Jan
9th
2017
Fantasy and Reality · 2:01pm Jan 9th, 2017
It's finally clicked why Witcher 3 is the smash hit that it is; why it's one of the rare games that has handily outsold its prequels.
Never before have I played a fantasy RPG injected with so much... Reality.
You meet characters that you initially pass off as cliche; you've seen them before, but then the curtain is slowly pulled back, and you see why they are the way they are. Seeing what war does to people; to a family; to a man. Seeing a battlefield with charred corpses and thinking what a pointless waste of life. Seeing how racism and hatred systematically infects a church and a city.
Nothing brings these thoughts and emotions to the surface more than the music.
I've heard the main game described as a "peasant misery simulator", which I find fairly accurate. It shows how horrible a war can be, and that real life doesn't have fairytale endings.