Virtually nothing of importance has happened in the last three hours. The game has done that thing that rpgs do where you need some simple piece of information to proceed to the next step of your quest but the npc who can help you somehow contrives to send you out on a bunch of small, unrelated errands that eat up a lot of time, but don't really amount to much.
Most of my time has thus far been spent walking from place to place. All the enemies I've encountered have only come out at night, so half the time I'd be perfectly safe. It kind of feels like padding to me. The layout of the level is basically a huge looped tunnel, and if you have two objectives on opposite sides of the map, there's no way to cut across, so you wind up having to cover a lot of ground.
I'm not really inclined to complain about this too much, because there's something enjoyably relaxing about just wandering around and looking at things, and unlike a game like Ship Simulator Extremes there's enough action to keep my mind occupied when things start to flag. The combat is still on the simple side, and I'm not sure it'll get better. All the talents I've unlocked so far has been passive bonuses.
I think I've got a handle on the alchemy system. Each of the ingredients is associated with a couple of different colors, and the alchemy recipes require a certain combination of colors. This is a nice change from something like Skyrim's alchemy system, where not having the exact right ingredient will shut you out of using important potions. The only thing that concerns me is that I'm not accustomed to using expendable items in rpgs, so I'll probably just wind up hoarding materials and finished potions without actually benefiting from them.
It's hard for me to get a grip on my emotional reaction to the game after only a few sidequests. I like that the errands I'm sent out on are easy enough that I can I finish them in a reasonable amount of time. Completing a quest, even one that is simply taking an item from one place to another, is moderately satisfying, and the leveling rate is fast enough that I'm getting a genuine sense of progress. I'm thankful that I haven't encountered any more terrible sex scenes. There's some kind of political stuff going on with non-humans, where they are persecuted by the dominant human majority, but the elves and dwarves are thus far so generic that I find it difficult to care.
I don't anticipate ever becoming really invested in the story or the world of The Witcher. There would have to be some incredible swerve or revelation that has not been foreshadowed. However, I'm also starting to become convinced that the uncomfortable sexual politics I was afraid of in the first post are a small part of the overall game, so I'm not too worried about disliking it either. What I expect is to be moderately entertained for the next fourteen hours (or beyond, if I don't want to quit when the deadline comes), and is not moderate entertainment exactly what one wants from a video game?
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