Kenneth Chen

Kenneth Chen

Digital Media PhD Student

Kenneth is a doctoral student in the Digital Media PhD program. In his series “Kenneth on Games” he writes about his passion for games and game design.

Stab me with a pitchfork, but I’m not madly in love with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Maybe it’s just not my type of game. Maybe I haven’t read enough of the books. Maybe I’m tired of playing as gruff male protagonists who all sound like Christian Bale’s Batman. But I think that there’s something very, very wrong with how the Witcher sets up the ending of the game. Every modern RPG makes big promises about how important your decisions are and how everything you do has consequences, but Witcher does it in a way that left a bad taste in my mouth (and yes, I am bitter because I got the worst ending).

WARNING: Extraordinarily massive spoilers ahead.

The Events Before The End

The ending that you get is decided by the things you say to Ciri after you find her. If you say things that make her feel confident and strong, you get the good ending. But if you say things that make her feel weak and helpless, you get the bad ending. These are decided by certain trigger points (that the player is unaware of) where your dialogue choice suddenly has much more impact than all the other pointless things you’ve said.

So the first problem is that this whole system isn’t even visible for the player. You don’t know what gets a good ending and a bad ending. It’s all a black box.

Let’s put that problem aside and instead, we’ll talk about those trigger points and the things you can say to Ciri.

Scenario 1: Ciri just sneaked into her mentor’s house and found out that he might not like her, so she wants to destroy the whole place before she leaves. What do you do… tell her to stop, or let her do it? The good choice is to let her do it. The bad choice is to stop her.

It’s bad to stop someone from vandalizing a place that they’re not supposed to be in just because their feeling are hurt? How on earth is that bad? Why is it good to let her have a temper tantrum? Shouldn’t confidence come from the ability to calm down and rationalize a situation? If Ciri feels better about herself by blowing things up, there’s a real problem. That’s not what adults do. Treating her like an adult gets you the bad ending.

Scenario 2: After you find Ciri, you decide whether or not to go see her father. He was the one who hired you to find her in the first place. Accepting the reward is the bad choice. Refusing it is the good choice.

The logic here is that if you accept the reward, then Ciri gets angry at you because she thinks you were doing it all for the money rather than an actual desire to protect her. But guess what… this is TRUE. Geralt goes out to search for Ciri because of her father’s contract. That is how the game begins. It is the inciting incident. So if you turn around and tell Ciri that it wasn’t for the money, that’s a lie no matter what. If it really wasn’t for the money, Geralt should have gone looking for Ciri without relying on her father’s information.

And why does Ciri immediately jump to the conclusion that money equals heartlessness? You’re going to be fighting the Wild Hunt, wouldn’t it be nice to buy some fancy weapons and armor? Shouldn’t you take every advantage you can get when you’re up against the world’s most powerful myth? Maybe use that money to patch up the hole in Kaer Morhen in case the Wild Hunt attacks again? Instead, she gets angry because your life doesn’t seem to revolve around her.

Scenario 3: Ciri is angry because she can’t get the hang of using magic (after only trying eight times). You can either tell her “Relax. You don’t have to be good at everything.” Or you can tell her “Think I know what might lift your spirits.” The second one is the good choice.

First of all, these dialogue options are just so extraordinarily meaningless. How on earth is the player supposed to know what either of these things means? For your information, if you choose “relax,” the two of you go out to have a drink together, but if you choose “lifting your spirits,” you have a snowball fight. There’s no connection between Geralt’s words and the resulting action. “Lifting your spirits” could mean anything. It could mean hunting a dragon, or eating a sandwich, or going to sleep. Why does it suddenly mean “have a snowball fight” now?

Second, these actions could be interpreted in a million different ways, but CDPR decided that only one interpretation actually matters. Why does drinking make Ciri less confident? That pretty much goes against everything that pop culture says about alcohol. You’re supposed to get more confident when you’re drunk. Putting that aside, why does a snowball fight make her more confident?

Ciri’s personal growth is a major point of her character arc. She’s always saying things like “I’m not a child anymore, let me do what I want.” So if you want to treat her like an adult, shouldn’t you go out drinking with her? That’s the kind of thing that you do with equals. Geralt goes out drinking with his fellow witchers and witches all the time. Wouldn’t inviting Ciri for a drink mean that you regard her on the same level as all your other friends? Doesn’t a snowball fight imply childishness and immaturity?

I think that telling her that she doesn’t have to be good at everything is a sign of respect. It’s good for people to analyze themselves and see their own strengths and weaknesses. They’re not supposed to be good at everything. Only a child would believe that they could start using magic after only a few days of training.

The Ending and the Good/Evil Dichotomy

As angry as I am about the setup before the ending, I’m most disappointed in the endings themselves. You get a good ending and a bad ending. In one ending, everything dies and the world is doomed and no one is happy. In the other ending, there’s rainbows and smiles everywhere while everyone rides off into the sunset. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but even when you look at the small details, there’s clearly a good path and a bad path.

Moral dualism is an issue that I don’t expect the Witcher to solve. But the problem is that they use ambiguous events to decide an unambiguous ending. You can say something that may or may not be good depending on which perspective you view it from, but the game will decide that it was good regardless of your opinion.

There needs to be some consistency. Bioware games have unambiguous events that lead to an unambiguous ending. Fallout 4 has ambiguous events that lead to an ambiguous ending. But if you mix and match, then you run the risk of disconnecting the player’s actions to the results. They might intend to say something one way, but then the game interprets it another way.

So when I got the worst possible ending in the Witcher, I didn’t feel sad. I felt cheated. And I don’t think that games should make people feel cheated.