This game has a lot of fill. I really shouldn't complain, because what is life if not a series of filler quests between notable events (what, I've got to go to the store to retrieve a list of items and bring them back home - jeez, how many more of these fetch quests do I have to do before I can advance the plot already)? Still, it comes to be a flaw when the significant information becomes so spread out in time and so buried in minor incident that you forget about it by the time it becomes relevant. For example, I just recently learned that Geralt has iron-clad proof that Raymond the detective, who was helping to uncover the location and activities of the Salamandra gang, had actually been killed and replaced by the leader of the gang. I know this because Geralt said as much to an npc, but for the life of me, I couldn't tell you what that proof actually is (I just looked it up on the wiki, and apparently you find the real Raymond's body, which I either completely overlooked or somehow the game glitched and triggered the dialogue anyway).
I think what I'm supposed to be doing is chasing the threads of a complex plot that can't be boiled down to simple summaries or easy answers. The game advertised itself by saying "NO GOOD AND NO EVIL - ONLY CHOICES AND CONSEQUENCES" and presumably that means that The Witcher is attempting to create an ethically murky world where the line between right and wrong is not easy to discern. However, most of the time I feel less like I'm being presented with serious moral dilemmas and more like I simply don't have enough information to make a confident decision. And perhaps that, too, is realistic. How often in life do we fail to have the whole story? How often are we confronted by lies and self-serving mythology? Yet, to the degree that it is realistic, it emulates one of the worst facets of life. However ideologically dubious it might be, I like it when video games present me with a clear moral path. In some ways, it is better to play as an outright villain than to have to navigate through a story that casts you as a conflicted antihero (which is not to say that I don't like stories with conflicted antiheros, but when I'm presented with a choice, that's generally a path I avoid, with the caveat that in video game morality, slaughtering ordinary work-a-day mercenaries, gangsters, and goblins does not really count as a cause for ethical conflict).
I may be overthinking this, though. Geralt is really just a monster hunter. Traipsing through a swamp, killing random ghouls and plant monsters, that's where he's at his best. This whole thing with Salamandra is really just a distraction from his main business, so perhaps instead of viewing the sidequests as filler that distracts from the main plot, it is in fact the main plot that is superfluous. All this time I spend getting confused by the machinations of the various factions in Vizima's underworld is really time that I could better spend slaying cockatrices and hunting vampires. In which case, I'd better get it over with as soon as possible.
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