The Bloody Baron quest is a great example of the depth of the side quests. It's tragic and discusses important topics in a way that isn't just black & white.

Bloody Baron is a main quest, though. Anyways, side quests are indeed very well written. The werewolf quest in Velen comes to mind. The one where where you help Cerys an Craite on her own quest is also amazing (the one with the oven).

I also enjoyed the serial killer quest line in Novigrad.

> It's tragic and discusses important topics in a way that isn't just black & white.

That's why I love the Witcher lore. It's one of very, very few fantasy settings where ethics are fuzzy and ugly. It makes other fantasy settings look like rom coms.

Blame Tolkien's World War I trauma, with which he coped by writing a series of therapeutic novels where ethical nuance quite understandably wasn't on the menu - novels which inadvertently inspired a genre that has tended mostly to be more of the same sort of flight from modernity, but without the originator's nigh peerless world-building skill.

(I used to write Quenya and Sindarin in the tengwar! Probably still could; I'm sure I kept those notes. Brilliant languages, if heavily systematized in the same unrealistic way as Esperanto. But I still to this day can't make it through the main trilogy without running out of patience. Would you believe, I used to think I was the one with the problem?)

Just finished reading the whole LOTR series to my daughter night after night. It is very long winded, yes. But she actually had little problem with it, and she actually preferred the portions that many consider long winded and tangential (Bombadil and Scouring of the Shire for example) But he was trying to do something with the English language that others haven't got, trying to bring back an Anglo-Saxon poetics to it. It is quite lovely when read aloud, tho the landscape descriptions... oh my long winded.

But yeah, the good vs evil stuff is pretty ham-fisted and always was. And there's some pretty racist stuff in there.

Agree. The Bloody Baron in itself was a huge demonstration of why Witcher 3 is just so different compared to all the other games out there. It's so well written.

Already the first witcher contract about the ghost in the well blew my mind. Many great stories and two DLCs worth every penny. That whole storyline of Hearts of Stone may be the best ever in any game.

I have a WiiU but I still don't know should I get a Switch or buy the WiiU version of Zelda. I'm a massive Nintendo fan but mostly playing with a PC nowadays.

I bought the WiiU version of Zelda and will hold off on the Switch until they get more games and get the glitches out.

The WiiU version plays fine. A few frame rate hiccups on complex scenes here and there but nothing terrible. And I hear the Switch has this when docked anyways.

What I love about the Witcher stories are how well they can be looked at as a fantastical commentary on modern life, especially with business and politics.

Right now I’m playing through 3 and seeing Geralt as a monster-slayer consultant that occasionally has to deal with deadbeat clients. Interesting to see how he protects his finances before and after these encounters with the buyer (there’s only one quest I can recall where he actually asks for a deposit, since the quest giver reeks of thievery and corruption).

well Skyrim has that with the globalist vs nationalist debate represented by the empire vs stormcloaks. That's the only political issue I can remember from it though

Same here... I tried to like Skyrim a lot (using SE edition), and its just a very boring sandbox.

I feel better now. I actually played Skyrim recently and thought "Man, do I just not like video games anymore?" It's nice to see people describing how I felt and why I stopped playing it.

Skyrim is a fun game to pick up once in awhile, but it gets very easy and very empty quite fast. I should be enthralled by the appearance of a dragon, and it should be a significant challenge to take it on, but after a few encounters, it becomes rote and mundane. There's also no consequence for dawdling on completing various objectives - I took a good few days to go to Kynesgrove after Delphine told me to get there ASAP. Little things, i guess, but they all add up to a pretty hollow experience.

Pick up Witcher 3 - it is excellend and fun game compared to Skyrim. Plus it treats you like an adult when it comes to choices you are given.

Skyrim feels like a boring MMO with no other players. If you have done MMOs, you wonder what the big deal is.

"there are serious rails."

A.K.A. an emotionally engaging story, which would be very hard to do without some sequence of narrative. A complete sandbox is an endless timesink - if I'm building something freeform I'd rather do it using a medium which provides lasting value - art, 3D modeling, programming or such. But these are just personal preferences, I'm not claiming any objective value of one over the other (narrative v.s. sandbox).

I don't enjoy the default Skyrim game all that much. However, the Requiem mod which gives it more of an old school feel allows for more emergent stories. Because it's not on rails and combat is intense you will spend 15 minutes running away from something and not always make it to safety. One of my strongest memory's is a fight that took all of 8 seconds but I was riding the edge of death the entire time. This was not chasing some boss for epic loot, this was just not dying.

One of my favorite side-missions in TW3 is Fencing Lessons.

This article[0] goes into detail on why I think it's so great, but contains spoilers.

[0] https://killscreen.com/articles/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-att...