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\u2019ll go through all the way through the main mission chain, fight the big bad, and then after you\u2019ve beat him there\u2019ll be some more missions as a wind-down, but the thing is they\u2019re 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\u2019t even know what that was. You could say it\u2019s more content for people who\u2019ve exhausted everything else but that chain ends too eventually and I\u2019m 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\u2019re mucking society up for people], but lately they\u2019ve 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\u2019d been dragging ass around - but even within it after you resolve everything there\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t remember the last time I\u2019ve seen that stuff treated through metaphor. And I\u2019m like \u201cwell, you know, Detlaff had a female paramour, it was an important plot point\u201d but then I think.
There\u2019s this huge world, and like I\u2019ve 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\u2019t remember seeing one single same-gender pairing, or even intimation of same.
Poland, huh!
So that\u2019s a point, I\u2019ll 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\u2019s 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\u2019d seen - that was so appealing it\u2019s 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 \u201cbumdiddler\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019t identify as a woman, he identified as a shapeshifter.
Oh, and I see all these things saying Ciri is non-straight because\u2026 in what was written in the books and not at all mentioned in the game\u2026 as a younger girl living on the streets she fell in with a gang which included another homeless girl who forced herself on Ciri\u2026 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\u2019s bedwarmer for a while. OH. WELL THEN.))
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