It’s hard to describe why The Witcher 3 is good without letting goodness itself—sheer quality—be the unit of measurement. Think of a scene in the game, any scene, and how much care and craftsmanship it exudes from every pixel, every sound, every word, every aesthetic and narrative choice. I still find myself struck by a cutscene from what many regard to be the game’s most captivating and devastating sequence: the Bloody Baron questline, which requires mutant monster-hunter Geralt to travel across the wastes of Velen looking for the wife and daughter of a self-proclaimed provincial despot. At a certain point, Geralt arrives at the cabin of an old woman simply named Gran, hoping to commune with the witches who control her. The camera lingers on a tapestry of three young women; standing before them, she utters a plaintive, withering plea:
Ladies lovely, with power o’er all,
Beseech I thee, answer my call,
Before you a worm crawls, wretched and small…
Gran’s eyes roll back and the witches begin to speak through her, the game’s top-notch facial animation capturing the uncanny microexpressions of the possessed (as opposed to most facial animation, which makes characters look possessed 100% of the time). In the background, a ragged violin pursues its neverending project of furious lamentation. In the foreground, the cinematography—aside from dialogue, consistently the game’s best and most expressive aspect—jumps to and from the figures on the tapestry as they converse with our white-haired hero, heightening their implacability and, as always, heightening his.
One way to praise this scene without just flat-out saying it’s atmospheric as fuck would be to talk about how densely and subtly it blends together elements of other genres and other media. The tapestry looks Pre-Raphaelite, its figures flattened and serpentine; the rhyme could’ve been extracted from the Brothers Grimm; the witches themselves, evil yet never quite inconsistent, take us all the way back to Macbeth. The score draws from a pan-European blend of folk styles; the camerawork proceeds with a canny understanding of the reaction shot, pinging desperately—in a way that heightens the moment’s unease—from Geralt to interlocutors that can’t be framed. Unlike many big-budget games (let’s face it, probably most of them), The Witcher 3 not only behaves as though it’s aware of the existence of other art forms but seems entirely willing to converse with them in both directions. Just as it draws from the techniques of movies, books, and everything else, it confidently offers itself as a possible reference point, as though it weren’t preposterous at all to think that someone’s future movie could be “like The Witcher 3.” I remember one of my favorite professors arguing that the novel was a “literary turducken” because it could contain and consume everything from poetry to classified ads. The Witcher 3 is a multimedia turducken with an entirely un-turducken-like sense of purpose.
At the same time, the game’s way of containing and consuming its own genre—the open-world Western RPG—might be even more impressive. It’s a lot like the best prestige TV (The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad) in its commitment to transcending the structures of a recognizable genre tradition, meaningfully exploiting what the German critic Hans Robert Jauss called the “horizons of expectation” that we bring with us to any work of art that looks like something we’ve encountered before. The Sopranos depicted a world in which characters had internalized The Godfather to a ridiculous extent, and its most brilliant moments stemmed from an assumption that its audience had done the same.
The Witcher 3, likewise, betrays a canny understanding of what we tend to expect from RPGs like it. There is freedom in The Witcher 3, as there is in any Bethesda game or Dragon Age: Inquisition: freedom to go where you want, do what you want, fight what you want, romance who you want. But it isn’t unlimited freedom, and it often transforms into varieties of constraint: the ostracism that shadows Geralt’s wandering-ronin lifestyle; the sense that most choices are not yours and equally valid but his and equally grim. You can choose Triss or Yennefer, but the choice isn’t completely, synchronically open to you like Miranda vs. Tali vs. Jack; if you’re like me, you’ll get to know Yennefer well after having chosen or not chosen Triss, and feel a measure of resentment toward the unfairnesses of time. Working within a genre that lends itself to systematic sidequesting and obsessive completionism, the game makes a ton of things missable, often silently so. It takes the “open” in “open-world,” the “role-playing” in RPG, and makes both into expressive vehicles of pathos and discomfort. The world is too open, and Geralt’s role in it is wearily, oppressively defined. (Before you a worm crawls, wretched and small…
But perhaps we can derive some comfort from the idea that the open-world as an aesthetic template is more open than ever—to other genres, to other meanings, to a different idea of itself. –Matt Margini
