I really, really like BioWare games.
Actually, I love 'em. And I love the romances in them, too.
But as I was playing The Witcher III,
I was struck by how it posed to me a question that I've never been asked in a BioWare game before.
And that got me thinking about why that was.
What, from an interactive, storytelling perspective,
let the folks at CD Projekt Red do something that I'm not sure you could do in a BioWare title?
Oh, and, uh, if you haven't played The Witcher III yet,
don't worry, I'm not gonna spoil anything
and you really don't need to have played it to follow the episode, so, we're good.
In The Witcher III, you have two long term romance options:
Triss and Yennefer.
Both of whom the main character has a lot of history with
and both of whom he's been involved with in the past.
His relationship with Yennefer is tumultuous. Burning.
In some ways self-destructive but always passionate.
His relationship with Triss is more tragic but gentler and less destructive.
And now the player has to choose between them.
For all the player's history with both of these characters
that's not a choice they've had to face before.
And this gave me pause.
Not because it's something, we've never seen in a game before,
but rather because of the subtleties defining the choice.
As an example, in most BioWare games
when I have the option to choose a character to get romantic with,
I feel as though I'm choosing what I want most.
It's almost like picking from a buffet.
And that's fine but, as we've talked about before,
that's not usually how actual romance goes.
Especially when confronted with having to choose between two people who you love.
Each of whom you've parted from due to circumstances beyond your control.
And yet here, they managed to provide a perspective on the simple profundity of that choice.
In The Witcher, Geralt's relationship with each of these women represents something in himself.
Choosing which of these relationships to pursue isn't simply about what I want as a player
but instead, on some level, it's a question of Geralt having to choose between
who he is and who he thinks he wants to be.
Yennefer is wild, and restless, and free - a mirror to Geralt himself.
Triss is caring, and kind, and working to make the world a better place.
She's the person that Geralt, below that rough exteriour, believes he wants to be.
To love Yennefer is to be true to who he is.
To love Triss is to become that better man he imagines himself being.
Neither choice is wrong, but both options feel like they require giving something up.
And the tug of war here is great,
because throughout the game, Yennefer's interactions with Geralt are natural and flirtatious and unbridled,
while the interactions with Triss are often more tender and more caring, but they aren't quite as natural for Geralt.
And you can feel that, watching them.
You can see him wanting to be with Triss while also wanting to be with Yennefer.
This is a painful, but eminently human, eminently real dilemma.
There is the person, who drives him crazy and the person, who is so much better for him, who he maybe should love.
And in being presented with this more nuanced alternative
the player is given a chance to make a far more interesting decision than "Who do I like best?".
And in seing this dilemma play out, we get a deep and meaningful insight into Geralt
and, perhaps more importantly in a game, we as players get to make a profound decision about who this character really is.
Who my Geralt chose says more to me about Geralt than who my Shephard chose ever said about them.
Which leads me to the truly fascinating part of this from a design perspective.
For a long time, the prevailing argument has been that a blank slate character is best for truly interactive storytelling.
The theory goes that it allows the player to imbue the character with the most of themselves
and provides the most flexibility for the player to craft the character they want.
But I think The Witcher calls that into question.
By having a purely blank-slate to start from
as is the case in many of the BioWare games, where you even choose the character's backstory,
you may actually limit the narrative situations it's possible to present the player
and thus limit the narrative choices you can give them.
I can't put a character in a situation where they're torn between
choosing the love for who they are or the love for they want to be
unless the character not only has those aspects of themselves somewhat defined
but is also the sort of character who would care about such things,
and who would care about such a choice.
By trying to let the player make all the choices about the character,
we actually eliminate many of the most nuanced and interesting choices they could make,
because the idea of letting a player make all the choices about a character
is a fantasy in the first place.
We've never actually done that.
If we actually let the player make all the small choices that give a character CHARACTER,
if we let them have truly unlimited choices in every situation
to really create a holistic, rounded realistic person?
We'd never build a game.