I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to properly scope a project. Take The Witcher franchise. The Witcher today is famous as a video game series (The Witcher 3 was widely acclaimed as Game of the Year 2015, and I’m on my second playthrough right now.) and a Netflix show slated for 5 seasons. These in turn are based on 6 fantasy novels and 15 short stories by former economist Andrzej Sapkowski, described by some as “the Polish Tolkien”. But how did it all truly begin? It began with a single short story. What was it about that short story that set off such a cascade?

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I’m currently on my second playthrough of The Witcher 3 and I’m really enjoying it. (Girlfriend Reviews) My approach to playing large, dense role-playing games is typically to focus on getting the main story done, along with a smattering of side-quests and whatever else seems interesting yet not too difficult or tedious. In my first playthrough, for example, I mostly ignored Gwent, which is an optional card game that you get to play with loads of characters throughout the world. I didn’t really bother to use any of the magic or potions or the skill upgrades. On Normal difficulty (Story and Sword), you can typically just slash-and-dodge your way all the way to the end credits. This time around I’m playing on Hard (Blood and Broken Bones!), which is more challenging and also more compelling. Quick sidenote: after completing Doom (2016) on normal difficulty, I read a Kotaku blogpost about how Doom is better played on harder difficulties. I previously didn’t bother with harder difficulties in games, but I was convinced by the argument that it’s more satisfying when it’s more of a struggle, and it turned out to be true for me.

Anyway back to the Witcher. There are a lot of things to talk about re: the Witcher. For a 2015 game, it is visually stunning, though arguably Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) is even more visually stunning. There are some subtle details in RDR2 that The Witcher 3 doesn’t have. Simply walking around, or riding your horse, or hunting animals, or doing things like taunting NPCs, is more satisfying in RDR2. The controls feel ‘weightier’. (TW3 seems slightly better now after it’s been patched several times.) Combat in TW3 is okay, it’s not amazing. The camera movements can be a little janky. The player-character, Geralt, can feel a little ‘light’ or ‘weightless’ in his movements

the great thing about The Witcher 3 is the strength of its writing. That’s a very broad statement so let’s try to make it more precise. There are many games that can be described as “well-written”, or “having good writing”. The last two God of War games were well-written, in that the relationship between father and son was beautifully fleshed out. (Rereading this, I’m noticing that when the central theme is the father-son relationship, a lot of the other things going on in the story serve as contrasts. Eg you have the mother-son relationship between Freya and Baldur, and in Ragnarok you have the father-son relationships between Odin and Thor, and Thor and his kids. The Last of Us Part 1 was very well-written, Part 2 is more complicated and disputable (I generally liked the overall story, but I did feel like it has pacing issues. I’ll need to playthrough a second time to be sure about it.) The original Mass Effect Trilogy had lots of good writing in it overall, ME1 in particular was fantastic. ME2 was good as a standalone, but I’m coming around to the idea that it’s overall arc was a bad move in the context of the trilogy– it basically undid most of what ME1 set up, setting up ME3 for failure. The good things it did do were build the geth/quarian conflict and the genophage plot.

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