The Witcher

The Witcher
Grade: C
Platform: Windows
Genre: Quasi-Medieval RPG
Steam: $9.99
GOG: $9.99 
Released: 2008

The Witcher is a pretty good game with some interesting flaws.  Developed by a Polish game company, based on a series of novels.

From a gameplay standpoint my main objection is that the combat is boring. This is often the case in games unfortunately.  With the Witcher combat consists of clicking on an enemy, waiting until your mouse pointer turns orange, clicking again, and repeating.  While this is going on Geralt is doing all sorts of acrobatic and well animated moves, but all you're doing is clicking every now and then.  Which isn't bad, but just kind of middle of the road boring.  Combat could have been a lot worse, I've played games where combat was a lot worse, and if middle of the road boring combat is the biggest gameplay problem then the game is doing well.

Since the Witcher is an RPG, not a brawler, combat is sort of secondary anyway.

Leaving aside the mediocre combat system, the rest of the game mechanics are solid and familiar.  They've got a nice alchemy system, which integrates with the game and it's world well, you wander around, barging into people's houses and taking their stuff and no one cares.  On a modern PC loading time is fine, it may have been a bit laggy back in 2008.  And thanks to the Enhanced Edition the graphics are updated and don't look as jaggy as you'd expect from a 2008 title.

Overall the game plays well and is a solid C.

If that was all it had to offer, the Witcher would likely have passed unnoticed despite having solid if standard mechanics.

But in an RPG the setting and character are often a lot more important than the mechanics, they can make or break a game, and in the Witcher's case they make it, and also produce some flaws worth discussing.

There are two main ways to approach an RPG, the first is what might be called the Anything You Want School of RPG's: a giant sandbox of an open world and a total blank slate of a main character.  That approach is nice in that your character can be absolutely anything you want.  That approach has problems in that designing a story around a total blank slate of a character is neigh impossible, and sometimes you get story on rails in a way that feels really awkward and forced since the story (which is always really vague and bland when they take this approach) will often wind up going in a direction contrary to your idea of your character.  Bethesda clearly loves this school of RPG games.

The other approach, which might be called the Be Our Character School of RPG's takes the opposite direction.  There is no character customization, of if there is it's extremely limited, because the game is about you playing their character, not playing any character you want.  The advantage of this approach to RPG game design is that the developers can write a much tighter story, can include complexities and details that would not really be possible with a more generic character.  The disadvantage is that the plot is on rails by design and you may not like how the story develops.  The Witcher takes this approach.

You play Geralt of Rivia, one of an elite group of professional monster hunters called Witchers, and apparently one of the very few remaining Witchers since there were pogroms that wiped out most of the others.

They go for the main character has amnesia trick to explain why you're so totally unfamiliar with everything, which is a bit cheesy but they pull it off with less awkwardness than I've seen in other media trying the same thing.

At the core of the Witcher's plot and setting are issues of social justice.  Which is a bit of irony since the Witcher is often held up by gamergate as an example of a great game that infuriates the "SJW's" they imagine want to ruin their fun.

The TL;DR is that humanity was imported to the world the Witcher is set on, and promptly began exterminating and oppressing the native population of elves, dwarves, and gnomes.  While the game is lily white (more on that in a moment), the non-humans stand in for various oppressed groups, most clearly Jews.  That conflict is central to the plot of the game, and as a technical non-human (Witchers start off human and are modified to get extra combat power in a way that also makes them sterile) your part in the conflict is muddled.

The ethnic Polish population of Poland has a long and not at all happy history with the ethnic Jewish population of Poland.  There have been Jews living in Poland since long before Poland became a unified nation, and for a long time Jews got along well in the Kingdom of Poland.  Then Poland started engaging in the unfortunately very common European practice of oppressing the Jewish population, engaging in periodic pogroms, and ultimately in Poland this turned into widespread cooperation with the Nazis (at leas when it came to killing Jews) during WWII resulting in over 90% (around 3 million) of Polish Jews being killed, and after the war an en environment so hostile that almost all surviving Jews fled rather than continue living in Poland.  In the 1930's over 3.4 million Jews lived in Poland.  Per the 2011 census there were 7,353 Jews in Poland.  It was in Poland, not Germany, where Hitler's Final Solution was most thoroughly implemented.

That's the necessary history and background to see the Witcher and it's portrayal of non-human oppression against.

And the writers did a good job here.  Some of the bigotry expressed in game against non-humans is taken almost word for word from antisemitic myth, at one point in game you find a book describing non-humans swearing a pact to eradicate all humans and sealing it by drinking the blood of human babies, the parallel to the blood libel is unmistakable.

For all that humans are undoubtedly invaders and oppressors, the game doesn't present the situation entirely black and white.  The main non-human resistance group is unmistakably terrorists and there are legitimate reasons to oppose their methods, and legitimate reasons to think that their methods may be necessary, but their motive and goal is clearly shown in game as being valid.  There's quite a bit of Israel vs. Palestine in the game.

There are very few black and white moral choices in game, and most of the choices you make do have at least some impact later in the game.  I'm overall quite happy with that part.

That said, the Witcher does have problems.  As an American the ethnic homogeneity is striking and weird, especially given the centrality of ethnic and religious strife to the game itself. Everyone is white, even the non-humans are all white.  Given how very white Poland is it isn't entirely as odd as it might seem, but as an American it stands out in a bad way.  Especially since in theory there are non-white humans in game, just down in an empire to the south that had a recent war with the northern kingdoms.  You'd think there might at least be some traders, prisoners of war, and so on.

Some defenders of the game claim it's all a matter of historic accuracy, that since the game is based on historic Poland of course there wouldn't be anyone but white people.  This doesn't really hold up as a justification for several reasons.  To begin with, there were non-white people in medieval Europe.  They weren't common, but they did exist.  The idea that Europe existed as a perfectly white place until the modern era is simply false.  There's a blog devoted to examples of people of color in early European art.

There's also the fact that the game doesn't actually care about historic accuracy (and talking about hisoric accuracy in a game featuring elves and magic is more than a bit pointless anyway).  The game has a private investigator, a profession that didn't exist until very recently, a medic using modern crime scene autopsy jargon, people casually talking about mutations and genes, and flat-Earth atheist scientists sneering at the mere superstition of magic when people are literally teleporting across continents and throwing fire from their fingertips.

Given all that the idea that "historic accuracy" would have prevented the inclusion of people of color is clearly preposterous.

More important is the treatment of women, and how that mixes with some of the odd anachronisms in the game.

The Witcher is one of the few AAA titles to really include nudity, and it handles the sex and nudity with all the maturity of the average 12 year old kid snickering over some porn they found on their phone.  This, unfortunately, is about par for the course when it comes to sex in gaming.  Geralt can have sex with various women through the game, generally by giving them a particular gift though some women have various quests.  After having sex with a woman, the game presents you with a card showing what is claimed to be the woman in question partially nude.

I say "what is claimed to be the woman", because there was obviously no communication between the 3D modeling team and the artists who drew the sex cards.  For the most part the in game characters don't even slightly resemble the characters on their matching sex card.

Oddly, despite the models in game featuring full female nudity, the sex cards are more restrained and have bare nipples at the most.  There is no male nudity in game, because of course there isn't.

A least one of the sexual encounters is clearly exploitative, though you can choose not to have sex there I found it distasteful to include at all, especially since making the situation non-exploitative would have been simple.

There's also several costume choices that go against the established setting simply for a bit of titillation.  The Witcher is set in a quasi-medieval universe, typical human women wear floor length dresses, long sleeves, and sometimes headscarves, though several women (mostly lower class) also have a lot of cleavage.  

Yet, the two most significant named female characters wear miniskirts for their normal costumes, and Triss' party dress is even skimpier.  Which just jumps out and screams "hi male audience, get a load of these gams!" In a society where women are beaten, oppressed, and wear long dresses the sudden appearance of very short skirts on two women who are portrayed as being respected (or at least feared) by society is jarring and doesn't fit the universe as it is presented.  It comes across as pandering to the presumed heterosexual male audience in a way that breaks suspension of disbelief.

The Dyrad simply doesn't wear clothes at all, and that's fine.  But she's also described as being from a group of warrior archer types who are fighting a desperate last stand to defend their forest from human incursion.  So naturally she walks with super exaggerated hip sway and jello boob physics, which is also just pandering to the presumed straight male audience.

I've got no objection at all to sex in games, but the way sex was included in the Witcher is, at best, trying too hard to be cool and adult in a way that comes across as very juvenile.

The bigger problem, for me, is that the developers decided to include frequent references to domestic violence, presumably as a way of showing how gritty and realistic their game was.  Yes, there was a lot more domestic violence in the past, but in the Witcher it's hard to find a woman who isn't beaten by the men in her life.

None of that makes the Witcher a bad game from my privileged point of view, but it does make it a game with significant problematic elements.  Some people will doubtless chose not to play it based on the existence of those elements, others may find it enjoyable despite them.

Overall it's an interesting game set in an interesting universe. Despite the problems, I enjoyed playing it and will probably play the sequels.

A more in depth look at where Dishonored failed, and speculation on why

First off:

SPOILERS AHEAD

Dishonored is over four years old at this point, but there are many patient gamer types out there who may not have played it yet.  For those who haven't played it but plan to, there are spoilers ahead.  Read on at your own risk.

I'll be looking at the ways in which Dishonored did good things from a gender and storytelling standpoint in a later blog post.  This one is about the ways in which a lazy acceptance of patriarchal tropes weakened the story and characters.  A flawed ideology can lead directly to bad writing, anything written by Ayn Rand is a good example of this.  While Rand may have also simply been a bad writer, I think it is undeniable that her deeply flawed ideology contributed directly to just how bad her writing was.  Since real people don't act like Rand's ideology demands, her writing depicts people acting not like people, and situations that simply would never, could never, arise in the real world.

Much the same, I think, applies to some of the deeper failures of plot and characterization in Dishonored.

The truly interesting thing, to me, is that Dishonored was written by three people, two of whom were women, and one of those women has written about feminism in general and specifically feminism in gaming.  So how did a group of people with a not insignificant feminist influence wind up producing a game that relied on worn out, boring, and above all deeply patriarchal tropes?

I suspect it began with the decision to make Corvo a silent protagonist.  A number of people in the gaming industry have bought into the idea that the silent protagonist, originally a creation of desperation due to limited hardware resources and the necessarily very simplistic plots of early gaming, is a positive thing in a game.  The argument goes that by making the protagonist silent the player can project themselves into the protagonist, thus making the silent protagonist a fully realized character without any work on the part of the writing team at all and even better drawing the player more deeply into the game than they would with any other sort of character because the silent protagonist is the gamer themselves.

The only thing wrong with this argument is that it's total bullshit in the context of modern, story driven, gaming.

If you have a character willing to go out on a killing spree, you need to have a motive for that character.  Games without much story don't bother with much motive.  Doom, for example, gave your character the simple motive of survival against literal demons seeking to kill him.  The plot was essentially nonexistent (something something demons something something Mars), so it didn't much matter that the character was also essentially nonexistent.  Doom was, at heart, not all that different from Space Invaders or Galaga, in that the mechanics of the game were really all there was to the game.

In that sort of game, perhaps the argument for a silent protagonist make sense.  But once you move beyond "something something demons something something Mars", and into actual plots and stories, the silent protagonist fails, and fails badly. Games with a deeper plot and story require characters who are more than a void labeled Player 1.

Which is why the silent protagonist fails in its ostensible goal of presenting a void into which the player can project themselves.  Even if, as with Link in the Legend of Zelda, the protagonist has no actual dialog or conversation options, by their actions in the game, by the actions the plot forces on them, they develop character.  But, since they are hampered by being silent, and further hampered by a belief that avoiding developing their character is both necessary and good, they develop only the most flat and boring types of character.

And that, I'd argue, is where a wrongful devotion to the myth of the silent protagonist merges and amplifies the inevitable tendency in our culture to go along with patriarchal tropes.  Having eliminated the possibility of making Corvo a real character, who would require real motives and a richer story, the writers fell back onto the easy emotional hooks provided by a patriarchal society.  Not out of any deep rooted commitment to patriarchy, not out of any anti-feminist ideology, but simply because those tropes are easiest to implement with a character who is forbidden from being a character. The failing, at worst, was laziness.

Corvo is not a completely empty shell, much as the developers might have wanted him to be, he's a person.  He's just also a kind of boring and very predictable, and to be brutally honest not all that bright, person.  And he is all of those things because in trying to make him the empty shell into which the player can project themselves, the writers of Dishonored fell into lazy, or easy,  thinking that went directly for bog standard patriarchal tropes.   Its possible that "lazy" is entirely the wrong word here, given the limits imposed by the silent protagonist I'm not sure what other tropes would be available.

As mentioned earlier, a person on a killing spree needs a motive.  Since Corvo hadn't been developed as a character, since he has no background, no history, no beliefs or convictions, not the slightest shred of personality, the only motive they could think to give him was one of the most boring and overused: a dead and/or kidnapped lover.  The dead and/or kidnapped love interest has been the go to motive for male game protagonists since the earliest games because its cheap and easy.  You can introduce the motive in a few lines of text (Kung-Fu Master, in 1984, managed it in 30 words), and then get right into the game.

Worse, since the central character was banned from being a character, the plot and story of the game weren't allowed to go much of anywhere or have much depth.  Even the best writer can't tell a very good story if they aren't allowed to make their central character more than a hollow shell of a person.

The typical game with a kidnapped and/or dead love interest has a plot that can usually be summed up in a few short sentences.  Again, in the early days of gaming this was also enforced by hardware limits, there's just not much room in the 63kb that the Legend of Zelda had to work with to store both all the game resources, logic, and a plot deeper than "the princess is kidnapped by an evil wizard, you must save her and the kingdom".

Modern games, now free from the minuscule storage sizes of the old days, tell bigger, deeper, stories because people like stories.  Or at least they try to tell stories.  Often they fail.

Unfortunately, having settled on the most boring and predictable of character motives, driven by the twin engines of the limits of the silent protagonist and casual acceptance of patriarchal tropes, the writers then had little choice but to settle on a rather boring and predictable plot.

The characters, the story, and possibly even the setting, would have improved drastically simply by refusing to buy into the easy availability of the dead/kidnapped loved one trope.

Imagine a different Dishonored.  A Dishonored where the writing team chose not to fall back on hacknied, patriarchal, plot and character development, and as a consistence were forced to abandon the silent protagonist shtick.  Here's one possible way it could have gone, and how the decision to abandon the easy way out, the sexist way out, might produce a better and deeper story.

In this Dishonored they would need to make Corvo a person, not a shell, in order to provide a motive.  It would have required a bit more storytelling, and a change in pacing, and put the story more at the forefront.  Rather than beginning with Corvo being told that he's returned from a failed trip to gather support (bad and lazy anyway, why would the guards tell him what he just did?) begin with Corvo at his last destination, delivering Jessamine's plea for help to an unsympathetic ruler of one of the allied powers in the Isles.

And suddenly we have an explosion of questions that demand better storytelling to answer. Why Corvo?  Why would the Protector of all people be playing diplomat? Surely Jessamine has a professional diplomatic corps, why send her Protector instead of one of them?  It was never addressed in Dishonored.  But once the writers are allowed, or forced, to look more at the story they want to tell it forces them to improve it, to fill in plot holes.  Clearly Corvo was sent on a diplomat's errand because Jessamine doesn't trust her diplomats.  This Jessamine knows that her government is filled with people seeking to bring it down and she doesn't know who she can trust.  She suspects the plague is deliberate, because in this Dishonored both Jessamine and Corvo are a bit smarter.  But why would Jessamine trust Corvo?

This Corvo, a Corvo developed without reliance on the easy sexist tropes, would need a background; not one told up front but one that comes out in bits and pieces in overheard snippets of conversion and discovered in books and letters.  Perhaps he's a commoner, not from a poor family but his father was merely a successful merchant and therefore no matter how good a soldier he was Corvo could never rise far in the military.  His rise to what little power and position he attained is due entirely to his martial prowess being so amazing that even the class ridden military of Gristol had to let him advance, though not too far of course.  Still, far enough that years ago Jessamine, realizing that she was being undermined by her own advisers and privy council saw him in action and realized that because he was an outsider, a commoner, that made him one of the few people she could count on as being not part of the conspiracy.  So she broke convention and elevated him above his station to make him the Royal Protector.

This Corvo has a reason to favor Jessamine beyond the simple and easy explanation that he loves her. This Jessamine has politics that give the conspiracy a real reason to hate her, make her elevation of Corvo part of a pattern of loosening the grip of the aristocracy and a direct threat to the conspirators, a threat that must be eliminated, ideally eliminated in a way that casts doubt on Jessamine's acceptance of loosening of the class structure.  Now, rather than merely being personally ambitious,  Hiram Burrows and the other conspirators have a deeper motive for their betrayal of Jessamine, they see their entire social order being threatened, and they have a better reason to oppose Corvo personally because he embodies the very thing they fear the most and their desire to frame him for her murder seems to make more sense.  This Corvo, a more politically motivated man, both needs more complicated motives and produces them, needs more complicated enemies and produces them. And by his demand for a better supporting cast forces the other characters and the story to become deeper and more fully realized as well.

Heck, this Corvo doesn't need to be Jessamine's lover at all, and I argue that he'd be lessened as a character if he was. Add an Imperial Consort, a man Corvo gets along with and respects, as Jessamine's lover and Emily's father, he'd be murdered by the conspirators towards the beginning of course.  The false rumor that Corvo was Jessamine's lover might have become part of the smear campaign Hiram and the others waged against him, and against her own support of weakening the class barriers.

From the simple, if difficult, changes of making Corvo a real character and choosing to abandon the easy road of sexist tropes, the whole game would have improved significantly.   Better characters, a better plot, and a better story all become not merely possible but necessary.

All of which is why I'm hoping that Dishonored 2 sets aside the vengeance for a loved one trope.  It isn't bad per se, but it's far too over used and encourages lazy thinking and shallow characters. So far the rumor is that you can play either Emily or Corvo, not both nor switch between the two.  If that means that they're planning to motivate the player by having Emily/Corvo kidnapped or killed so that the one you chose to play is motivated by basically a repeat of Dishonored I'll be greatly disappointed.  Reversing the gender on the kidnapped or killed loved one isn't an improvement.