The Vizima Confidential Clusterfuck

[PorkyThePaladin]

Playing my way through Chapter 2 of TW1, and I've been slowly chipping away at the various quests that make up the central investigation of the chapter (trying to figure out which of the various characters is connected to Azar Javed). Now, from the very beginning, I thought this collection of quests is badly designed because there is a great number of loosely related quests with ambiguous instructions in a game which does a lot of things for the player, instead of letting the player do them. So when you combine all of those things, what ends up happening is the player just runs around the chapter areas, talking to everyone, and sort of stumbles around blindly until hitting the right NPC/convo path and the game then notches the proper checkmark and has Geralt spell out what was discovered in a cutscene.

This is, in my opinion, really bad design and pales in comparison to older RPGs, which would let the player actually actively participate, pick up clues on their own, explore to find solutions, and all those things. But I chalked it up to modern design, and kept plugging at it, only mildly disappointed.

But then, this collection of quests went from inelegant and mildly disappointing to full on retarded. Apparently, the various quests that it is comprised of have to be done in a certain order and/or with certain dialogue options selected for the whole thing to make any sense. The order I did them in and the choices I made were apparently wrong, whatever the hell that means in an RPG, because the whole thing just went really weird and broken on me.

I got to the point where Raymond told me to go do the autopsy on the killed Salamander member. So I got Shani and the corpse there, and was doing it. As Shani performs the autopsy, you can speak with her, and several dialogue options are presented, which are presented in a way that you aren't even clearly communicated that there are critical choices to be made with each one. I made some of those choices, and they did not seem any more or less logical to me than the others (even after reading the wiki stuff afterwards), but based on those, apparently the autopsy produced completely wrong conclusions for me, implicating Kalkstein as the guilty party. This was bad enough, but on top of that, even assuming I did something wrong and accused Kalkstein incorrectly, even then, the quest made no sense whatsoever, because when I confronted Kalkstein afterward, it just told me to keep an eye on him, and told me to go tell Ramsmeat that he is innocent. I did that, and me and Ramsmeat established that we are both against Salamander, and parted as almost friends. So imagine my surprise, when after that, I went to see Raymond, and told him what I found out, and he told me to go kill Ramsmeat. What... the... fuck...? Going there, I had no option to talk to him either, so the only thing I could do was attack him, even if before, I already established that he is innocent and Kalkstein is the guilty party (according to my bad autopsy results). Then there was other weird stuff, like Raymond telling me he needs to think what I told him over, and for me to come back later. As I turn to leave his house, he walks toward the door, then sneaks back into his house with the knife drawn and ominous music, and as soon as I walk out, a small boy tells me a message from Raymond, that he needs to see me immediately. The same Raymond that I just fucking left.

So this is just a complete clusterfuck all the way around. Afterwards, I went online and researched it, and was even more pissed off once I realized how broken the whole thing is. A lot of people had a similar experience as me, although I guess a few, who were lucky enough to hit the quests in the order they were intended and wth the correct dialogue options, saw it unfold the way the developers intended. This is just a great example of how not to do quests, you don't want to combine a ton of moving parts in a tightly scripted RPG with open ended approaches in this way.

 

[DraQ]

Turns out I'm a fucking genius.

 

[varangos]

Raymond is dead

 

[Zibniyat]

So tl;dr: you were fooled by "Raymond" and you fell for it completely. You don't accuse anyone here unless you have *absolutely* irrefutable evidence, beyond any doubt. Which you apparently did anyway with Kalkstein.

Yeah, the quest is a lengthy and complicated one and requires you to literally speak with everyone, but the point is that you have to *thoroughly* research *all* of the characters with whom you interact... and I mean literally all of them.

 

[DraQ]

My main problem with that quest was that despite its intricacies it was basically an autopilot affair - if you played defensively, taking your time to ensure you had maximum information AND/OR explored extensively it was impossible to fuck up and therefore not well designed - I guess that point is moot now, since the OP did anyway.

It would be nice to see some quests defying the defensive plot metagame, BTW, ones you'd have to play aggressively to get the best results, and that would punish you from taking your time instead of punishing you for acting quickly and decisively by cutting you off from all sorts of good stuff.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Turns out I'm a fucking genius.

... the quest is a lengthy and complicated one ...

There is nothing complicated about it other than the fact that it doesn't fit together well, and depending on your choices and the order that you do them in, makes zero sense. The quests that make it up themselves are 95% solved for you by the game, all you have to do is walk around and talk to the NPCs that the game tells you to talk to. Like for example, the captain of the guards mentions something about the warehouse at night, and then your jounal quest entry says something like "hhmm, i should probably go to the warehouse at night and check it out", yeah sheer fucking brilliance by anyone who solved that one.

... requires you to literally speak with everyone, but the point is that you have to *thoroughly* research *all* of the characters with whom you interact... and I mean literally all of them.

Wrong, you don't have to research anyone, there is no research involved, you just run around and talk to them, and mindlessly do the quests they give you and so on. Which I did, but the problem was something else, as I will explain in a moment.

After being so pissed off with how the game completely broke down with the choices that I made (remember, I am not even bitching about making the wrong choice, and implicating Kalkstein, but about the fact that instead of sending me to kill Kalkstein, Raymond then sends me to kill Ramsmeat, who I already proved innocent earlier with my choices, which makes zero sense and is obviously a bug of some kind), I reloaded an earlier save, and tried to do the whole thing over, which this time I succeeded (armed with my meta-knowledge). So now I have a pretty good idea how the whole quest comes together.

The key to it (as far as correctly figuring out that Raymond is Javed) is the part where Raymond sends you to the gravedigger to get the corpse for the autopsy. This is where the quest is solved, and the only time where you as a player actually have any real input, the rest of it is just auto-pilot. There are 2 branches, 1 is if you get the corpse from the digger and do the autopsy with Shani, the other is if you tell the gravedigger that you don't trust Raymond and ask him to let you into the cemetery. Either of those let you expose Raymond as Javed, so let's take a look at both of them.

If you do the autopsy, the game tells you to read up on that stuff first (a medical book available from the antiquary in the district) and to talk to captain of the guards. I did both, but the stuff captain tells you is mostly useless, and the stuff in the book holds the ultimate clue as to how to proceed, but it is so subtle that I imagine most people would not be able to necessarily turn it into a successful autopsy. It tells you something along the lines of only draw conclusions that are supported by evidence completely and disregard everything else. So that works fairly well for the first couple of choices with Shani, where there are some obvious red herrings based on zero evidence, but once it gets to the later parts of autopsy dialogue, stuff gets very iffy. At some point Shani finds that the corpse's tongue is black, which points to an alchemical poison, and you have a dialogue choice between "This is too easy" and "Can you confirm it?", where the first leads you to the correct conclusion about Javed, and the second leads you to the wrong conclusion that Kalstein is the murderer. The thing is, if you are playing for the first time, without any kind of meta-knowledge, and don't know that the text in the medical book is meant as direct instructions to essentially always pick the most skeptical choice, then the 2nd choice makes more sense from an investigative/scientific perspective. In fact, even from the skeptical viewpoint, asking a medic to confirm/deny presence of a poison seems more prudent than impulsively claiming that the logical conclusions you arrived at by that point must necessarily be false because "they seem too easy". And yet that choice leads you to implicate Kalkstein.

Similarly, going the other route with the cemetery is very iffy. When you talk to the gravedigger about getting the corpse for the autopsy, you can choose some other dialogue options, including something like "I don't trust Raymond". Presumably you would pick that because the Witcher medallion keeps going off near him, as I can't think of anything else, but still, it's kind of a strange option to bring up with the gravedigger out of the blue, but that leads to dialogue where he tells you he can let you into the cemetery if you get the pass from guards or pay for his debts with Thaler. My big problem here is how disjointed all of this is, even assuming that you felt Raymond was untrustworthy, and you chose for some reason to bring this up with the gravedigger, why on earth would you think going into the cemetery would help with any of this? Oh I know why, because after you talk to the gravedigger, the journal says that he told you you might find some clues there about Raymond, even if I don't recall him actually saying any of this during the actual dialogue. A great example of a game playing itself for you.

 

[Roguey]

OP is right in that chapter 2 is a narratively incomprehensible mess unless you play it in the order CD Projekt's designers intended. They were amateurs.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

OP is right in that chapter 2 is a narratively incomprehensible mess unless you play it in the order CD Projekt's designers intended. They were amateurs.

Very talented amateurs though. I generally absolutely love the writing in The Witcher, particularly its emphasis on mature themes compared to typical RPG stuff, but yeah, in terms of narrative structure, it leaves a lot to be desired. One other thing I was shaking my head about in chapter 2 was my eventual tryst with Shani. I actually liked her the most out of all the women Geralt meets, at least so far, so I was looking forward to it, and right before it, she mentions her previous affair with that Snatch-sounding douchebag Thaler, who is old enough to be her grandfather. Way to set the mood, CDR...

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Wrong, you don't have to research anyone, there is no research involved, you just run around and talk to them, and mindlessly do the quests they give you and so on. Which I did, but the problem was something else, as I will explain in a moment.

After being so pissed off with how the game completely broke down with the choices that I made (remember, I am not even bitching about making the wrong choice, and implicating Kalkstein, but about the fact that instead of sending me to kill Kalkstein, Raymond then sends me to kill Ramsmeat, who I already proved innocent earlier with my choices, which makes zero sense and is obviously a bug of some kind), I reloaded an earlier save, and tried to do the whole thing over, which this time I succeeded (armed with my meta-knowledge). So now I have a pretty good idea how the whole quest comes together.

The key to it (as far as correctly figuring out that Raymond is Javed) is the part where Raymond sends you to the gravedigger to get the corpse for the autopsy. This is where the quest is solved, and the only time where you as a player actually have any real input, the rest of it is just auto-pilot. There are 2 branches, 1 is if you get the corpse from the digger and do the autopsy with Shani, the other is if you tell the gravedigger that you don't trust Raymond and ask him to let you into the cemetery. Either of those let you expose Raymond as Javed, so let's take a look at both of them.

You are wrong.
1) you can prove all suspects to be innocent before doing the autopsy, except Kalkstein iirc, you can only prove Kalkstein's innocence by successfully finding the real culprit
2) you can come to the right conclusions without finding Raymund corpse in the cemetery, this involves reading the autopsy book and a book on the serrikanian cc fly or whatever that was about, that way Geralt can conclude-> victim got killed with Fisstech contaminated with serrikanian fly eggs, Shani got fisstech from Raymund-> Azar Yaved is from Serrikania+ a fisstech addict etc

 

[Carrion]

Vizima Confidential could become a bit of a mess in places, but I love how ambitious it was and wish that they had tried to do something similar with their later games. One of the highlights of the game for me, broken or not.

On my first playthrough I just stumbled upon Raymond's corpse and solved the whole thing by accident, which was a bit anti-climactic.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

You are wrong.

You should read what people actually write in their posts before telling them they are wrong.

1) you can prove all suspects to be innocent before doing the autopsy, except Kalkstein iirc, you can only prove Kalkstein's innocence by successfully finding the real culprit

And what does this have to do with anything that I said? I have proved a few of them innocent before the autopsy, but ultimately you still need to do the autopsy or find Raymond's corpse to move the quest forward. And even after I proved Ramsmeat innocent, fake Raymond still told me to go kill him with no other option available.

2) you can come to the right conclusions without finding Raymund corpse in the cemetery, this involves reading the autopsy book and a book on the serrikanian cc fly or whatever that was about, that way Geralt can conclude-> victim got killed with Fisstech contaminated with serrikanian fly eggs, Shani got fisstech from Raymund-> Azar Yaved is from Serrikania+ a fisstech addict etc

From the part that you quoted (but apparently didn't read) in your post:

"There are 2 branches, 1 is if you get the corpse from the digger and do the autopsy with Shani, the other is if you tell the gravedigger that you don't trust Raymond and ask him to let you into the cemetery. Either of those let you expose Raymond as Javed, so let's take a look at both of them."

Vizima Confidential could become a bit of a mess in places, but I love how ambitious it was and wish that they had tried to do something similar with their later games. One of the highlights of the game for me, broken or not.

On my first playthrough I just stumbled upon Raymond's corpse and solved the whole thing by accident, which was a bit anti-climactic.

That whole questline feels like an accident, whether you get a good or a bad result, which is my biggest problem with it. You stumble onto Suspect: A/Suspect: B type quests out of the blue which makes no sense if you don't go to speak with Raymond right away, solving it hinges on making some arbitrary dialogue choices, the outcomes are also completely arbitrary and often nonsensical, and the whole thing makes much more sense in your journal than in the actual dialogue.