Also, the Witcher Does Side-Quests and Moral Choices Right

One of the issues you often get in Open-World RPG games is that there are a million side quests, and pretty much all of them are "hey, I want this thing. Go to this cave and get this thing and come back and you'll get gold and pants." While they put a little effort into giving some backstory to the McGuffin, often it's a simple matter of going there and picking something up.

Now, to be fair, I've only played through a bit of the Witcher III. I'm in Velen (wondering if I should head back to White Orchard and make sure I've fully explored there,) and I think I've gotten to a serious midpoint of the area (quests are now sending me to Novigrad, which is the big city in the area that I haven't even come near yet.)

It's possible that I'm just not wise to the familiar patterns that Witcher side quests will fall into. But so far, I'm really impressed.

Being a Witcher means being a genetically enhanced monster-hunter (despite being a pretty straightforward medieval setting with countless tiny villages dealing with monster infestations, people seem to understand stuff like DNA to a greater extent than even we do today,) and that means that even though Geralt's got his own main concern (finding his badass adopted daughter Ciri and protecting her rom the eponymous Wild Hunt,) he pays the bills by taking on Witcher Contracts and also helps out people he meets along the way.

The great thing is that even the Witcher Contracts - given their own special category apart from Side Quests - which are your classic "kill this one monster" sorts of missions, are given a decent backstory and a few twists and turns. You'll often have to track down clues to help you find the monster (admittedly, this mechanic is not the greatest, especially given the way you need to point the camera and position Geralt just right to make him interact with the correct object) and talk to villagers, then hopefully identify what the thing is, allowing you to use the quite clever crafting system to put together the right potions and oils to get ready to face the monster down.

And sometimes, the monster is more complicated and you are forced to make a moral choice. But this isn't like Bioshock, where it's between total sociopathic cruelty and altruistic benevolence, or even Mass Effect, which has a somewhat more subtle dichotomy of ethical paragon or expedient renegade, which is still a clear set of categories to put your choices into.

Geralt has real serious moral questions to answer, and the "right" option, or even the "officially good" option is not at all obvious. For example, there is a side quest in which you are hired by a hunter to track down his wife - she was happily married to him, and was unlikely to run away, but she has gone missing in the woods.

When you search for her, her sisters (who appears to live with them) approaches and tells you to just tell the hunter that she's dead and let him move on with his life. You can take a bribe from her to do this, but if you continue your investigation, you'll find that she was killed by a werewolf. You can track the werewolf to a hunting lodge in the woods, and if you go into a cavern beneath it, you'll find the beast. However, when you fight it, just as you're about to kill it, the woman's sister arrives and tells you to stop - that the werewolf is actually the hunter, and that he didn't know that he had killed his wife.

The hunter had been going to this lodge and locking himself away to protect people from himself when he was transformed. But the sister had fallen in love with her brother-in-law, and she decided to show the wife what her husband really was, hoping that she would run off in fear. Instead, the werewolf broke free and killed her.

So here's the moral choice you're presented with: the werewolf/hunter finds out about this and resolves to kill the sister in revenge. Do you let him? In a sense, she killed her sister by proxy via werewolf, but she never intended to do it. Yet she was still responsible for the death, and let's also recall that she was trying to destroy her sister's marriage.

The hunter had specifically gone to this cabin to avoid hurting anyone, and while he clearly did not think out all the contingencies, he was making an effort to keep people safe. But the fact remains that he is a dangerous monster, and now he is threatening to kill this woman who has wronged him.

It's a tough call. I decided that once the werewolf started killing people intentionally, as justified as he might have been, he'd no longer be eligible for protection from my monster-hunting wrath. That, and also that killing this woman would not bring his wife back, and he'd still live out the rest of his life knowing that he had killed his beloved wife. The sister might have a chance to repent. So I killed the werewolf.

You might argue that this was, in fact, the "officially good" way to resolve the situation, but it required real moral interrogation, You could make the argument that the real criminal here was the sister, and perhaps she deserved a just death.

In case you're worried that I've spoiled something major about the game, take note: this is one side quest among many. These people are not major characters in the story. It's just a basic "track down this monster and kill it" kind of quest. But it's invested with real story stakes in a way that I don't think I've ever seen another video game put in a side quest.

The Witcher III Does Item-Based Combat Right

One of the great archetypes of heroic fantasy is the guy who always has the right gadget, herb, or charm for the given situation. This is a person who knows exactly how to make a concoction to slow the effects of a cursed dagger or exactly what kind of charm can be constructed with household parts to ward off some wraith. Basically, fantasy MacGyver.

The problem is that in games, this basically means incessant farming - gathering materials constantly and having to restock, always afraid to use your Gold Dust Anti-Dragon Bomb because dammit, you only have so much Anti-Dragon and you don't want to head all the way to the Isle of Antimatter to get more.

The Witcher III (and maybe earlier games in the series for all I know) resolves this problem by taking a radical approach to the crafting system.

Once you've brewed a potion, assembled a bomb, mixed up some oil, or what have you, you simply have it forever. Weapon Oil is always there for you (but has to be reapplied after a while) while bombs and potions do have limited charges - usually 1-3 - but if you spend time meditating, you can simply consume a bottle of hard alcohol and all of your stuff pops back into your inventory.

Booze is rather easy to come by and can be bought, and it appears that any sort of hard liquor you have will work to replenish your stuff.

So while theoretically you might have to "farm" booze, ultimately it's pretty easy to get all your stuff back, which means that you can (and should) use those items pretty proactively - really only saving them if you think there's a particularly hard fight coming up.

There are a couple of downsides to keep you from abusing these potions. One is that if you take a whole bunch without waiting to recover (or using other materials to detox,) you'll fill up your toxicity meter and start to lose health until the effects wear off.

Additionally, recipes demand lots of different ingredients, so you'll need to pick herbs you come across and buy stuff from herbalists.

It appears that you'll want to enhance these items with new recipes as you level up, but the fact that once you have Specter Oil, you'll always have something to add a little more punch to your ghost-fighting attacks, is pretty damn great.

Oh, and Devil's Puffball is a nasty thing to throw at a group of thugs who have made the ill-advised decision to fight Geralt of Rivia.

Monster Hunting in the Witcher III

As all good RPG players do, I'm focusing on clearing out side quests before proceeding on to the main quest line in the Witcher III.

While the main quest has me hunting down a Griffin that is terrorizing the local town, I first did a side quest in which a well (whose water is needed to help a sick girl now that the river water is contaminated with the bodies of dead soldiers) is haunted by a foul ghost.

The ghost is initially not hostile, but I did manage to get too close and found myself in a very difficult battle. Running away and then returning to complete the investigation, I found the body of the woman whose ghost was haunting the well and retrieved her bracelet - a memento that remained to bind her to the world.

Knowing what kind of foe I was dealing with, I brewed some Specter Oil (unfortunately, while I was able to find the Bear Fat needed for the oil, I had to look up online where to find the flowers that serve as the other component to the oil. I wonder if I missed something in-game.)

Thus prepared, I faced down the Noonwraith (the specific kind of ghost she was) and made quick work of her.

I'm actually really excited about this kind of fight being the sort of thing the game focuses on. Too often scary monsters in video games become these total fodder kind of enemies (and to be fair, I have faced some "Necrophages," which seem to the be blanket term for physical undead rather than spectral ones (though the Noonwraith was plenty nasty-looking, mind you) that have died by the handful.) I'm sure that the eventual destruction of the Griffin will also involve this kind of quest-based prep-work, but which might get tedious over a long course, but assuming that it's not too difficult to find the right tools for the job, this could be a really cool way of organizing the game.

I am still unable to scale the UI's text. I guess I'll just have to look up if it's possible.

(EDIT: Apparently this is something they patched in. I'll need to ensure that the PS4 is downloading the pertinent data.)