Much of my gaming time lately has been spent roaming the expanse of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s enormous world. I played about 20-25 hours of it when it came out a decade ago (ugh), but even with that I barely scratched the surface before getting distracted and letting it fall to the wayside. Still, I played enough of the game to know that it was a masterpiece, and just the bit that I played was enough for me to consider it my Game of the Year in 2015.
For ten years, the specter of The Witcher 3 loomed over my backlog, until I finally decided this was the year I would attempt to beat it. So I started again, from the beginning. Almost 40 hours in, I’m still nowhere near the end, but it’s already cementing its place as one of my favorite games of all time. And if I stick it through to the end like I plan to, it will probably be the longest game I’ve ever finished as well.
In my first attempt to play the game back in 2015, I was struck by how fleshed-out even many of the side quests were, and how often I needed to make tough decisions that didn’t have an obvious correct answer. Playing the game even further has really driven home just how brilliantly The Witcher 3 handles moral dilemmas. Even in just the opening third or so of the game, I’ve already had several moments that have stuck with me well after moving beyond their outcomes.
Before continuing, it goes without saying that there are going to be heavy TW3 spoilers ahead, specifically for the Velen portion of the game. Read on with caution! And buckle up, because this is going to be a long one.
Morality in Other Games
Games haven’t had the best track record with morality systems. Often, they’re very binary, black-or-white decisions with obvious outcomes. While playing The Witcher 3, I’ve been recalling some previous games I’ve played that present moral dilemmas and comparing them to the decisions in TW3.
One of the poster children for moral choices in gaming in its time was Infamous, a game that I finally got around to playing last year. Throughout Infamous, players are given a number of situations that reward Cole, the main character, with either good or evil Karma depending on the choices the player makes in the moment (along with obvious things like, y’know, not slaughtering innocent civilians). The choices in Infamous are almost comical – taken to such binary extremes as “You find a puppy. Adopt the puppy, or punt the puppy into the stratosphere?” There’s no room for nuance or for the player to carefully consider which choices bring about the best outcome.
Star Wars is another franchise known for its focus on morality, with the Light Side and Dark Side being two halves of the Force. The Jedi Knight series takes into account which Force powers you upgrade: players who invest more points into defensive options such as Healing and Protection will align with the Light Side, while those who choose aggressive powers such as Lightning and Choke will ultimately fall to the Dark Side. The Force Unleashed, in contrast, doesn’t give a damn about Force powers and bases your alignment solely on one decision that you make before the final boss of the game.
Knights of the Old Republic is the standout among Star Wars games for the wealth of decisions it presents to the player. Your dialogue choices and actions throughout the game contribute to your alignment with either the Dark or Light Side. Selfless choices that benefit the greater good will gravitate the main character towards the Light, while Dark Side characters will choose more self-serving decisions. While a lot of those choices are still fairly black-or-white, it was an impressive system in 2003 when the game released, and it still holds up fairly well to this day.
Even the Mass Effect trilogy, known for its wealth of choices and consequences for those choices, isn’t immune to binary morality. You have the option of playing Shepard as a Paragon or Renegade, and this essentially plays out as choosing between two dialogue options in any given conversation: a perfectly polite and wise diplomat, or an unmitigated dick. That being said, there are quite a few deeper and more difficult choices that have overarching effects on the trilogy’s storyline, and your actions in each game can have ramifications that carry over to the next game.
So with all that behind us, what does The Witcher 3 do differently?
Morality in The Witcher 3
In The Witcher 3, when the player is presented with a decision to make, there is rarely a good or bad option. The situations we come across throughout Geralt’s journey are often morally gray, requiring us to decide for ourselves what is the lesser of two evils. Even seemingly noble or “good” decisions at the time can come back to haunt us later, having unforeseen consequences that might even be worse than making the “bad” decision in the first place.
Almost every time that I come to one of these decision points, I’ve had to give careful consideration to what the ramifications of each option would be, and I’ve found myself paralyzed by indecision on so many occasions. The fact that The Witcher 3 can consistently elicit this reaction from me every time a moral choice comes up is a testament to its writing and design. In so many other games, it’s obvious what the “best” choice is. In TW3, it’s rarely obvious at all, and there often isn’t a “best” or even a “good” choice. More often than not, someone’s going to get screwed over by your choices and actions regardless.
As I alluded to before, this type of storytelling and decision-making isn’t exclusive to the main quest. Even random side quests can pose difficult dilemmas that cause you to question your sense of morality and what is good in the world. One such side quest that sticks out to me is an early Velen quest called Wild at Heart.
Wild at Heart
Wild at Heart starts off like a pretty standard side quest. Geralt takes a contract from a hunter named Niellen, whose wife Hanna has gone missing. After some investigation, Geralt finds a corpse surrounded by a pack of wolves. Obviously it’s Hanna…she went out into the woods and got cornered by wolves and killed. Easy investigation, right? But, in fact, it’s not Hanna’s corpse, but instead that of a dog.
Turns out that Hanna’s sister, Margrit, actually has the hots for Niellen and knows he has a dark secret that she suspects would make Hanna leave him. Geralt can either accept a bribe from her to lie to Niellen about finding Hanna’s body, or continue his investigation. If he continues his search, he eventually finds Hanna’s actual ravaged corpse. He deduces that she was killed by a werewolf.
Geralt tracks down said werewolf only to find out that it’s, indeed, Niellen, who would go out into the forest to hide during his transformations so that he wouldn’t harm anyone. After Geralt fights with the beast, Margrit appears and tells Niellen the whole story. She had sent Hanna out so she could witness what Niellen really was, but in his werewolf-induced rage he had unknowingly slaughtered her. Upon realizing this, Werewolf-Niellen prepares to kill Margrit as revenge for her actions. It’s now time to make a choice – does Geralt allow Niellen to enact his revenge? Or does he fight off Niellen and allow Margrit to escape?
There’s no good choice here. Niellen is, by all accounts, a good, loving man who happens to have a tragic curse. Margrit is an incredibly selfish woman, causing her own sister’s death because of her own jealousy. Whoever survives will be haunted by their actions for the rest of their lives. And, in fact, if you allow Niellen to enact his revenge, he then comes to Geralt and asks him to end his life and his suffering. Either way, this story doesn’t end happily for anyone.
Getting back to the main quest, let’s take a closer look at three situations in my journey through the game’s Velen region that especially stuck with me, though there are plenty more that I could easily include.
A Towerful of Mice
This secondary quest sees Geralt investigating a tower on a remote island at the bidding of Keira Metz. This tower had been the home of a mage, who had given refuge to a lord and his family as they fled the Nilfgaardian invasion. Geralt finds out that the mage, Alexander, had been experimenting with rats and infecting them with a deadly plague in order to find a cure, even willing to go so far as to experiment on humans as well.
Geralt discovers the ghost of the lord’s daughter, Anabelle, who tells him she was in love with Graham, a poor fisherman from a nearby village, but her father did not approve. During a peasant revolt, as the residents of the tower are slaughtered, Alexander gave Anabelle a potion, which made her fall into a deep paralyzing sleep to make the peasants think she was dead, in the hopes that it would save her life. But, in an absolutely gruesome twist of fate, she died anyway because the rats ate her alive while paralyzed. Oy vey.
Either way, now she’s stuck here and inadvertently causing a curse on the whole island because she’s pissed that Graham seemingly abandoned her and fled the island (when in actuality he also thought she was dead) . She tells Geralt that she’s ready to forgive him though, and asks for him to carry her bones to the nearby village and give them to Graham so he can lay her to rest. So obviously this is a pretty straightforward decision, right? He takes her bones to Graham, he buries them, and she’s finally at peace and the curse over the island is broken.
Actually, no. Doing so results in Anabelle revealing her true form, a plague maiden, who immediately enacts her revenge and kills off Graham. The good news – the curse is broken. The bad news – now there’s a plague maiden running free spreading disease everywhere it goes.
The other choice isn’t much better. If Geralt refuses to take her bones, she gets really pissed and attacks him in her plague maiden form. After fighting her off, Geralt finds Graham and brings him to the tower to tell Anabelle that he still loves her. She won’t believe him unless he kisses her, plague maiden form and all – which he willingly does, and promptly dies. At least the curse is broken?
This quest stuck with me long after completing it because the seemingly obvious “good” choice is arguably worse than the alternative. Graham meets an unfortunate and unfair end either way, but at least this way the island’s curse is lifted and the plague maiden doesn’t roam free.
There’s no good choice in A Towerful of Mice, and you have to determine what you believe is the lesser of two evils. But there’s a main quest that presents a choice with even more difficult ramifications…
The Whispering Hillock
This is the single decision that I’ve seen come up most when referring to the Velen portion of the game’s story, and it’s also the choice that I struggled the most to make when I reached this point of the game.
The swamps of Velen are ruled by the Crones of Crookback Bog. These three ancient witches have a habit of being “generous” with their aid to the people of Velen, but at steep costs – part of which involves tributes of children for the Crones to seemingly eat. They inspire both fear and worship from the citizens of the swamp in an unquestionably abusive relationship. The Crones speak through an older woman seemingly bound to their service. This old woman lives in a clearing in the swamp and takes care of the orphans that are sent to the Crones as tribute, protecting and treating them as if they were her own, and they affectionately call her Gran.
As Geralt unravels the mysteries of the swamp and its rulers, he is directed to the Whispering Hillock to solve a string of murders happening in the nearby village of Downwarren. Once arriving there, he finds a spirit trapped beneath an ancient oak tree. The spirit claimed to have been the protector of Velen until the Crones had murdered her and imprisoned her spirit. She doesn’t deny the deaths of the townsfolk but claims that they are simply unfortunate losses brought about by the unpredictable forces of nature that protect her. She asks Geralt to free her, promising to rescue the children in the clearing from their inevitable fate at the hands of the Crones.
Now Geralt has a decision to make, and its consequences are significant. Does he trust the mysterious spirit to keep its word and free her? Or does he smell something fishy and kill the spirit? After all, she’s not exactly denying that she’s already killed innocent civilians. But killing her would doom the children to their terrible fate.
If Geralt frees the spirit, she keeps her word and frees the children from the Crones’ clutches. But she also attacks Downwarren, slaughtering nearly its entire populace, leaving us to wonder if perhaps we’ve unleashed an even greater evil than the Crones upon Velen. That’s not all, either, because the Crones are pretty pissed about losing their meal ticket and have taken out their revenge on Gran, turning her into a Water Hag. If Geralt kills the spirit, however, Downwarren is saved, but he returns to find the clearing empty – the children having been seemingly taken by the Crones. With her precious children gone, Gran has devolved into madness, losing her mind after the trauma of her loss.
This is already a huge moral quandary – are the lives of a handful of children worth the lives of an entire village and who knows how many more now that the spirit is unleashed? Will freeing the spirit actually end the Crones’ reign of terror in the swamp, or will it just replace them with something far worse? But it’s made even more difficult by the figure that ties it all together; a man who may very well exemplify The Witcher 3‘s complex sense of morality more than any other.
The Bloody Baron
Ask anyone who’s played The Witcher 3 about the highlights of the game, and they’ll almost inevitably bring up the Bloody Baron, whose story runs through the entirety of the Velen portion of the game’s main quest.
Phillip Strenger, known as the Bloody Baron, is the de facto ruler of Velen after the Nilfgaardian sacking of Temeria. He is a fierce warrior with an even fiercer temper, amplified by his severe alcoholism. This results in him violently reacting to news of Anna having an affair with another man, killing her lover and beginning a string of abusiveness towards her. This also causes his relationship with his daughter, Tamara, to become increasingly fractured.
Eventually, after another violent altercation with Anna, who at this point had become pregnant again, he passes out. Waking up, he finds Anna and Tamara gone and the fetus lying dead after Anna seemingly miscarried. He buries the fetus unceremoniously and sets his focus on finding his wife and daughter. In the course of all this, he takes in Ciri, Geralt’s adopted daughter who he’s searching for, after her escapades in the bog.
Enter Geralt, who accepts the Baron’s offer of information about Ciri in exchange for finding Anna and Tamara. But first, they must deal with the stillborn child, because it’s now roaming the town as a botchling. With Geralt’s assistance, the Baron has the first of many confrontations with the consequences of his own actions, having to look his stillborn child in the eye and give her a name and a proper burial in order to turn the botchling into a benevolent lubberkin.
After searching, Geralt finds that Anna and Tamara were attacked by a fiend on the road. Anna’s hands started glowing with fire as the fiend attacked them, and was separated from her daughter. Tamara now lives in Oxenfurt, following the Church of the Eternal Fire, and has no desire to ever see her father again. Anna, however, eludes him for quite a bit longer…
…until he begins to unravel the mysteries of Crookback Bog. You see, when Geralt encounters the Crones in person for the first time, one of them causes a mark on Gran’s hand to burn with fire. He then figures out the mystery: Gran is Anna Strenger, aged beyond her years and mentally torn apart by the curse of the Crones.
The pieces come together. Anna, unwilling to give birth to another child sired by her abusive husband, went to the Crones for a way out. She made a pact with them to do away with her unborn child in exchange for one year of service. True to form though, the Crones caused the fetus to also drain Anna’s strength as it dies, which would kill her as well. Only a magical talisman that she obtained from a local priest saved her from the Crones’ influence. The fetus was lost during the fight with the Baron, but so was the talisman, and the fiend that attacked Anna and Tamara was sent by the Crones to return Anna to their clutches.
With all of this coming to light, it makes the Whispering Hillock decision even more consequential. If the children are taken, Gran – Anna Strenger – is driven to insanity. It is in this state that the Baron is finally reunited with his wife. Vowing to make things right, he takes her off to a distant healer in the hopes that she can be cured. But if the children are saved, Anna is turned into a water hag by the Crones as punishment. Geralt lifts the curse on her, but her life is bound to the curse. She has just enough time to reunite with her daughter and her husband, who apologizes for everything before she draws her last breath. Distraught at having lost everything dear to him, and knowing that it was all his fault, the Baron returns to his keep and hangs himself from a tree.
The Bloody Baron is such a well-written and fascinating character for so many reasons. He’s unquestionably not a good person; he’s done incredibly awful things and honestly deserves nothing but the worst after what he put his family through. He is a broken man, having lost literally everything: his wife, his daughter, his unborn child. Throughout his story, we see a man grappling with the harsh consequences of his own actions, struggling with the reality that he caused it all, but showing true remorse and a will to make things right. Seeing the pain of his self-reflection makes us hope for his redemption. That’s what makes his suicide (depending on Anna’s fate) so tragic despite all the evil he’s done.
Anna herself isn’t a paragon of moral virtue either, cheating on her husband, at times coaxing him knowing that he’ll respond with violence, and conspiring with malevolent witches to kill her own child before it’s even born. Geralt even remarks that “You two deserve each other” as he hears more and more details of their toxic relationship. But despite this, we can see her entire life as a tragedy – one where she never truly found happiness. And despite her miserable life, her ending is even more heartbreaking – either being driven to insanity with no guarantee of a cure, or being reunited with her daughter and seeing her husband’s remorse only at the moment of her death.
Tying It All Together
I’ve never had a game give me such a hard time as The Witcher 3, and I mean that in the best way possible. I’ve never had to stop and carefully consider every choice presented to me in the same way that I have over my 40 or so hours of journeying with Geralt. And if we’re being honest, it’s so difficult because it’s realistic.
Every single one of us has morally gray aspects, and we all have the capability to not only act selfishly, but to reflect on our past ugliness and to atone. And we’ve all had to choose between the lesser of two evils at times. None of us are binarily good or evil – we’re all capable of both, even those we think of as either paragons of righteousness or evil beyond redemption. I think that’s why TW3 handles morality so well – because it’s so real.
I’ve already said so much, and keep in mind that all of this has happened in the first third or so of the game. I don’t know if anything left in the game will top the Bloody Baron’s fascinating and heart-wrenching arc, but I’m anxious to see what lies ahead. What choices will I have to make before the end of Geralt’s journey? And what consequences will those choices have on the people and the world around him?
All I can do is keep playing and find out.
