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The Witcher 3 Pre-Expansion Thread
- Thread starter Nithrakis
- Start date
Underwater entrance, or circle around and try to climb after visiting PoP.
WhiteGuts
Arcane
- Joined
- May 3, 2013
- Messages
- 2,382
After many shenanigans, I can finally play the game.
Grafix wise I'm on Ultra for most things except one or two things like foliage density and stuff (HairWorks OFF), and I'm having pretty good performance, both in and outdoors. The combat isn't as bad as I some people are saying, and on Death March it can definitely get tricky. I died a couple of times more than I would've liked to the ghouls.
I'm still way too early in the game to give any actual review, but so far so good.
Grafix wise I'm on Ultra for most things except one or two things like foliage density and stuff (HairWorks OFF), and I'm having pretty good performance, both in and outdoors. The combat isn't as bad as I some people are saying, and on Death March it can definitely get tricky. I died a couple of times more than I would've liked to the ghouls.
I'm still way too early in the game to give any actual review, but so far so good.
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2012
- Messages
- 1,653
If you suck at twitch combat (like me), the level recommendations for story missions are actually pretty accurate... (It probably didnt help that i went in with a badly damaged silver sword and not enough food).
zeroprometheus
Novice
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2014
- Messages
- 31
Theres a gay hunter
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,508
Don't want to see people posting endgames slides, so I'll just post this blindly with my impressions so far, haven't read the thread past page 1. I'm around level 11. I've played a bit of the main story, but not that much, I tend to favor exploration and open world stuff over main plot in games that allow me to do so. I'll spoiler it up so you fags don't have to read my wall of text + pics if you don't want to. You're welcome.
TL DR:
Better than pretty much all games in this sub-genre (actioneers with "open world") except the Gothic series, which isn't saying much, since non-Gothic open worlders are all basically mediocre wastes of time. Still, definitely worth playing if you prize storyfaggotry or world design over gameplay.
Easy, bad combat, bad movement. But still decent if you can get past that. 10/10 IGN etc :')
Running on an aging Phenom II X4 965 + a new Geforce GTX 970, game runs smooth as butter on max settings. Which is... fucked, to say the least. I'm basically getting perfect performance with a 5 year old computer and a modern mid-range GPU, the downgrade is real.
Coming in to Witcher 3 from having just played through Witcher 2 on Dark, the first hour or so of 3 was a brutal awakening to what I had in store for me. You wouldn't think they could make a game that is initially less pleasant than 2, but they somehow managed to.
Movement? A shit. Remember that slight inertia movement in Witcher 2 had to simulate reality? Well, it's been dialed up to eleven here. Geralt takes a full second to start moving if you're still. Changing directions is just as bad. Want to turn around and walk backwards? You can't. Instead, Geralt wheels about and comes at things from an angle, only straightening out once you've gone a few yards. There's now a horse named Roach, who provides a nice boost to movement speed when crossing the game world, but it comes with its own particular problems. It handles even more ridiculously than Geralt on foot, becoming paralyzed with dark fevers and morbid introspection whenever it approaches a small tree or a fence. And when the horse stops, it takes approximately 2-3X as long as Geralt does to start moving again, presumedly so that Geralt can throw out his canned lines asking Roach to HURRY THE FUCK UP ALREADY. I know this probably sounds like useless Codexian nitpicking, but damn, it's really something when a game manages to mess up something so central to the game experience. You get used to it after a bit, but it's still something that has no reason to be so shoddy.
Beware! Those may look like simple trees, but they are actually noonwraiths that can send a horse into paralytic shock by their very presence.
Combat? Mostly a shit. It's hard to say if it's actually worse than 2, or if it's just the victim of the movement system + anemic character development. I'll get to the character development in a second, but for the moment let's focus on what's changed at the most basic level. The rolling dodge of 2 is still here, but it now costs a lot of stamina. You want to avoid using it if you like spamming signs. There is a pirouette/slide dodge that moves a few feet, doesn't cost stamina, and is better suiting to dodging small attacks. Dodging works well against one or two targets, but falls apart against lots of enemies. One very noticeable change from 2 is that enemies have much more significant access to dodging. They can and will dodge when you attack--monsters tend to dodge, humans to block or parry.
This depends on the enemy type, but it mostly seems to happen after they've been struck 2-3 times, preventing hit chains from permanently staggering weaker enemies. In theory this is not only okay, but sounds really cool. In practice, it feels awful. Due to the enemy's propensity to dodge and the usual bugginess of free-form fighting against multiple enemies in a game built for controllers, it's hard to tell if your attacks are bugging out and not properly targeting the enemy, or they're simply dodging. Some enemy types magnify this problem even further, with enemies like wolves and ghouls running around in circles like schizoid maniacs on crack in the middle of attacking you.
Does this make the combat more challenging than 2's rather reductive QTE rollfest? Not really. Since enemies tend to start avoiding attacks only after you've punished them a certain amount, you simply take the safest route when fighting enemies: pirouette dodge once against most enemies, attack once or twice, then wait for their next attack to pirouette dodge and repeat the cycle. Attempting "max damage" full attack chains is something you can do if you want a fight to end quicker at the expense of health, but it is much more likely to cause you to get boned, especially against groups of enemies.
Difficulty? Easy. REALLY easy. Like, what in the actual fuck? I'm playing on Death March! (yeah, they really put that exclamation mark in the difficulty name), the hardest difficulty before post-game permadeath options, which might explain some of the clunky combat mechanics, since supposedly the AI is unchained and blocks/dodges/whatevers more often on higher difficulties, but the game is not hard. Ever. I shudder to think what it is like on Blood and Bones (the new "Hard" difficulty) or godforbid Normal.
World design? Solid. I give them an A- here. There's really minor room for improvement, but in the open world genre these guys have actually set a new standard. They've got a massive world, a Skyrim beater, but it doesn't feel like Skyrim. It is most comparable to Gothic's dense detail, though by design sparser since it has a much bigger world. Most quests feel handmade. Even the incidental details are interesting: notice boards that are not just filled with actual quests, but also little notes that illustrate the petty lives of villagers and vagrants. Letters and books that aren't the objectives of quests are everywhere, and it's one of the few examples of well-used text in an AAA game I can think of. Witcher 3's world is filled with things to do, stuff to kill, and carcasses to loot. And it all feels rather rewarding, in stark contrast to its competitors.
M'lady...
Character development? Utterly and entirely A MAGNIFICENT SHIT. This is my biggest complaint with the game as it stands. Witcher 2 had a lot of problems, but it was ameliorated by a standard talent tree that offered some decent chocies in how you build your character, with each point tending to offer sizable increases in power. Witcher 3 goes "another direction", if you can call swaggering in a bog of feces with a huge grin on its face "another direction". Character points are... pointless. +2% to touching bum, +4% to gentle frollicking through meadows. It's the most frustrating brand of MMO-style non-power-creep, mired weirdly in a singleplayer game where character development shouldn't feel so shackled. Why? For the love of god, CDProjekt, why? Maybe they heard some nerds complaining about the alchemy tree in Witcher 2 being grossly overpowered (which it was), but compensating by making every tree completely neutered wasn't the solution I had in mind. What can I say to sum this all up? "+5% to fast attack damage" is, in the strange land of Witcher 3, one of the best bonuses in the entire game. Even on Death March! difficulty, you could easily beat the game without ever spending a single character point. Bravissimo! In the glorious tradition of such RPG stalwarts as Diablo 3, the majority of all character power stems from your gear, rather than the choices you made in character development.
This is made all the more tragic by the little details that are done right. The open world exploration is tied into the character development system by Places of Power, out-of-the-way shrines that you can activate to receive a single character point. Compared to the reward-less busywork of titles like DA:I and the always enticing Ubisoft Open World Game #59, this is a good thing. We need our busywork to more often have mechanical advantages and rewards to justify their existence. It's just a pity that it doesn't tie back into a character development system that is actually worth spending points on.
Oh boy, +1% to WHO GIVES A FLYING WILD CUNT.
I'm tired of typing. More later. Maybe.
Coming in to Witcher 3 from having just played through Witcher 2 on Dark, the first hour or so of 3 was a brutal awakening to what I had in store for me. You wouldn't think they could make a game that is initially less pleasant than 2, but they somehow managed to.
Movement? A shit. Remember that slight inertia movement in Witcher 2 had to simulate reality? Well, it's been dialed up to eleven here. Geralt takes a full second to start moving if you're still. Changing directions is just as bad. Want to turn around and walk backwards? You can't. Instead, Geralt wheels about and comes at things from an angle, only straightening out once you've gone a few yards. There's now a horse named Roach, who provides a nice boost to movement speed when crossing the game world, but it comes with its own particular problems. It handles even more ridiculously than Geralt on foot, becoming paralyzed with dark fevers and morbid introspection whenever it approaches a small tree or a fence. And when the horse stops, it takes approximately 2-3X as long as Geralt does to start moving again, presumedly so that Geralt can throw out his canned lines asking Roach to HURRY THE FUCK UP ALREADY. I know this probably sounds like useless Codexian nitpicking, but damn, it's really something when a game manages to mess up something so central to the game experience. You get used to it after a bit, but it's still something that has no reason to be so shoddy.
Beware! Those may look like simple trees, but they are actually noonwraiths that can send a horse into paralytic shock by their very presence.
Combat? Mostly a shit. It's hard to say if it's actually worse than 2, or if it's just the victim of the movement system + anemic character development. I'll get to the character development in a second, but for the moment let's focus on what's changed at the most basic level. The rolling dodge of 2 is still here, but it now costs a lot of stamina. You want to avoid using it if you like spamming signs. There is a pirouette/slide dodge that moves a few feet, doesn't cost stamina, and is better suiting to dodging small attacks. Dodging works well against one or two targets, but falls apart against lots of enemies. One very noticeable change from 2 is that enemies have much more significant access to dodging. They can and will dodge when you attack--monsters tend to dodge, humans to block or parry.
This depends on the enemy type, but it mostly seems to happen after they've been struck 2-3 times, preventing hit chains from permanently staggering weaker enemies. In theory this is not only okay, but sounds really cool. In practice, it feels awful. Due to the enemy's propensity to dodge and the usual bugginess of free-form fighting against multiple enemies in a game built for controllers, it's hard to tell if your attacks are bugging out and not properly targeting the enemy, or they're simply dodging. Some enemy types magnify this problem even further, with enemies like wolves and ghouls running around in circles like schizoid maniacs on crack in the middle of attacking you.
Does this make the combat more challenging than 2's rather reductive QTE rollfest? Not really. Since enemies tend to start avoiding attacks only after you've punished them a certain amount, you simply take the safest route when fighting enemies: pirouette dodge once against most enemies, attack once or twice, then wait for their next attack to pirouette dodge and repeat the cycle. Attempting "max damage" full attack chains is something you can do if you want a fight to end quicker at the expense of health, but it is much more likely to cause you to get boned, especially against groups of enemies.
Difficulty? Easy. REALLY easy. Like, what in the actual fuck? I'm playing on Death March! (yeah, they really put that exclamation mark in the difficulty name), the hardest difficulty before post-game permadeath options, which might explain some of the clunky combat mechanics, since supposedly the AI is unchained and blocks/dodges/whatevers more often on higher difficulties, but the game is not hard. Ever. I shudder to think what it is like on Blood and Bones (the new "Hard" difficulty) or godforbid Normal.
World design? Solid. I give them an A- here. There's really minor room for improvement, but in the open world genre these guys have actually set a new standard. They've got a massive world, a Skyrim beater, but it doesn't feel like Skyrim. It is most comparable to Gothic's dense detail, though by design sparser since it has a much bigger world. Most quests feel handmade. Even the incidental details are interesting: notice boards that are not just filled with actual quests, but also little notes that illustrate the petty lives of villagers and vagrants. Letters and books that aren't the objectives of quests are everywhere, and it's one of the few examples of well-used text in an AAA game I can think of. Witcher 3's world is filled with things to do, stuff to kill, and carcasses to loot. And it all feels rather rewarding, in stark contrast to its competitors.
M'lady...
Character development? Utterly and entirely A MAGNIFICENT SHIT. This is my biggest complaint with the game as it stands. Witcher 2 had a lot of problems, but it was ameliorated by a standard talent tree that offered some decent chocies in how you build your character, with each point tending to offer sizable increases in power. Witcher 3 goes "another direction", if you can call swaggering in a bog of feces with a huge grin on its face "another direction". Character points are... pointless. +2% to touching bum, +4% to gentle frollicking through meadows. It's the most frustrating brand of MMO-style non-power-creep, mired weirdly in a singleplayer game where character development shouldn't feel so shackled. Why? For the love of god, CDProjekt, why? Maybe they heard some nerds complaining about the alchemy tree in Witcher 2 being grossly overpowered (which it was), but compensating by making every tree completely neutered wasn't the solution I had in mind. What can I say to sum this all up? "+5% to fast attack damage" is, in the strange land of Witcher 3, one of the best bonuses in the entire game. Even on Death March! difficulty, you could easily beat the game without ever spending a single character point. Bravissimo! In the glorious tradition of such RPG stalwarts as Diablo 3, the majority of all character power stems from your gear, rather than the choices you made in character development.
This is made all the more tragic by the little details that are done right. The open world exploration is tied into the character development system by Places of Power, out-of-the-way shrines that you can activate to receive a single character point. Compared to the reward-less busywork of titles like DA:I and the always enticing Ubisoft Open World Game #59, this is a good thing. We need our busywork to more often have mechanical advantages and rewards to justify their existence. It's just a pity that it doesn't tie back into a character development system that is actually worth spending points on.
Oh boy, +1% to WHO GIVES A FLYING WILD CUNT.
I'm tired of typing. More later. Maybe.
TL DR:
Better than pretty much all games in this sub-genre (actioneers with "open world") except the Gothic series, which isn't saying much, since non-Gothic open worlders are all basically mediocre wastes of time. Still, definitely worth playing if you prize storyfaggotry or world design over gameplay.
Easy, bad combat, bad movement. But still decent if you can get past that. 10/10 IGN etc :')
Finished the WO map. Exploration so far is pretty damn good. It goes without saying that you disable popamole map markers and quest compass. NPCs actually give directions to objectives so you can find them on your own.
World design makes a lot of sense and POIs have been spread around intelligently so it never feels like you're stumbling from one attraction into another: the village layout is believable and natural, ghuls dig their lairs close to the battlefield where there's an abundance of corpses, drowners are usually found where bodies were washed ashore along with some cargo to dig through. The exception being the many places of power; there's like 5 or 6 scattered around the map seemingly at random. Those were pretty damn rare in TW1 IIRC.
There's a good balance between quantity and quality of treasure - you find tons of common loot that's basically vendor fodder or useful in crafting, and you discover the occasional rare treasure like a set of witcher sword schematics with associated backstory that explains why they are where they are. Was only able to craft one of those so far due to lack of materials and being strapped for cash.
Missing so far are Gothic-style OP enemies guarding something peculiar that you would run away from and return to later; I haven't come across anything that I couldn't dispatch then and there (a few reloads notwithstanding). Given that this was only the tutorial map that takes you fro lvl 1-4, I'm optimistic this will improve in the larger areas.
World design makes a lot of sense and POIs have been spread around intelligently so it never feels like you're stumbling from one attraction into another: the village layout is believable and natural, ghuls dig their lairs close to the battlefield where there's an abundance of corpses, drowners are usually found where bodies were washed ashore along with some cargo to dig through. The exception being the many places of power; there's like 5 or 6 scattered around the map seemingly at random. Those were pretty damn rare in TW1 IIRC.
There's a good balance between quantity and quality of treasure - you find tons of common loot that's basically vendor fodder or useful in crafting, and you discover the occasional rare treasure like a set of witcher sword schematics with associated backstory that explains why they are where they are. Was only able to craft one of those so far due to lack of materials and being strapped for cash.
Missing so far are Gothic-style OP enemies guarding something peculiar that you would run away from and return to later; I haven't come across anything that I couldn't dispatch then and there (a few reloads notwithstanding). Given that this was only the tutorial map that takes you fro lvl 1-4, I'm optimistic this will improve in the larger areas.
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,508
There's a few things like that in the big map. However even on the hardest difficulty, there's no enemy I can't kill if patient enough. I guess you could say the same of Gothic, too...
That being said, if you know a crazy monster is guarding something good, it's way easier to just run up to the chest, loot it, and then run away. This is one of the reasons I think handplaced monster loot and big kill XP chunks are a design RPGs should not be moving away from. Witcher 3 has this modern problem of tough monsters not dropping much loot/little XP, and instead guarding treasure, and it means you have little incentive to fight the monster.
i don't think so. there were plenty just as crappy and disappointing kickstarters before it
Gerrard
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2007
- Messages
- 12,134
I was going to say they fixed the crashing in 1.03, but then my game crashed.
The "You've reached end of the world" mechanic is incredibly annoying with the map popping up at the worst moments (nothing stops monsters from running around the edges of the map).
The "You've reached end of the world" mechanic is incredibly annoying with the map popping up at the worst moments (nothing stops monsters from running around the edges of the map).
Lhynn
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2013
- Messages
- 9,865
Sometimes, but never considered that the games are actually that shit? sounds to me like you havent.
Not really, it treats it as the IE successor it tried and failed to be, i think roxor judged the game by the standards obsidian themselves set.
Grow a thick skin and prove them wrong with a sound argument, plenty of people wont like the shit you like. And are you fucking insane? we have anual threads about the shit parts of every classic game praised by the codex.
Im honestly beyond caring, if Angthoron sucks geralts cock in all of its lenght on the review ill probably buy.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2007
- Messages
- 14,809
So I'm in Velen and doing Gwent. I won with the Baron and got a decent card. Played with a merchant and got a special card. So I'm thinking "So far so good". Played with a smith expecting something average and suddenly a wild hero card appears. Shit blow my mind.
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,508
Gwent's pretty easy once you get 2x decoy and some spies. It's all about card advantage... with little complexity. Badly needs some milling or something to punish this approach, but I guess its just supposed to be a minigame on par with press W A S D to win as brawling was in Witcher 2.
Rly? On the WO map, sure, but Velen? Everything north of Baron is lvl 15 and higher. Sometimes much, much higher. I came across basilisk guarding a chest and a lvl24 wyvern. I didn't even make a dent in them. Literally zero damage. I feel there some hidden mechanics to ensure you don't gnaw at those high level enemies for half an hour with a rusty toothpick, so you must be within certain level range to even hurt them. Dunno, can be talking out of my ass here.
And btw I did try to run up to the basilisk chest and loot it but the prompt didn't appear so I thought looting is disabled until you kill the guardian.
Damn I couldn't beat the Baron. He just has a shitton of those cards that double each other's value. So if you put three 4 value swordsmen with this ability next to each other it's a massacre.
And I never play the merchants. Always thought they're scrubs with shitty cards not worth master's time. Gotta check them out.
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,508
I killed a level 15 forktail at level 5. Meh, it's whatever, maybe you just are less patient than I am? Of course, after I killed that forktail I came to another guarded loot area and just grabbed the chest (with +tenbillion vitality relic) and ran away from the monster. I can see level scaling making enemies invulnerable past a certain point (like +20 levels instead of +10), but overall the bigger problem is that for spending 10 minutes killing a mega-tough enemy you get like 5 XP and sometimes no loot because the chance for enemies to drop loot is that, a chance, even if its a super tough enemy they can sometimes drop nothing.
Also keep in mind on the hardest difficulty the damage you take is high enough from normal enemies you just don't allow yourself to get hit much, and once you take that approach to its logical extreme the level of the enemy is rather unimportant. Either all its attacks are evadable, in which case you can kill it, or some are unavoidable, in which case you need to be near its level to beat it.
There badly needs to be a modern game that reintroduces tough enemies that give lots of XP + good drops, rather than the current trend of kill rewards being nothing and the monsters just being a gateway to better chests.
Cromwell
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2013
- Messages
- 5,443
You can loot it. Also if you get the basilisk to fight you at the cliff west of the chest you can theoretically kill him with level 5 but I did not have the patience to do it. You can cheese him there and get one or two attacks in until he flies a little and then you make a few steps back and he will land at the same spot again. Maybe you could kill him with igni, but its so horribly slow that I dont know if thats worth it.
So far it seems to me that if you dont follow the main quest and do the sidequests that come with it you are horribly underleveled for the rest of the content most of the time. I tried to discover a ton of sidequests there and only played main until I got the family matters quest but it seems I am to low level for that shit. I would hunt for the Cat School Stuff now but I think If I get theese diagrams they will not be for my level.
I am also thinking about setting the difficulty lower, so far blood and broken bones doesnt seem hard just tedius, I just have to hopp around more and it takes longer to kill the whole banditr camp for the fifth time. But I am unsure.
zeroprometheus
Novice
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2014
- Messages
- 31
Not much mention of horse combat. I found it servicable And at times quite fun. Roasting bandits off their saddles is for the lulz. I also like combat variation between monsters. Dodge and roll usage totally depend on the types of monsters youre up against and to a lesser extent if youre a heavy melee or magic user. For example fighting a lv13 alghoul @ lv5 was awesome especially after my 10 death i deciced to actually read the bestiary and breezed through the fight with axii. Monster specific weaknesses really immerse the sense of RPing a witcher; however, im pretty disappointed they streamlined meditation and potions. The need to spam 30 sec effects makes combat a little more hectic and twitchy. I already find it difficult even though enjoyable when trying to change signs as a heavy magic fast melee focused character. In fact if they havent fixed the input delay, then the sheer difficulty of trying to mix sign usage during a fight is my biggest letdown.
I love crafting with a plethora of exotic reagents, monster parts, and other miscellanea. It brings life and flavor to the background lore. Though the lack of a permanent storage is regrettable. And contrary to my earlier statements money is quite manageable and repair costs are reasonable. However, all of my local merchants are running out of crowns. Is there a purse refill/reset mechanism that functions periodically?
I love crafting with a plethora of exotic reagents, monster parts, and other miscellanea. It brings life and flavor to the background lore. Though the lack of a permanent storage is regrettable. And contrary to my earlier statements money is quite manageable and repair costs are reasonable. However, all of my local merchants are running out of crowns. Is there a purse refill/reset mechanism that functions periodically?
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 13,508
As far as I saw, it functions the same way it did in Witcher 2, their inventory resets after a full day. There's so many merchants in Velen, though, that I find it hard to imagine you ever run out of people to go to within a single day.
Character development aside, my other biggest niggle is the new potion system. FUCK the short-ass potion durations and most of the decoctions being useless or far too niche/restrictive, I miss Witcher 2's grand old times of stacking 4 potions at all times that last for 10m each. Now all the useful buff potions last a few seconds, and you can't brew up 20 at a time. It's all tedious decline of a scale I don't have the energy to consider at the moment.
jagged-jimmy
Prophet
How the hell? Isn't the map supposed to be huge open world? How long is the main story?Ok, finished. I can safely state that this is one of the best games of the past ten years.
Azarkon
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2005
- Messages
- 2,989
Since we were on the topic of moral ambiguity & choices and consequences a bit earlier, here are a couple that I have actually tested:
Thinking about the two scenarios above, I think the first one exhibits a great deal of moral ambiguity and was a tough choice. With the information you had available to you, there was no way to know for sure what was the correct way to go. You had to think hard about the clues you were given, the people the choice was going affect, and pick the lesser of two evils. It was also a test of optimism and gullibility, which we've come to accept as being the standard 'moral' route in mainstream RPGs with C&C. You were ultimately punished for being a trusting pleb.
In fact, that's also the case for the second scenario, except there we have no moral ambiguity. It's obvious what the correct solution is in retrospect - the problem was reaching that conclusion without spoilers and not being 'tricked,' which is the case for a lot of Witcher 3 quests, and is one of its greatest achievements in quest design: forcing players to second guess themselves on their decisions for fear that it's the wrong one, while at the same time, being fair about it and giving them the tools to figure out which decisions are the wrong ones.
Main Quest: Whispering Hillock
At one stage in the Crones storyline, you meet a spirit trapped in a tree. The Crones tell you to destroy the spirit in order to stop it from killing their villager worshipers. You go to the spirit and it tells you that it was a druidess trapped there by the Crones and that it'd be willing to save the village children from being eaten by the Crones, were you to free it. Sounds awesome, right? In other RPGs this'd be your standard 'moral' choice given that the Crones have already proven themselves to be child-eating douches.
So the spirit has you dig up its bones as one of the conditions, at which time Geralt remarks, "ohwaitaminute, these aren't human bones." You get the option then to betray the spirit and kill it instead of going through with the freedom ritual.
Outcomes:
1. Free the spirit -- the children are freed by the spirit, but the other villagers are slaughtered by it, because it turns out the spirit is no druidess but an ancient being as malicious as the Crones themselves. The Crones punish Anna - that's the Barons' wife - for losing the children and she dies. The Baron then hangs himself.
2. Kill the spirit -- the children are eaten by the Crones. The villagers however are fine. The Crones don't punish Anna, who survives the ordeal and is later rescued by the Baron & his daughter in a side quest. The Baron takes his wife to be healed by a healer and says he's going to 'be a new man from now on.'
At one stage in the Crones storyline, you meet a spirit trapped in a tree. The Crones tell you to destroy the spirit in order to stop it from killing their villager worshipers. You go to the spirit and it tells you that it was a druidess trapped there by the Crones and that it'd be willing to save the village children from being eaten by the Crones, were you to free it. Sounds awesome, right? In other RPGs this'd be your standard 'moral' choice given that the Crones have already proven themselves to be child-eating douches.
So the spirit has you dig up its bones as one of the conditions, at which time Geralt remarks, "ohwaitaminute, these aren't human bones." You get the option then to betray the spirit and kill it instead of going through with the freedom ritual.
Outcomes:
1. Free the spirit -- the children are freed by the spirit, but the other villagers are slaughtered by it, because it turns out the spirit is no druidess but an ancient being as malicious as the Crones themselves. The Crones punish Anna - that's the Barons' wife - for losing the children and she dies. The Baron then hangs himself.
2. Kill the spirit -- the children are eaten by the Crones. The villagers however are fine. The Crones don't punish Anna, who survives the ordeal and is later rescued by the Baron & his daughter in a side quest. The Baron takes his wife to be healed by a healer and says he's going to 'be a new man from now on.'
Side Quest: Towerful of Mice
To complete this quest, you have one of two options:
1. Be a trusting pleb and take the bones of the ghost girl to her lover. In that case, he dies after she reveals herself to be a Pesta - a pestilence wraith - and then laughs at you and flees. The curse of the tower is lifted but is set to appear elsewhere.
2. Take the lover to the ghost girl. In that case, he also dies, but they make up before he dies and both 'pass on.' The curse of the tower is lifted.
To complete this quest, you have one of two options:
1. Be a trusting pleb and take the bones of the ghost girl to her lover. In that case, he dies after she reveals herself to be a Pesta - a pestilence wraith - and then laughs at you and flees. The curse of the tower is lifted but is set to appear elsewhere.
2. Take the lover to the ghost girl. In that case, he also dies, but they make up before he dies and both 'pass on.' The curse of the tower is lifted.
Thinking about the two scenarios above, I think the first one exhibits a great deal of moral ambiguity and was a tough choice. With the information you had available to you, there was no way to know for sure what was the correct way to go. You had to think hard about the clues you were given, the people the choice was going affect, and pick the lesser of two evils. It was also a test of optimism and gullibility, which we've come to accept as being the standard 'moral' route in mainstream RPGs with C&C. You were ultimately punished for being a trusting pleb.
In fact, that's also the case for the second scenario, except there we have no moral ambiguity. It's obvious what the correct solution is in retrospect - the problem was reaching that conclusion without spoilers and not being 'tricked,' which is the case for a lot of Witcher 3 quests, and is one of its greatest achievements in quest design: forcing players to second guess themselves on their decisions for fear that it's the wrong one, while at the same time, being fair about it and giving them the tools to figure out which decisions are the wrong ones.
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