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?