I would just like to comment a bit more on the Witcher 3. It is not a big spoiler as this is pretty obvious since the start of the game that there are two big political forces competing for power on Witcher 3, the Nilfgaard Empire and the kingdom of Redania. I really liked how the game focused at the start on the suffering of the little people in war and how their rights can be trampled with little regard from the powerful, this is why Velen is the best area in the game, the game manages to induce some emphaty on the player for the peasants and it makes the whole thing more interesting and a bit more emotionally powerful than the generic escapist fantasy you mostly see on games.
The climax of the game is at the end of the Red Baron quest line that manages to tie together human suffering, the misery of the land and the foklore coming from the terror of the man left alone to deal with a merciless, random and cruel Nature, far from the romantic hipster gaia bullshit from urbanites that don't need to suffer under Nature rule as people on the Middle Ages and before had.
However as things go to Novigrad and to a bit lesser degree on Skellige, all the power of the story is lost, I would go as far to say that the ending of Witcher 3 is in there and all the rest is just DLC material. The reason is they go from Velen into Novigrad, I dunno what happened, if it was another group of writers making that part or watever but the drop in quality is noticeable. It still has alot of fun escapist grim dark fantasy on it but it doesnt manage to draw power from it so you kinda feel disappointed with the result.
They just follow a series of fantasy templates pretty common on popular fantasy fiction and hapzardly go around on a mess of themes and tones. On an scene you are seeing people being burn at stake for being mages and on the next scene you go adventuring with your funny dwarven friend doing alot of ass jokes. This mess of tones of on a time you see hardcore religious persecution and at another point you see comedy could work if there was something to bring them together but as the story at this point is an endless fetch quest, this doesn't happen and you end Novigrad without anything that brings it to a close and just a butch of story paths that lead nowhere, are meaningless to the whole of the story, side adventures that don't go nowhere or end way too quickly.
They present you a villain at the start of Novigrad and show a nice option of theme of religious persecution of what is seen as different, they build a climate of threat at the start of the Novigrad section that they end wasting as none of the major characters in this storyline suffers from it or have any serious connection to it. There is a disconnect between the tone of the characters and the plot points of the story with the background as they don't suffer any direct consequence from this persecution.
This made Zoltan and Dandelion extra annoying as they don't take anything serious when the background is just awful stuff are happening and you should worry if you are a non human or are seen as an associate. Zoltan and Dandelion looked like they were on drugs and entered in conflict with the background, the only character that truly takes what is going on seriously is Triss. I dunno if they tought they should add a bit of comedy and light hearted stuff after the depressing Velen but the result was meh.
It is on this section where most attention is given to political stuff, and as all grimdark fantasy fiction does, they go for the "Everybody is Evil, LOL!". The Nilfgaardian emperor is a power hungry asshole and Radovid of Redania is a crazy sadist loon. Yep, that is it. You need to choose between two psychopath assholes without redeeming features, guess this is grey morality these days. I know the kids these days think this is edgy, to present grey morality and "mature" themes. This is just weak when the very own CDProjekt managed to make much more interesting assholes like Foltest and Jacques de Aldsberg. I don't see any maturity in it especially after seeing the ending slides.
