Finished the Witcher DLCs. (Previous on the Witcher III: 1, 2) Really good! Bioware and Bethesda have found a real worthy competitor in CD Projekt Red. They got me thinking about two things though:

AAA open world games now have anticlimaxes. Like, you’ll go through all the way through the main mission chain, fight the big bad, and then after you’ve beat him there’ll be some more missions as a wind-down, but the thing is they’re not apex challenges but kind of cozy scenarios.

The first one I noticed was Red Dead Redemption, where the return to domesticity was an important step to resolving themes and setting up the tone for the ultimate resolution, so fair. But last year the weird James Bond-inspired AC:Syndicate chain where you take missions from Queen Victoria, I don’t even know what that was. You could say it’s more content for people who’ve exhausted everything else but that chain ends too eventually and I’m not sure what the point was of putting that particular lump of content after the main quest rather than integrated with it like other side quests.

(It also says something about the ideological drift of the AC games, where the assassins who started out as killers-of-tyrants-and-bringers-of-freedom still do that sometimes [while being heavy-handedly reminded how much they’re mucking society up for people], but lately they’ve been resisting the French Revolution because democracy is an more insidious means of control than monarchy and helping the Queen defend the British Empire - but! cheekily mentioning that maybe she could politely consider not keeping India under the colonial yoke.)

Of course the entire Blood and Wine DLC felt like this - the environment and culture of fake Western Europe wine country is so much more pleasant than the fake Poland-and-the-Hebrides you’d been dragging ass around - but even within it after you resolve everything there’s a mission to go drink and pick flowers and bullshit with an old friend, and then a mission to laze about in the sun and muse about retirement with your girlfriend.

I wonder if some of this recent tendency towards anticlimax has to do with the concurrent rise of DLC and particularly season pass-based business models - that you can’t just blow up the world in the climax, and you need to dramatize everything settling back to normal ready for the next sitcom episode.

(BECAUSE Read Dead Redemption wrapped up so comprehensively, the only single player DLC had to go as an alternate universe zombie plot)

The second thought I had, watching the close bond of the higher vampires Regis and Detlaff play out in tragedy, was wait a second, is this relationship fucking queer-coded? Because I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen that stuff treated through metaphor. And I’m like “well, you know, Detlaff had a female paramour, it was an important plot point” but then I think.

There’s this huge world, and like I’ve said so much of your experience is driven not by the machinations of kings but in response to intimate personal lives so there are TONS of young lovers, or married couples, or people driven by lust, over and over, and I can’t remember seeing one single same-gender pairing, or even intimation of same.

Poland, huh!

So that’s a point, I’ll scoff at people who take issue with CD Projekt Red for not at all holding ~*~representation~*~ as a particularly pressing end in itself, and roll my eyes (indulgently!) at BioWare for so eagerly and transparently beavering away to stuff affirmational stuff in wherever there’s space.

But I DID just go through a 80+ hour total experience with what I took to be the best yet simulation of a coherent world full of people with actual interiority - the most humane AAA game I’d seen - that was so appealing it’s bolstered my respect and interest for the actual home culture of its creators, and only in incidental hindsight noticed that gayness had no place in this world.

(Actually in further introspection, I suppose you might be able to count the way people in Toussaint use “bumdiddler” as an insult. Poland!)

((Okay I decided to do some googling and am reminded that in the introductory area, you do encounter a man living in loathed exile in the woods because he was caught in a gay relationship with a lord’s heir [who suicided]. Okay, I remembered the tone-setting mission that used a dwarven blacksmith to establish the rural Polish-style ethnic tensions and the threat of pogrom but forgot that, fair enough.

And there was that elf tailor who liked to wear dresses, who I remember making the distinction that he didn’t identify as a woman, he identified as a shapeshifter.

Oh, and I see all these things saying Ciri is non-straight because… in what was written in the books and not at all mentioned in the game… as a younger girl living on the streets she fell in with a gang which included another homeless girl who forced herself on Ciri… and vulnerable and abused with no other place in society and and a professed desire not to be alone again, she ends up being this girl’s bedwarmer for a while. OH. WELL THEN.))