BarbaricGoose said:
BrotherRool said:
The Witcher isn't mature in terms of sex, women and NPC dialogue. In fact, it's incredibly immature and half the dialogue has been written by a 13 year old. There's a whole gameplay mechanic that would give people who know what a female is migraine's just thinking about the design of it.
'I couldn't sleep last night over the sound of my neighbour beating his wife' as NPC dialoge is something that belongs in Saints Row, it is the purple dildo of maturity and is only fitting in a game which doesn't understand the words it's using.
I'm sorry, but this is full of misinformation.
First of all, you can't say "In fact" and then proceed to say something that is not at all, in any conceivable way, a fact. IN FACT, the game was NOT written by a 13-year-old.
The sex card thing in TW1 was a little silly, yeah. They did away with it in TW2, but frankly, I think people overreacted a bit. Then again, they're gamers, so those two go hand in hand. It WASN'T a gameplay mechanic, though. You couldn't even call it a mini-game. You got cards that depicted naked women, and you got them basically by talking to the right people. Calling it a "Gameplay mechanic" misleads people into thinking there's something like "Hot Coffee" in TW1. There isn't. They were a more lewd take on collectibles. Nothing more.
If you don't like the game, that's fair. There's nothing I can say to change your mind, but you clearly haven't played much of it, or don't remember any of it, so better not to speak ill of it.
I'm sorry for the offence. I played it two weeks ago and yes I didn't play far beyond the first chapter (I think I've mentioned that elsewhere here but this is a pretty megalithic thread by now) because there was a bit with the witch at the end, that touched upon something I'm particularly sensitive to and so I stopped playing.
In fact is just word cruft, I tend to use a lot of it and I'm not particularly sophisticated in my written communication (I really struggle not to use smiley's for one thing), I didn't mean to mislead anyone, but in this particular place, because it's an opinion thread, I hope that the majority of people didn't interpret me as suggesting that I know the literal end all truth in the immaturity discussion. Since you're the first person to call me out on the use of that phrase and yet it's done nothing to stifle a healthy discussion and people expressing contrary views in the thread, I believe in this case I haven't done much harm and I don't think anyone believed that an actual 13 year old wrote the game.
The gameplay mechanic is a more serious accusation and I may have genuinely misled someone there, which I'd be sorry to do. I tend to play games with a very heavy story focus (Alpha Protocol, KotoR 2, Planescape: Torment) and in particular, conversation is a very important element of gameplay to me. So when we have a collectible that is triggered by certain conversation options and quest triggers, I described is a gameplay mechanic, which in a broad sense I believe it is. Give flowers to lady, get sex card etc. However you're quite right that it could easily make someone believe there was some sort of hot-coffee thing involved and that's wrong of me.
However, in the place where I start to disagree with you, frankly the game would have been maturer if it had a hot-coffee mechanic instead of the moronic conversation mechanic it had instead. In one case in particular, when the Witch proffered sex in exchange for you trying to help her not be burned alive, if you accepted in a similar situation in real life, I believe you could go to court for statutory rape. It really repulses me that the developers didn't notice that taken sexual favours off a women because she's scared you'll leave her to die otherwise is an incredibly wrong thing to do. And the dialogue for that instance is absolutely sickening 'I've wanted you from the moment I first laid eyes on you,', then why the fuck is he taking advantage of her then. And you get a collectible for doing it. I absolutely cannot abide men taking sexual advantage over women from a position of power and
we have a semi-reward mechanic for it? When the dialogue started and I began to catch a glimpse of where it was going, I couldn't believe what was going on, that someone would write this and not know what they were doing.
So, although this is going to seem laughable to you, I actually consider myself as being fairly nice when I call the devs 13 year olds. Because I had the choice of choosing to believe they were so inept they couldn't realise that they had an option for the protagonist to near-violate someone, or that they put that there deliberately.
In Yahtzee's words
Some people might call The Witcher misogynistic, for the fact that every single woman in the game shows off a cleavage you could lose your dog in, and will jump on you at the slightest provocation, for a PG-13 sex scene, followed by a paradoxically explicit dirty postcard. Personally, I think it's less The Witcher's obvious hatred of women, and more the same misguided pretension to maturity that also causes the characters to cuss with every alternate word.
And that is what I've chosen to believe. This is something (the witch thing) I'm incredibly touchy about, it fills me with a lot of squick and disgust just thinking about it and there are reasons why I'm like that, but I don't particularly want to go into them, and I understand that other people aren't going to be offended in the same way and I definitely don't expect anyone else to stop playing a game they just bought at the end of the first chapter because of it, but I could have chosen to believe the developers were sick people and I didn't. I chose ignorance instead.
And as far as maturity goes, any system that has a women say 'I love flowers' and then you give her some flowers and then you have sex, that isn't a mature depiction of sex. I'm not saying the game is bad, I'm not saying it shouldn't exist (although if they wanted to cut the witch bit out thats fine with me), I'm not even saying the game doesn't handle other themes in a mature way. But, you've been pretty fair to me all things considered, so I hope you'll understand if I continue to believe that a game with that sort of sex system, doesn#t handle sex and women in a particularly mature fashion
