Plot hole in The Witcher 2 (Act 2)?

The Game Room
1

Spoiler alert from 2011, I guess, but if you haven’t played it, I have no idea why you’d open or even mouse over this thread. I’ll provide a wordy preamble as spoiler space. If you want to skip straight to the question, it’s at the end.

I’ve gotten around to playing The Witcher 2. It’s quite a nice action RPG, although not without some drawbacks. It’s not hard, for examples, to find complaints about combat lag, the lack of fast travel, or the unhelpful minimap. One thing that appears to be universally praised, however, is the story. Even Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw gives the writing praise, which with Yahtzee is “it’s passable”.

Yeah, well, I guess it’s good for an RPG, which means it’s about as “good” as your average TV drama. I appreciate that it must be difficult to write a choose-your-own-adventure in 3 acts (plus prologue, tutorial, and epilogue), has 16 different endings, and requires maybe 30 hours for a player to get through, provided he or she isn’t fussy about exploring every cave and meadow. I’m willing to forgive “bugs” in the writing where dialogue must be stilted or repetitive in order to cover the bases. I’m also happy to forgive lengthy cutscenes and paragraphs of exposition, so long as I can skip them. And I appreciated the humor, too.

The wallbanger for me, though, was in my second playthrough, when I took the Iorveth fork in the plot for Act II. On the other path, the whole thing was about lifting the blood curse of doom that separated the armies, so that Henselt could smash the plucky champions of diversity. Makes sense. The curse prevented Henselt from meeting his military objective, and apparently threatened his life.

So on the other side, what does Geralt have to do? Lift the curse. Why the rebel side would want the curse lifted either wasn’t explained or I missed it clicking through dialogue too fast. Seems like they’d need a damn good reason to want it lifted, though. I suspect that such a reason was given, as searches for criticism of this apparent plot hole came up empty.

TLDR - Why would Henselt’s enemies want to lift the curse that was upon him and kept his (much larger) force from attacking?

2

…A witcher did it?

3

They want the curse lifted the same reason Henselt does : to fuck up the other side’s army for good and get to their political endgame. They have a plowing dragon on their side and a mess of assassin ex-witchers to take out the key players (as far as they know), it’s not like they don’t have a shot.

Plus the cursed lands happen to be their turf, the place they want to turn into an independent nonhuman kingdom. Kind of sucks to have a bunch of immortal undead all over the place, driving property values down.

4

Is that in the script?

5

It’s been a while, so I cannot guarantee that. Well, the former at least. The fact that the rebels hope the Pontar Valley to become its own separate nation I’m pretty sure is.

6

I found a save game that starts near the War Council segment. Phillipa says that the haunted area may grow and that the land covered is Vergen’s territory. As far as I could tell, that was it for justification, although I couldn’t help myself but skip dialogue.

Yeah, that’s all well and good, but right after that the faction’s leader gets poisoned and the commanders are split. No mention of a dragon under control. Apparently, Phillipa just says “we gotta lift this curse” and nobody thinks to ask “gee, why don’t we wait and see if it kills off Henselt for us?”

I guess it’s one of those Hamlet things, where if the characters had good sense the story wouldn’t work. Not that this is Shakespeare, just that writers have to bow to constraints. I’m thinking that the way they bowed wasn’t so good, though.

7

A third, more implicit reason for Geralt to do what he does is simply that the Pontar Valley is the most fertile land around (which is why all four of the surrounding kingdoms want it), and necessarily feeds quite a few people. It being apocalypsed would presumably lead to mass starvation. Witchers end supernatural threats that threaten people - it’s what they’re here for.