Having a sleepy period. It’s very annoying. I want to DO things!
Been playing a lot of Witcher 3 : The Wild Hunt lately. It’s the game I got for my birthday from a very dear online furry friend. He’s so sweet.
And it’s quite good. Its main asset is its depth. There is an amazing amount of content to explore. And some of it is extremely well written, if rather dark.
But I can do dark. Dark works for me. If I wasn’t in a position where I can fight the dark at least some of the time, it would depress me. But in the game, I am the hero, and I can fight the darkness and prevent it, or at least exact justice for it.
Here’s an example of the high grimdark quotient of the game : on one of the shorter and less complicated quests, I am hired by a man to find his wife. I talk to the sister of said wife as part of the investigation, and she is quite sure that her sister is dead after having wandered off into the swamp alone. And so there’s no need to investigate further, really, because I will never find the body. She also goes on about what a great man her brother in law, the guy who hired me, is.
That is, of course, suspicious as fuck, and I (the player) am convinced she killed her sister in order to get the guy who hired me (we’ll call him Neville) all to herself.
I investigate further, and discover an underground passage underneath the place where Neville and the sister (let’s call her Bitch) live together. When I enter the cave, Bitch shows up and offers me double whatever Neville’s paying me to stop investigating right now and just tell Neville that she’s dead. I, of course, decline. Homey don’t play that. In said passage, I find the remains of Neville’s wife. She’d dead alright. Ripped to pieces by something very strong and very big. with long sharp claws. There’s also some tufts of fur, scattered bones of animals, and bloodstains on the wall.
This all points to the murderer being a werewolf. I wait until nightfall, hoping to trap the beast. Sure enough, there’s a werewolf in the cave when I return. I fight it and almost kill it, then just as I am about to deliver the fatal blow,. Bitch shows up and pleads for me not to hurt the werewolf because it is, in truth, (dramatic REVEAL!) the werewolf is Neville, the man she loves.
She confessed to having lured her sister down into the cave, knowing that it was the place Neville went in order to isolate himself when it was time to wolf out.
She claims she only meant to scare her away from wanting Neville by letting her see her husband as he changed. But now he knows why his mouth tasted of blood when he woke up the morning. He had killed his wife, the woman he loved more than anything in the world, while a werewolf. And now he knew.
At that point, I had a choice. Kill him right then and let Bitch go free, or stand back and let him exact brutal revenge on Bitch.
Going against my usual preference for maximum nobility, I let him kill Bitch. She made him kill his wife and wake up with her blood in his mouth and (presumably) some of her in his stomach. I couldn’t kill Neville, whom she had so deeply wronged, and let Bitch, the one who did it to her, go free.
So chomp chomp, he kills her, then begs me to kill him because he has nothing left in the world and can’t live with the knowledge of what he’s done, and is tired of living with his curse. I grant him this mercy.
That’s typical of the tone of the game, which is, I think, a major factor in its universal appeal. For a lot of people, a storyline like that would be impressively dark and moving and grim, and that could be transformational for some people.
But I have had depression for a long time and to me, that storyline is just another day. A day in which my grimly dedicated services are needed to resolve a situation, even if that resolution leads to two deaths.
On a lighter note, I have figure out that the character I play, Geralt, is basically Christopher Lambert. You know, the guy who played Raiden in the Mortal Kombat movie?
I mean, look at him :
There can be only one… lawsuit?
He’s got the white hair, he’s got the rough unshaven facial features, the same grim look.
And this is what he sounds like :
The accent seals it for me. I actually thought they might have gotten Lambert himself to do the voice. But no, it’s this guy doing a Lambert impression :
That’s Lambert alright. Not that I mind. Lambert’s a very cool actor and it’s very cool to see “him” in a role with decent writing, unlike a lot of his vehicles.
But I wonder how he feels about it.
Oh, and for a long time, the game would freeze up for 2-7 seconds at random intervals. And I put up with it because it’s a great game. But after having tried eight or nine other things that the Internet suggested, I finally found one that works. Yay!
That will make playing a lot less aggravating. Although, truth be told, I had adjusted to the pauses to such an extent that I didn’t even notice them half the time.
And that’s weird.. Where was my mind going while I waited?
It made me feel like the game was winning. So I had to find a solution before this missing time thing did not creep into my life.
I mean, sure, it would be nice not to subjectively experience annoying delays and skip a lot of waiting for things.
But I am pretty sure that spacing out all the time would be pretty freaky to others and not at all how a sane person behaves.
And sanity is my goal, distant though it might be.
I can’t even imagine what it would be like to sane. I have been depressed for my entire life, starting when I got molested at the tender age of 3.
But I will get there. Some day I will catch up to that massive emotional backlog and free myself of all that ice around my heart and walk, healthy and dry, in the sunlight.
Until then, all I can do is keep plodding along.
Luckily, I am very good at that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
