The broad strokes are all amazing, but I fear the stiff writing could ruin its best moments.
At Gamescom last week, I got a chance to peer into what CDPR and Fool’s Theory are cooking in The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past. And I loved most of what I saw, but one thing stuck out for me—and not in a good way either—and that’s the expansion’s new writing style.
Overall, the whole of the DLC, at least the hour I got to see played by CDPR itself in a purpose-built cinema, felt like not a day had passed between 2016 and today. The developers really nailed it all: the music, the atmosphere, the way Geralt behaves, and all the jank that comes with that. It truly fits the recognizable Witcher 3 framework, both in tone and art direction and level design.
The way Geralt interacts with NPCs is also iconic. The same quips, the same arrogance, and the same witcher putting peasants in their place because they are just a tad too drunk on vodka. When passing by any number of characters, they still throw out those same one-liners, those that you will constantly hear when going through the same places, to the point where you’ll probably memorize them all (remember pam pam pa-ram).
In general, I just loved what I saw. It’s a direct continuation of what made The Witcher 3 good as a game, but I can’t say that I’m not concerned by the writing.
Geralt, like all the other witchers, has an American accent. The developers used this method to differentiate this faction from everyone else in the world, all of whom speak a number of British and Irish English varieties. And the writing in The Witcher 3 overall followed this thread. Whenever Doug Cockle, Geralt’s VA, spoke, it never felt off or out of sync with the text itself. Everything was as it should be.
And it was the same for all the other witchers, too. The game took into consideration this accentual and dialectic difference between witchers and others, and the writing followed suit.
But in the DLC, it seems the new writers just did not understand that. Geralt, i.e., Doug Cockle, constantly says inversions and dialogues that would only ever work within a heavily theatrical British English environment, or even just as text rather than in speech.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/witcher-3-songs-of-the-past-impressions/
