It’s Cyberpunk 2077 but yeah. Definitely looking forward to that one.
It’ll be cute if Ciri gets her implied cameo in their Cyberpunk game.
How big is Skellige vs Velen/Novigrad?
probably bigger, overall, but quite a lot of it is water.
And another lot of it is making detours around impassable terrain and fjords… Skellige looks fantastic and I really wanted to love it as much as it deserves, but the first few hours there made me thank Melitele for the existence of fast travel ; which I’d never used in Velen.
The devs must have realized it too, since the merchants there sell maps of the islands to unlock fast travel points all over the place. Do yourself a solid and buy those ASAP.
I’d never played any of the previous games in this series but picked this first one up on the promise of it being a deeper Skyrim and have thus far not been disappointed - though I’m only just through the point where Triss kills Menge. The main thing it has going for it though, imo, is the humour - I’ve spent a lot of time laughing at the absurdity and sarcasm of some of the missions and dialogue. The silly references that have been going on throughout are also a huge plus point (standing in one of taverns and a courtesan quoting Madonna’s Material Girl, walking past a beggar in Novigrad and hearing him paraphrase Eric Idle’s leper sketch from Life of Brian and the fact that Inn at the Crossroads is a Game of Thrones food blog, all being particularly amusing).
It’s going to get a bit wearing if it’s always the case that whatever you do, the worst happens for people all the time though. GoT does that and the “however bad it is, things can always get worse” trope definitely becomes wearing when it’s your go to move. As a result of this, I get most enjoyment out of winning games of Gwent and building my deck up. At the moment, I don’t seem to be driving anyone into penury by doing so. On the whole though, this has been more than solid - and will probably really push back when I might buy and get into Arkham Knight.
It’s not always the case. But both the books’ author and the game’s dev are Polish so bleak fatalism must come naturally to them :). In many cases, Geralt doesn’t so much choose between “good” and “bad” but between “bad” and “less bad”.
But both this game and Witcher 2 also had their share of heartwarming moments.
I find it’s easiest to just do my job and take my pay, no matter the side story. Look, I wouldn’t call someone to get an opossum out of my attic and then work in a tale about my sick child to dodge the bill, so stop trying to get out of paying me for my drowner removal services. 
This stuff, I don’t mind so much. It’s more the stuff like: realise these orphans are being fattened up for witches to eat, think “Hmm. Seems like bad business to me - plus a fight with some witches might be a blast, let’s take that option” and then get to the end and the kids all get killed anyway. On reading about what the other option was, I think it boils down to “keep the kids alive, so they can be eaten or have them all be killed right here and now” - although I could well be wrong about that, not having taken the other path.
I’m all for grey areas but you can’t go to this well too many times or my thought process at the point of decision is going to be “fuck it, I don’t care” - maybe that’s the aim but the strength of the game thus far for me, is that I actually *do *care about what’s happening (I could feel myself gritting my teeth along with Geralt whilst Triss gets tortured immediately prior to offing Menge in fact). I hope they can walk that tightrope all the way throughout the game, as up to know, as noted in my original post, I’m really enjoying this and can see myself burying several hundred hours into this game.
Huh ? I’m pretty sure that if you pick the “fuck witches” option, the kids actually do get out of it safe Anna and the Baron, not so much. They vanish from the game world either way, but IIRC dialogue informs you that they got out and you can also find mention of a bunch of feral orphans showing up in an orphanage in Oxenfurt.
That being said, yes, the “fuck the Furies” option involves some pretty dark stuff as well. The witches are bad, but the fucked up spirit trapped under the hill is not exactly rosy either. That’s what I meant by “bad” and “less bad” - the Witches are quite evidently fucked up, but they also represent a functioning, if abhorrent, status quo. Upsetting that status quo leads into uncertain territory, which could be better but could be even worse. And the whole moral question, the one which is at the heart of most of the Witcher stories, is “is it Geralt’s place to make that gamble, when he’s not the one who’s gonna have to live with the consequences ? We know he cares. Hell, we care. But does that give us the right to **act **?”
And that’s really the Polish showing IMO. “The USSR was bad and everybody knew it. Is the post-USSR better ? Hmmmmm.”
Is that right? I must have missed that dialogue, if so. To be honest, I pitched up, there’s a full fledged battle going on and I just assumed that the kids bought it as casualties of war/the fact their village is being used for a re-enactment of Culloden. Struggled to work up sympathy for the Baron to be honest (though given I might have missed a nuanced bit of dialogue as described earlier, my takeaway that he’s a total dick - due to his response to his wife falling in love with someone else is to kill the guy and beat the shit out of her - might be wrong somewhere along the line). I was disappointed that I’d managed to get the “wanders off looking for Skellige’s Betty Ford clinic or equivalent” ending once I’d found out that there was an option where the bastard hangs himself.
Your description of the tale as an allegory for life pre and post Communism is, however, striking. I didn’t think I wanted to actually read the books. Now I probably will - and will have trouble getting rid of that interpretation as I play the remainder of the game, I’d imagine.
I think the Baron is a great character, and I don’t think there’s really a “right” way to approach or understand him. On the one hand, he’s an absolute shithead who quite unapologetically did unforgivable stuff. Whether we’re talking wife-beating, or killing the guy who cuckolded him, or stringing Geralt along, he’s a huge cunt.
And yet, he’s kind of a charismatic guy. He’s funny and friendly ; self-aware enough that you want to like him ; he seems to really regret what he did ; he treated Ciri more than alright…
He’s neither a villain nor a good guy. He’s just a sumbitch whom you may or may not give an opportunity for redemption, without much indication at the time you make that choice that he’s really going to seize it.
Pretty good writing, that :).