lead dev dude who wanted players to feel ‘protective’ over Laura (dude was a weirdo).

Oh yuck!

The good news is past the first game the death cutscenes are far less gratuitous, and honestly as long as you’ve got decent enough reactions you don’t see very many of them. The third game in particular puts a ton of effort into being respectful, including for example, actually having NPCs speak in local languages with English subtitles rather than a crowd in Mexico City all speaking English for example

The second one might benefit from a remaster by the time 4 comes out, as some of the models are a bit too XBox360 era, with the strangely wide shoulders and oversized arm muscles of the time

The death cutscenes were absolutely gratitudous in the first entry, but honestly, if you can get past that the whole series is quite good and it’s really great storytelling and acting watching Laura arc from terrified recent college graduate put into unthinkable situations that she must find a way to survive all the way to cocky know-it-all who must literally nearly end the entire world and accidentally kill many countless innocent people to finally find hubris and actually start being a decent human being

By [email protected]’s description I know what scene they’re talking about. It’s not great but it’s not as bad as they make out. Basically she ends up traveling for a bit with this really smarmy dude. Think incel used car salesman. He’s described as having greasy hair, he’s clearly not trustworthy and acts only in his own best interest, and is constantly trying to get into Ciri’s pants. But, he’s riding this incredible horse the likes of which Ciri has never seen before (and it turns out to in fact be a magical horse) and Ciri is just entranced by this incredible and majestic horse, and smarmy dude can tell, so he makes sure to use the horse to get Ciri to interact with him even though they both know she wants nothing to do with him and only gives him the light of day to see his horse.

Anyways smarmy dude and Ciri end up running from some bandits, smarmy dude is injured but plays down how badly, and basically uses this plus gifting her the horse she’s so entranced by to manipulate and guilt her into agreeing to sleep with him (from her perspective it’s been made clear how curious but nervous she is about sex, so she’s not entirely opposed, but it’s also implied up to this point that she’s far more into women than men) and then just as she’s starting to potentially enjoy the pity sex with the asshole but before either of them can actually get their pants off, he fucking dies!

She does also extremely briefly travel to Edwardian or Victorian London (I forget exactly what year it was). It’s mostly depicted through a newspaper clipping from The Sun and a rebuttle from another newspaper calling out their quoted witness for trespassing and strongly implying he was inebriated at the time and being an unreliable source. It’s quite comically written really

can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.

Uhhh which book is that? If it’s the section I’m thinking of with Kelpie the horse, she’s entranced by its beauty and it’s rider/owner tries to use that to get into her pants (and ultimately died before he was successful) but I don’t believe she ever expressed sexual attraction at all to it by my memory from reading the books a couple of months ago.

the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it

The party is trying to find Ciri after her disappearance. Geralt and Cahir are having visions indicating that she’s presently in great danger and suffering (and at that she was!). Finding out while practically at the front lines of the great war that their incredible archer, Milva is pregnant completely derails their entire journey because she can’t ride, shouldn’t travel, and will need to rest in a safe area for a while (which they are at this point constantly far from anywhere safe), plus they can’t exactly bring a baby onto the battlefield they’re actively crossing. It’s one moral quandry wrapped in another. Ultimately Geralt and Cahir leave it to Milva’s decision, as does Regis the barber-surgeon/vampire who created the abortion potion.

Also it wasn’t rape. While guiding a group of elves to safety, they hid in a thicket for a night with Nilfgaurdians surrounding them and searching for them. The elves decided that since they were likely to die a horrible death at any moment that they should take the time they have to find what enjoyment they can, and Milva decided to join in. It just so happened they did not die that night and now Milva is carring a halfling for whom she does not know the fathers name (for safety no names were shared with the elves she guided)

i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise.

She gave up her magic after trying to use fire as a source of power out of desperation while navigating out of the “Frying Pan” desert. She wanted to save Little Horse the unicorn after an unfortunate battle with a monster she hadn’t yet learned of, but no other sources were available. My understanding is fire as a magical source is all consuming so it is forbidden to pull from for safety reasons, but that was largely left up to interpretation.

Upon pulling from fire, she saw the imense power that presented her, the ability to rule the entire world, but also how that would hurt those she cared so deeply about, so she instead gave up her sourceress’ powers.

If you want anything to complain about in the books it should be Milva’s winging about being an illiterate farm girl that honestly was out of character and just seemed written in so she wouldn’t outshine the others

Edit: Cahir’s attraction to Ciri is also creepy as hell the way it’s written, but that might be intentional, since that’s at a point where she’s coming to realize that everyone wants something from her, everyone will tell her why she should want to give them what they want from her but nobody ever seems to care or ask what she actually wants.

I feel like the repetitive combat is more a result of combat that actually encourages dodging and using signs rather than just standing still and slicing while the enemy either hits or not based on RNG, and the fact that in combat you truly are jumping around, dodging, parrying, etc. makes it more true to the source material.

The style of combat in The Witcher 3 also makes it so that if you do find yourself in a much higher level fight than you should be you can with enough tries manage to beat it. I had one playthrough where I took on the werewolf quest while too low level for it, didn’t preserve any saves before the no turning back point for the battle. In order to save my save file I had to keep trying and failing to defeat the werewolf until I finally got the hits and dodges just perfectly enough to defeat the werewolf. It sucked but ultimately it was possible to complete and not just by an attempt with golden RNG rolls results

Cranky brooding swordsman is kinda a one trick pony. It’s brilliant and hilarious to respond to everything no matter how threatening with just a grunt or dismissive comment, but after 3 major games, it’s time for something else

Honestly the longform books take a similar approach, telling several very important people’s stories from the perspective of how their stories intertwined with Geralt’s and later Ciri’s

Ending with Ciri following the Witcher path, is Canon now

It’s canon in the books too. She was trained at Ker Moren, then trained by Yennefer but ultimately she gives up her magic entirely after pulling from fire as a source out of desperation. She remains an extremely skilled swordswoman with partial mutation

It’s a game series (and later media series) literally based on a series of books. The short stories tell Garalt’s story, but the longform books are far more about Ciri than they are Geralt. Go read them they’re brilliant books but more important to the point you’ll understand why Ciri is so important to the story that’s being told

Honestly TES6 has one thing going for it and that’s that Skyrim is over a decade old now so matching the scale and scope of Skyrim is much more achievable.

In my opinion when a sequel falls flat or is outshined by an earlier entry in the series, it’s usually because the studio messed with the formula for the gameplay, not because of a change in characters

Passing the torch off to Ciri fucking entirely makes sense within the world and lore of the Witcher serie

It’s also literally what happens in the books. Ciri grows as a person and becomes a badass swordswoman while Geralt eventually swears off taking monster contracts and later actually stops killing monsters. He even goes to donate his sword before getting pulled into one last battle to protect his friends and chosen family

Yennefer trained her in some sort of sorcery arts

So I recently devoured the book series and can clarify, she was first trained as a Witcher, then as a sourceress by Yennefer, but after she was teleported into the middle of the desert and tried to use fire as a source of power out of desperation, she gave up all magical abilities as the fire was trying to consumer her. So shes a brilliant swordswoman, has partial Witcher mutation (some of the mutations come from the secret Witcher diet which she was fed at Ker Moren while being trained) and depending on when in the timeline the game takes place she would have incredible reflexes and some interdimensional travel capabilities.

There’s also some really interesting opportunities for storytelling given how Ciri’s background is just soaked in trauma. On that note, I am also curious if they intend to play down the salaciousness for this entry or not. In the books Ciri was definitely curious (and heavily implied to be bi) but remained a virgin, and by the end of the series she was still a minor by modern standards. I want to say she was 16 or so at the end of the last book.

I’m super excited to see where this game goes, because if its worthy of being released after the masterpiece that was The Witcher 3, it’s going to be brilliant

I just went through this yesterday! I did a big upgrade on my wife’s computer, fresh install of Windows on a 2TB NVMe drive replacing the aging 120GB SSD that somehow didn’t completely fill up, etc. Etc. really loved pointing epic at the installs on the secondary drive and it just ignoring them and instead spending 3 hours downloading Fortnite after we just spent 1 hour applying the last update yesterday (and another hour on a different update the day before too!) on the drive that’s RIGHT THERE IN THE COMPUTER!

Need the same to happen to those plantations that were converted to prisons. Without casualties of course because the last thing the world needs need is more needless deaths of poor black and brown people

The big benefit is that much horsepower allows the phone to very very rapidly “race to sleep” in that the faster it can crunch the numbers then return to a much slower clock the less power it’ll consume overall

The wildest part is that advertising has become so poisonous that now over 50% of a Americans use adblockers and over 1/3 of people world wide. It’s not just techies installing adblockers for their grandmas, it’s become mass market!

Personally, I think setting up a reverse proxy for accessing Jellyfin would be fine, just make sure you’ve got your firewall setup accordingly to limit exposure should someone gain access to the container/VM running Jellyfin

I ran my crappy lawmower on crappy gas I filled up 2-3 years ago, and I’ve never done any maintenance on it. I can tell it’s not happy but also I’m sure this $100 lawnmower is a lot simpler than any road vehicle made in the last 50 years