

But this doesn’t have to be the case. For an example of how to maintain narrative interest in a third person game look at The Last of Us. Joel and Ellie’s adventure keeps you engaged not because of the game’s mechanics, but because it is mature and confident enough to stick to its core story. Would the game have been so effective if you were given the freedom to do side quests for the Fireflies? Almost certainly not. The authors knew they had a good story to tell and they ran with it.

Now I know comparing The Last of us and The Witcher may seem unfair as they are on the surface completely different games, but when it comes down to it they both share an authored core and both want desperately to tell a story that is affecting and, for want of a better word, mature.

Could CD Project learn from Naughty Dog’s example? Could The Witcher not enforce a playthrough of its main story with no diversions before then opening up the world for the secondary stuff? Given the effort that has gone into the writing of the game, does it not seem reasonable that the main quest be given the structure it deserves? I know this would entail lots of those immersion-breaking artificial borders restricting where you could and couldn’t go in the world during this period, but if the narrative imperative was strong enough then I’m sure such restrictions could be justified within the walls of its own fiction.

As it stands, I feel like I will struggle to re-involve myself back in The Witcher’s world in any meaningful way because, quite simply, I have lost my way within its structure. This is extremely sad because clearly the game stands up on so many other levels. It just happens to have drowned itself in its own substance.

For me, if the developer chooses the third person perspective (i.e. controlling an authored avatar) along with a driven through-story, then the imperative should be on bringing the player on that journey as the author originally intended. The game’s open world would still exist, but just within its own post-story state. Geralt can stop and take in the views once he’s found Ciri.

Perhaps CD Project could look to Rockstar for another example of how to author third-person open world experience such as this. GTA V succeeds where The Witcher fails because of the pacing of the main story. At what point main and side quests will be given to you is handled carefully, and as a result you rarely lose sight of what your ultimate purpose in the game is.

The Witcher is a great game in many ways and CD Project seem like an awesome studio who care passionately about their fan-base, but unfortunately I am afraid that I am unlikely to see their latest release through to its final conclusion. And that is sad for me as I can see that it is a product of real quality.

Tonight, I intend on starting Everybody Has Gone to the Rapture. It will be interesting to see how their radically different take on presenting narrative compares.

#TheWitcher #TheWitcher3 #PS4