The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Retrospective, Part 2

Today, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published the second part of its The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings retrospective article, which focuses on the game’s failures. Here’s a bit on the game’s labyrinthine plot:

6) Overly Fractured Story

One of The Witcher 2’s biggest features was its two different Act 2s depending on who you decided to trust at the start of the game. This is definitely very cool, and impressively ambitious. Looking back however, I think it was also a pretty serious mistake. Choosing means that far too many plot points are either not introduced properly or resolved poorly/off-screen. The sorceress conspiracy, the hunt for Triss, the whole business with the royal children. it’s there, but only in theory.

This reaches critical mass in the final act, which is just awful. To someone with it mapped out on a big whiteboard, there’s both a ton of content and lots of resolutions to everything. In practice, only seeing a tiny slice of it isn’t very satisfying at all, and the idea of replaying the entire thing. well, that’s a big time commitment, and one most people are only going to bother with if they were incredibly satisfied. I’d be curious to know whether or not you actually bothered, and which side you joined if you did. Certainly when I reached the end only to find nothing I’d been chasing resolved, and the big political upheaval being that a country I’d never heard of was going to take over a country neither I nor Geralt seemed to have any particular ties to, that wasn’t my first inclination.

I do still like the idea of seeing the story from both sides of the war, but it rests on actually seeing the story. At least, in enough detail to appreciate the bigger sweeps of what’s happening by the end, if not necessarily everyone’s reasons and rationales. (To use Dragon Age as an example here, one of my favourite things about the original game is that you get to talk to Loghain about his many acts of dickery and realise that for all he ballsed up, his motives were relatively sound.)