Fantasy game bad guys are usually evil because of their black little hearts, but in The Witcher everyone has a motive

May 25, 2015 10:20 GMT  ·  By

Many people consider the recently released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt one of the best video games of recent years, offering an engrossing experience that is leagued beyond what other notable role-playing game makers have created so far.

One of the title's main draws is its deep world, letting you not only tackle the main, over-arching main storyline but also a myriad of detailed side quests. One of the reasons straying from the main questline in The Witcher 3 is fun is the fact that developer CD Projekt RED put a lot of thought into fleshing out a believable fantasy world.

Many titles treat optional objectives as padding, with fetch quests and other such menial tasks being what makes up the bulk of the content, whereas The Witcher has the decency of letting you do things that an actual witcher would undertake.

The vibrant fantasy world has been praised ever since Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski decided to create it, and fortunately, CD Projekt RED has followed his blueprint. Instead of the usual clear-cut good versus evil faction struggle seen in many works of fiction, The Witcher 3 challenges us with something a lot more relatable, a lot similar to the world we live in today.

Copying reality is most of the time better than trying to reinvent it

If Tolkien's work and "Harry Potter" are Disney-grade fantasy, The Witcher is a pretty serious affair that puts the focus on the murky grey area of life that makes us uncomfortable and is less appropriate for simple situations where there is a clear delimitation between "us" and "them."

The simple notion of "villain," usually representing a cardboard cutout antagonist that has no real goals aside from something along the lines of ruling the world or destroying it just for the sake of providing a dangling carrot at the end of a stick for the protagonists, is transformed in The Witcher 3.

Fallout 3: New Vegas was a lot better than the original game when it comes to how immersive its world was, due to the fact that it actually felt alive. People planted crops near their houses, and you could actually see them trying to eke out a living in the wastes.

Similarly, The Witcher 3 uses a realistic model for its world, one where notions of right and wrong are relative to the side you're on, and are more of a balancing act that ripples into the ongoing lives of the inhabitants of the world, rather than having the shiny veneer of a holy crusade.

If you're undergoing hardship and trying to make your life better at the expense of others, your group will feel entitled to behave as it's not in the wrong, no matter how far things are taken.

Being right or wrong is simply a matter of winning or losing

In the same manner, nobody blames a lion for murdering its food, and nobody blames a ghost for haunting someone and feeding on the person's suffering, because they're just doing what is natural to them.

That said, getting rid of annoying or potentially dangerous things like lions and ghosts living in your vicinity is not seen as something as bad as kicking a puppy, because of the impact it has on those nearby characters' lives.

A lot of species like the quagga have had the Audacity of competing for forage area with domesticated species used by humans for food. Today, they exist no longer, just like the Tasmanian wolf, due to the fact that mankind wanted to expand and proliferate.

The monsters in The Witcher are treated pretty much the same way. Geralt treats his job as pest control, and occasionally goes out of his way in order to enforce what he sees as justice due to the fact that he also has a conscience and that mankind can sometimes be terrible.

For the most part though, he's just doing his job, and actively tries to stay out of people's business.

You're not there to cast a moral judgment, just to get rid of a monster

The creatures he has to fight are sometimes sentient, sometimes perhaps more justified to exist than the creatures who want them gone. But it's all the same. They are collateral victims of civilization, the ones who pay the price of progress with their lives, just like so many others did over the course of human history.

The world we see in The Witcher 3 is not merely a human-centric power fantasy, just like our own world, but it is becoming so through the actions of its inhabitants, and Geralt's monster hunting ways are just one of the things that could be construed as evil by the creatures who see their domain being encroached on by mankind.

Sure, the experience is still centered around you, and your actions do influence a lot of future events, but in the end, you're just one of the vectors, and your mark on the world is very limited, in the grand scheme of things.

The monsters you slay are free actors in the game world, every bit as much as you are, and many times they are more charismatic or endearing than the ones who employ you to take them out. The men who want you to deal with a monster may actually be more evil, in the traditional sense, than the thing you are slaying, but your job isn't to redeem the world, just to get paid for playing exterminator.

If you do manage to save anyone or make the world a slightly safer place while doing your job, that's just a bonus. People have it bad, they will have it bad in the future, and you try to keep yourself out of their lives. The world is indifferent to your existence, and you're fine with that.