This is something I've been thinking about a lot while playing The Witcher 3. Before I get into the meat of it, though, I should say that I haven't finished the game yet (being that the game is a million hours long and never feels like filler somehow so I am constantly doing something other than the main quest). I don't know my actual play time (because I have it on GOG and run it through steam and neither seem to track that so I'd probably have to open the game to see and I don't feel like doing that right now), but it's somewhere around 50 hours. Also, this contains no spoilers. Please be kind and block any spoilers in the comments below.

I've noticed on my travels in this game that you are constantly met with a tough choice. Really that's been a staple for this series since at least Witcher 2. In actuality I feel pretty confident in saying every single mission (whether the main story line or just something you run into) has some impact on someone. Every time you talk to anyone you're going to have to make an important choice. This isn't a problem with design as it gives you something compelling to think about at all times, but I find myself wondering what any of it means. I mean, really. I've made hundreds of these choices now and only a handful are at all apparent what they mean to a person or the world at large.

Here's the thing; you help so many people in the game (or don't help as the case could often be), and the major choices will come back at some point, but where it gets muddled for me is all the little people you help. I can't remember half the people I've made a choice to either help or not so the only way the game can tell me is by having them allude to when I made that choice and how this is the moment they're coming back to it. Very often, but not always, I don't remember the circumstance.

It comes off a little odd if only because there are so many of the little side stuff that I have done (and made choices on) that I don't even remember what choice I made or why for that one guy I helped 40 hours ago. Half the time no choice is an easy choice so you have to go with your gut so the reasons aren't readily apparent what their telling me I did wrong or they were happy I did what I did.

Having had similar situations before (in real life) I can understand the quandary is maybe more the human dilemma, the jaded nature of doing something so much, and the feeling of so much resting on your shoulders that maybe doesn't need to. Or even something as simple as not remembering that one guys name you knew years ago- he remembers you vividly but while you remember him his name alludes you. This is a real issue you could potentially face so it is interesting to face that dilemma in a game. At what point, though, does it become meaningless and therefore another form of tedium?

I'm not saying The Witcher 3 is poorly written or even designed. In fact it's incredible the way they have manufactured this world to feel so real in so many ways- even down to minute details. A problem I can see arising is such; at what point are there so many meaningful choices that they are no longer meaningful?

I find every time I make a choice I ask myself what the consequences would be. Like a chess game I try to make a choice for what I feel is the best outcome (even if not a "good" outcome), but when I have to make a similar choice again and again at times I can find myself just making one of the choices meaninglessly because I just had a moral quandary 5 minutes ago and I'm emotionally just too exhausted to deal with another one at this very second.

The game does sort of deal with this by making it so you could just blow off just about any choice you have to make (which is a choice in itself) but being human even that has an emotional cost, doesn't it? You risk angering someone you may not actually want to anger, or basically choosing to let their tribulations overwhelm them.

It is quite fascinating that CDProjekt Red has been able to craft such a fascinating dilemma within the context of a video game. To make it so every choice is a burden you must carry.The fact that we even become exhausted by the idea of having to to make a better choice at every turn is quite laudable. As I play, though, while some choices become apparent readily, and others don't, I often find myself wondering if maybe I've chosen to do too much. Maybe some of the people I made choices with had consequences I am missing because I don't remember anything of that even because I've had to do similar things so many times before and after that event.

It's something that I find really fascinating, but also at a game play level leaves me wondering if maybe there's a point when there's too much. It's not that games should always be fun, but at what point does the innovative way of making a player care about every choice they make become so tedious itself (because of the human dilemma, not because of bad design) that it itself becomes a chore to play? Or even at what point is it too much when you no longer remember what happened before and why you made the choice you did?

I just found these to be interesting to think about as I travel through The Witcher 3. It's an incredibly vast and open world. There's so much going on that you even find yourself speculating about it's roots, and the history of Poland itself. Where all these ideas come from and what spurns them on. It's quite interesting and wonderful to see something like this. Even my silly little introspection on player choice and if there can be too much seems to be a beautiful thing to come out of a video game.

Has anyone else ever thought about this stuff while playing? I'd love to read your thoughts!

I just finished the game yesterday and it was a great ride even though I didn't get my romance ending and I have no idea why. That said, I think they go a little too out of their way to mess with your expectations at every single step of the way. It seemed like every single quest had you double guessing yourself, what is this guys motivation, is this choice TOO obvious? There are times when you simply cannot deduct the convoluted repercussions that follow later and instead of clever it can come off as cheap.

The romance thing for example is handled rather awkwardly. Without any huge spoilers, your main choices are obviously Triss or Yennefer, yet you're introduced to each one in a chronological order. You meet Triss and follow her plotline to it's conclusion before you spend any time with Yennefer. If you get involved with Triss and then later want to romance Yennefer you will lose out on both love lines. This is clever and realistic, going against the typical completionist video game mindset as obviously you can't frivolously go around sleeping with whoever and then come back to your current girlfriend acting like nothing ever happened. At the same time it's a little cheap and disingenuous to the player.

There are plenty of other places in the game where I felt like the story was trying to pull a fast one over on me and I genuinely became somewhat paranoid about all the choices I was making, over analyzing every little piece of dialog and wondering if I'm not screwing myself over 20 hours down the road. It certainly makes for interesting gameplay and nothing that gamers have typically experienced before, but I didn't think it always made for good gameplay. As much as I love good writing I also think there needs to be logic to everything. If you're not given enough facts to deduct the consequences of your choices, getting a seemingly random outcome on the contrary can make you feel quite powerless.

I think the game mostly did a good job with some the choice and consequence stuff. As to your point of not being able to remember all of the people who might call you out on a choice later, I guess I don't view that as a huge problem, and in fact find it quite realistic given the circumstances. You need to consider the relative stations of the characters. For Geralt, the people he helps and the choices he makes are offshoots of his profession as a Witcher. When he takes a contract to kill a monster, it's just another job. It is, as you put it "more tedium" for him. One drowner is the same as another is the same as another. For the person he helped though, the interaction with a Witcher is probably a major life event and thus sticks out for that person, even if it doesn't for Geralt.

I think the game gets into little bit more trouble in situations where choices are not based on choosing action/inaction, but rather shoot off from specific dialogue choices that aren't obviously related to doing something. I definitely felt that there were situations where that felt "gamey" in the sense that the dialogue snippets didn't give me enough information about what was actually going to be said. For example, the Novigrad murders you investigate. The entire "correct" answer to that quest relies on making one specific dialogue choice that you really have no reason to make. Rather than being a choice about action/inaction it was a choice of action/information, but the way the quest had been structured, the game hadn't provided you any reason at that point to seek more information.

Specifically regarding the Yen/Triss choice, I think the game did itself a disservice with the recommended level requirements of those respective quests chains. The levels on the quests very clearly imply that the order of areas is supposed to be Velen --> Novigrad --> Skellige, which is what I'm guessing most people will do. They should have normalized those two quest chains to be roughly equivalent to one another, which would have kept the realism of not being able to romance two people at once while removing the feeling that one got pulled over on the player.

@lawgamer:

As to your point of not being able to remember all of the people who might call you out on a choice later, I guess I don't view that as a huge problem, and in fact find it quite realistic given the circumstances.

I agree. This gets into the human element of the situations.

You need to consider the relative stations of the characters. For Geralt, the people he helps and the choices he makes are offshoots of his profession as a Witcher. When he takes a contract to kill a monster, it's just another job. It is, as you put it "more tedium" for him. One drowner is the same as another is the same as another. For the person he helped though, the interaction with a Witcher is probably a major life event and thus sticks out for that person, even if it doesn't for Geralt.

This is true, however I counter while the act of choosing to kill certain monsters is part of Geralt's station, it is not Geralt's place to choose whether to tell someone if their son died because he was a coward and abandoned his post. This is also a human choice, but it's a moral dilemma. In real life I'd probably never see this person again so someone could argue it doesn't matter, but what affect does it have on me in this case? Is this person's feelings on the matter important enough to affect me in the long run, or is me sparing their feelings and leaving out the details just a nice thing to do? Who does it really hurt which option I choose?

I guess this further goes into both you and @humanity's point about often making choices with little information, and I do feel a lot of that is trying to reflect life. I'm not sure I've encountered that so much in the game yet, as often you do have many clues to interact with (on investigation type missions) and if you miss even one you could be out a very key piece of information which leaves you with little to go on or maybe not even an option for something important. I don't know for sure- that quest you mentioned could also just be poorly implemented. However, in some situations, even in life, you don't really have all the information. So I can kinda see where situations like hat come into play.

At what point, though, does it become meaningless when I've had to make this moral decision for not just that woman I mentioned above, but also another guy I meet just a minute down the road?

When you have to make these emotional choices so often that in itself is where the potential tedium lies. It's not because you don't like the story, or how they give you information, but because you're exhausted from having to make these choices so much. This too reflects life, but as humanity sort of touched on as well; at what point is that not "good" game play? I keep using the word tedium. Maybe a better way for me to put it is exhausting given that it's not necessarily bad, but it's just so much.

Hopefully that made sense. I spoiler blocked one sentence because that could potentially be a spoiler if you hadn't seen that small side quest yet and while it's not a big thing that happens or anything I don't want to give away anything if people don't want to see that or whatever.

@cornbredx: I understand and agree with your sentiment. It often seems like the Witcher 3 really gives you no respite when it comes to making "hard" decisions throughout the game. A large majority of your choices aren't going to carry consequence into the latter portions of the game but you still feel like you want to make the "right" choice. There should have been some more cut and dry quests where you obviously know whodunnit and move on with your life. As it stands because every choice was kind of dramatic and convoluted that started to erode some of the immersion for me. I was no longer choosing answers as I saw fit, I was constantly trying to peek under the narrative trying to expose the cold hard game mechanics beneath.

Another part of the problem, for me anyway, stemmed from the fact that I'm roleplaying an existing character rather than projecting myself onto a blank slate. There were plenty of moments where I would try to figure out what would Geralt do in this situation. This leads to some confusion and frustration. For instance there is one very late-game quest where you are in a hurry and have to make a decision on how Geralt will respond to someone. Depending on that single dialog choice you could miss out on a very important quest chain that has large bearing on the games ending - yet the choice you're supposed to make doesn't seem like something that Geralt would do in that situation.

Lack of information as @lawgamer mentioned is best exemplified for me in the early Baron questline. The pivotal moment when you decide how to interact with a certain "stationary" NPC determines the entire outcome of the story, yet tried as I might I could not dig up enough clues to let me know who is right and who is wrong - as I imagine you're not supposed to really know. Even after you make your choice, you could never guess the chain of events that follow which only seem logical in retrospect. I guess this was a way for the developer to let the player know that you can never really be in control of anything, but once again as much as that makes for good storytelling it doesn't always make for good gameplay.

All that nagging aside, I thought Witcher 3 was an excellent game and I'm actually really looking forward to the DLC they're planning to release at the end of this year.

@humanity: It's interesting that you were more inclined to try and expose the game mechanics rather than feel immersed in the world and free to choose what you saw fit as you went. I had the complete opposite experience. With this game I found that the complete feeling of never knowing if I was making the "right" choice freed me from giving any thought at all towards what the technically correct choice is. It allowed me to more effectively roleplay who I wanted my Geralt to be rather than worrying about the results of the game. All I had to consider was what would I do in this case. Compare this to something like mass effect where the answers are color coded or something like dragon age where there are clear good and evil choices. I find those types of games are more offensive to my immersion because I frequently pick the obvious "good character" choice even if I wouldn't naturally pick that choice in the circumstance as it is presented. With most rpg's released recently I see the choice before me and think "oh yeah, this is good guy response, and this is bad guy response. Well I'm not doing an evil run so even if I don't entirely like this response I better go with it for the sake of the playthrough."

I'll use the stationary npc that you reference as an example. When presented with the choice, I honestly had no idea what to do and that felt great to me. The lack of any real clear information freed my mind to really go places and wonder. I sat there with the game waiting for my answer for minutes as I considered what would be more important to my Geralt. To me that didn't break the immersion, but instead presented me with the opportunity to really get engrossed in the world. It was an opportunity to have a really serious getting into character moment in order to choose something I would be happy with. Ultimately I decided that saving the children would be worth the risk of trusting a potentially evil entity who very well cold be lying to me. And to my surprise, I ended up being fairly happy with my choice. Although there was no way to get out unscathed of this situation. Later on when I saw what happened to the Baron and his family because of my actions, I did feel a pang of regret as I stood by my decision to save the youth from the Crones. Now granted not all of the choices were this engrossing or interesting for me. Honestly this was one of the best moments of the early game in my opinion just because it was such a great choice to hit the player with.

To each their own though. I can certainly see where you're coming from and how the game could make you feel more out of it with its methods. As it turns out this kind of hit you over the head all game long with unclear choices style just works for me better than the more typical good/evil rpg that's on the market nowadays.

They probably looked at the story behind his nickname, The Butcher of Blaviken and thought: Let's do that every chance we get.

For those that don't know, Spoiler for the first book:

Geralt is basically searching for Snow White (called Renfri in the Witcher but 90% based on Snow White. There are a lot of other versions of fairy tales in that first book). She's a princess born during an eclipse and they say girls born during that show mutations, are monsters. So the Huntsman is supposed to kill her. But he shows mercy and just rapes her and lets her go.

She later gets saved by 7 gnomes and becomes a bandit leader.

Geralt meets a sorcerer in Blaviken who's an old aquaintance and he tells him that Renfri is after him and he should please kill her, it's the lesser evil. He declines.

Geralt finds her in Blaviken and tells her to leave town. She wants Geralt to kill the sorcerer because killing that one sorcerer is the lesser evil. He says he doesn't choose between the greater or lesser evil. The sorcerer experimented on and murdered those eclipse girls. He'll get any reward within reason. He also can't really do anything about her because she's protected by the King of the land.Geralt talks with her at night and thinks she came to her senses and she'll leave in the morning. They then bone. At some point she mentions the Tridam ultimatum but Geralt doesn't know what that is.

Geralt realizes what that Ultimatum entails the next morning (holding the town hostage and killing them one by one until the sorcerer comes out of his tower), that she won't leave and makes his way to her to stop her. He meets the bandits without Renfri. They knew he'd come and attack him with a crossbow. He slaps the bolt out of the way with his sword (which suprises them a lot) and proceeds to murder them all in the streets.

Renfri then comes back from the sorcerer and tells Geralt that he didn't have to do that because the sorcerer told her she can murder the whole town and then some and he wouldn't come out of the tower.

They then fight and Geralt also kills her in front of the people in the town. So from the outside it looked like Geralt just went to them and slaughtered them for no reason because no one knew about the plot to kill everyone.

The sorcerer then comes and wants to experiment on her dead body. Geralt tells him to fuck off. Then the town starts ganging up on him and chase him out.

And that's why he's called the Butcher of Blaviken.

I think they reference that here:

@mentaldisruption: I suppose I couldn't completely divorce myself from the notion that I'm playing a game and not just experiencing a story, and as such I always wanted the best ending. I enjoyed that storyline for it's unpredictability as well, but also felt the same regret you did. The only difference was that I felt like too many dominos fell over without my input at that point. To me it was the game saying "your actions will have consequences!" but those consequences can be seemingly random no matter how good your intentions are.

I agree with this sentiment. For a completely different reason, however. I find The Witcher 3 to be one of the most tiring games I have ever played, and I don't mean that entirely as a negative.

It's just... you pick a quest - which this in itself can be a taxing experience, as they didn't exactly go out of their way to simplify the usual RPG quest log "laundry list" - travel to said quest, possibly getting distracted on the way. Then you kill a monster or investigate or the like, God forbid you die and spend a good chunk of time reading tips in a loading screen. Then you're presented with a choice of life or death, or rape and death, or child murder or genocide. I'm simplifying, but come on, right? Anyway, these little tales are very well written, highly interesting and keep me engrossed in the story until the end. They are "good". I'm still deciding if they're "fun".

Now I'm coming across as a grump, and I don't want that. I just think there might be more to mission variety than gameplay. Because as I see it, there are three quests in the game: 85% of quests are moral-decision quests, most of the rest are hunts and a minute amount are the outliers, fist fights and horseraces and the card game I never play. Most of the time I spend in the game is making these head-scratchers of choices.

Sure I'll carry out the fights beforehand by using unique equipment and skills laid out on a per monster basis by the Bestiary (and again, DON'T get me wrong, that shit is awesome), but the actual mission type should be "Moral Mission" because that's what I remember and care about. And it's here that the game gets tiring.

"Hey you found the vile serial killer who has been ravaging the town! It was the blacksmith. Now, you CAN kill this murderer, but wait, he has a family. And you'd essentially be dooming them by killing him, as he is their source of income. All signs point to him being a wonderful and caring father and husband. Not to mention that if you kill him, the townspeople will ask questions and how do you think a dark ages-type town would treat the family of the murderer of their friends? Okay... GO!"

I don't think this scenario actually happens, but you see the resemblance. The actual choice, the reloading to see the other choice(s), combined with the after-choice rumination with myself over why I made that choice over the others, it all ends up tiring me out completely by the time I've done one or two quests.

I thought, after the stream of games a few years back with black and white Good/Evil choices, that a game entirely made of no-good-choices quests would be ideal. It turns out that it starts feeling kind of cheap when these heartwrenchers are thrown at you every thirty minutes. They lose some of their "oomph". It makes me appreciate the simplicity of choice and straightforwardness of a game like InFamous, or one which dispenses with choice altogether. Like Wolfenstein, in which you are facing nearly pure evil, no "SS officers with a starving young boy" there.

Again, all this said, I do think W3 is well crafted and the stories contextualizing the choices are fantastic. To reiterate, I've never stopped a quest midway, because that's how entrancing the writing is. But it really, REALLY seems that you could have had all that greatness while keeping the moral choices to something that only comes up every so often. If nothing else, it would certainly help make the choices seem more impactful.

Right now, I think of deciding the fate of (an avatar of) a fellow human being as Enma from DBZ views his job: "let a salient monster live or ensure town survival? Kill him." Stamp. "Rescue the little girl with special powers or grant her wish and leave her with her family... and the angry town? Rescue." Stamp. "Blah, blah, pedophile murder, blah blah, exile from town? Kill." Stamp. If these choices happened after three hours of gameplay each, they'd have much more WOW factor, and thus staying power I believe.

Anyway, it's suddenly 3:30 AM and I don't have an ending to this. So, bye!

@humanity: Ya, I find myself finding respite in choices that have less impact. Like, when it comes to a choice about whether or not I take someone's money for something (usually a Witcher contract) it seems simple to just take it because I did my job and it isn't my problem what the impact will be for them if they pay me to do it. Especially when you consider other choices involve much greater consequences on other people the smaller choices are the easiest to blow off.

To your point of immersion with Geralt, I personally don't feel that because Geralt is supposed to be emotionless as a character. Much like I understand Vulcan's to be (I don't know a lot about Star Trek, though, so I can't go much farther with that example). Normally maybe we see this as cold-hearted so you could argue Geralt would be a dick all the time, but this story seems to surmise he's more logical thinking than that. So, while it could be that in one instance it could be a seemingly nice act in his mind it's done for reasons of personal gain. You could argue the choices are never really one of "good" or "bad" because of this and more choices of "what protects the world for me" no matter the choice you make. In this way all choices technically benefit Geralt in the end. In this way we can both roleplay as Geralt while also attaching our own "morals" to it in an attempt to justify our actions. I suspect, anyway, that is the idea.

I actually couldn't read all of that because I have actually intended to read the Witcher books at some point. Geralt does mention Snow White when... Keira I think brings her up at one point. I was wondering if the reason he knew that was because of an encounter he'd actually been involved in, so that part of it is interesting to know how much that relates to parts of this game.

Excatly. Sometimes it feels like you have to play God because you're choosing who lives and who dies so much. Being God is an exhausting job haha

Thanks for reading, by the way, everybody. I'm enjoying seeing everyone's thoughts on this topic. =)

One of the things I found myself really enjoying in this game is how every important character (or even side quest ones) have a rationale behind everything they say and do. Motivations aren't always clear cut and even Geralt himself isn't just yourself projected into the world, he has a personality of his own, even if you slightly guide it. What is fascinating me with this is how much information there might be out there that I have missed on due to not having played to completion the last two games or read the books. On one hand it gives me free reigns to steer my story in a way that makes sense for me without prior bias. But at the same time, I ended up in a conversation as Ciri in a sauna (if you've played this you know what I mean) and I stopped and turned the game off at a question because I didn't know. And I actually didn't feel comfortable deciding that for that character, in some way.

But that's a side effect of a bigger picture thing, I love that I don't actually know what the outcome will be because I can only work with what's given to me. People love to bring up the Bloody Baron stuff, but the world is filled with those events that on the surface looks like a given only to be revealed you didn't actually think of every possible outcome. And that's life. We do things to the best of our abilities and hope it works out.

This game seems filled with unimportant events only to later find out your choice, however small, mattered. And as the game has progressed, I find myself not looking for the ideal outcome of events by some vague metric of good or bad. But ideal in achieving Geralt's goals. It's what made me start charging more for contracts, because there was no reason for Geralt to work pro bono. He's not actually the hero of the lands, he's just an able fighter for hire with his own goals.

To sum up this random mess, I admire how much this game manages to stay so far away from "Good Choice A, Bad Choice B or Neutral Choice C"-dilemmas. But in doing so, it's also not going in the other extreme by doing all bad choices. It's just choices. The outcome might be bad or good but the choice is rarely done with a moral objective.

@cornbredx: Does he actually call her Snow White? haha, they never call them by their fairy tale names but Rapunzel gets also a mention in that Blaviken chapter. Also Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella. One chapter is kinda Beauty and the Beast. Definitely read them. I'm currently reading the second book.

Luckily they're all translated in german so I can read them as long as I want.

@sogeman: Keira does and Geralt says something to the effect of "Her actual name is *such and such*" and he starts going on a tangent about the "real story" until Keira interrupts him so he'll shut up so she can finish her thought.

It's a funny moment- although most are with Keria.

Don't want to make light of this, but who says games don't prepare you for real life:

depressing stuff

I see no reason to not have those choices there.
If you are someone in that position you would make decisions that alter peoples lives.
With taking into acount that some of the lives you influence, for better or worse, will have zero impact on the big picture. Which I like, not everything has to be a world altering choice and not everything has to come back in some form or another. Knowing I made a certain choice develops the character that I am viewing/playing/portraying in the world.