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In W3 All Boats Are Motorboats
Jul. 6th, 2020 01:27 amvia https://ift.tt/2YYFgOW
We did some Witcher 3 on the 4th of July, which means I can finally get off my ass and write up the playthrough from the last night I spent at DF and MM’s house before going to the farm this last time. Shh listen it was the end of an era and i couldn’t bear to let it go. Also I didn’t have time at the farm to write it up. But here is a short and rather old Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt writeup from early June that I am only now converting from my notes to a proper writeup, to clear the way to write up the last one. Ha.
So when last we left off, Geralt had killed Whoreson Jr., been assigned by Radovid to go find Phillippa Ergonomics, and had equipped himself an absolutely fucktacular piece of Fantasy Nonsense Swordcraft.
(I’ve discovered, btw, that Tumblr is garbage but Dreamwidth actually keeps your tagged posts together, so if you want to find and review all my Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt Witcher 3 playthroughs, they are neatly archived, advertisement- and algorithm-free, at their tag on my Dreamwidth via crossposts. now, the formatting’s fucked, but nobody really cares about my gratuitous use of italics anyway, so.)
It was the middle of the night and there were bards performing near Hierarch Square, and nobody was listening to them because it was the middle of the night, so DF took Geralt over there to at least stand there so they wouldn’t be alone the whole time.
While there, he decided that we should do the Black Pearl quest, which requires going to Skellige, because it would drop off the end of getting point rewards pretty soon if we didn’t. So we fast-traveled to Skellige.
We stole a boat. This seemed fine and reasonable until several level 19 ekhidnas, which as far as I can tell are just… sirens… decided to be on the boat. They knocked Geralt out of the boat and then he was in the water. It was a huge pain in the dick. Geralt climbed up onto a rock in the water, and attempted to fight the ekhidnas from this rock, which he couldn’t really be on properly, and there was all this scrambling and clambering, but it turns out ekhidnas, even overpowered ones, do die pretty easy.
We discovered that if Geralt is in thigh-deep water, the animation makes him walk around with his arms held out to the sides just like a little old lady in a water aerobics class.
We killed the ekhidnas and looted them, and then found the corpse of a guy with a key on him so we could loot the locked trunk on this rock, which like… okay… it was fine, it wasn’t that exciting. Finally we managed to get back onto the boat, and sailed on.
There’s this really obnoxious effect when you’re on a boat, where the “camera” pivots to be behind the boat watching Geralt sail it, and gets splashed with water for no reason. They’re motorboats, all the boats; they don’t move in any way that a sail would make the slightest bit of sense, and they’re driven just like a motorboat, even though there’s no attention paid to making that plausible. Listen they’re just all magically motorboats.
And, equally magically, there’s suddenly a camera lens, to get splattered with water? It’s obnoxious.
Anyway we find our guy. This quest, see, is an older man who wants you to help him get his wife a rare black pearl, and these pearls grow in oyster beds in this particular bit of Skeillige. As the man talks more it’s like… he’s kind of a retiree, see… he was in the army… fought in some battles…
“So,” DF said, a little dubiously, “he’s a VA patient.”
And the quest is, basically, do you have the potion that lets you breathe underwater forever, or do you want to do it the hard way? Sigh, the hard way.
The water’s really fucking deep, which is annoying. And it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at, so at first we just wound up with a shitton of buckthorn.
Amusingly, every time Geralt surfaces, the default camera angle just frames his ass the whole way up. Gratuitous butt shots all the way. And then we got super annoyingly beseiged by sirens, which fucking suck. Why can they fly!!! IDK.
But we got the pearl, and then swam pell-mell back to shore because of fucking course there were Drowners attacking our quest-giver-retiree guy. At least drowners can’t fly, and since there’s no friendly fire, our pal is fireproof so we could just igni the whole beach with impunity.
On our way back to the fast travel point we sworded a snow hare to eat it, but while it showed as a killed enemy icon, there was nothing lootable. So we sworded another one, and again it was in vain. You can commit bunny crimes, but you will not be rewarded. Alas.
Randomly we found a blacksmith, and got excited that maybe he was the Master Armorer that the dwarf’s wife at the Baron’s compound thingy in Velen was going on about, but no, he wasn’t, he was just an amateur. Weirdly, he was obsessed with Dandelion. We made some crack about how he’s held Dandelion’s Achievements in both hands… for a while after that, MM kept repeating “… achievements” in differing tones of emphasis, to great hilarity.
At that point the game sort of weirdly froze with Geralt making the polite hmm are you going to tell me anything useful face at the blacksmith. After a while, DF realized that the dialogue options were present, but invisible, so he managed to randomly highlight and pick one, sight unseen, and it got us out of the weird frozen scene.
So we got back to Novigrad and the guy paid Geralt for the pearl, and we got the punchline, that he wanted this pearl because his wife has dementia and he thought it might remind her who he was. Very sad, but also, like, he paid us so that’s good.
DF, tiredly, saved the game, as it was time for bed, and then threw Geralt off the dock into like, nine feet of water, to do some water aerobics and see how long it took him to drown. He didn’t really have the gumption to make him drown, though, so he just quit the game with Geralt down there, which we then forgot about so I’m gonna spoiler it and say that a month later when I came back (last night, as I write this recap, so that I can then write last night’s recap, LOL) we loaded the game and DF was like “what the fuck why is Geralt underwater with half his breath gone” so it turns out the game saved again, LOL. Anyway, that’s enough for now, and I’m glad to get this out of my drafts; I was too sad to write it when I thought maybe it was going to be the last one, but now I know I have at least one more.
I don’t think life’s going back to normal but after having gotten stuck at the farm waiting for COVID test results I just was having visions of not getting back out west at all, and that crisis is past, and well, anyway. Good night, and we’ll come back to this again.
We did some Witcher 3 on the 4th of July, which means I can finally get off my ass and write up the playthrough from the last night I spent at DF and MM’s house before going to the farm this last time. Shh listen it was the end of an era and i couldn’t bear to let it go. Also I didn’t have time at the farm to write it up. But here is a short and rather old Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt writeup from early June that I am only now converting from my notes to a proper writeup, to clear the way to write up the last one. Ha.
So when last we left off, Geralt had killed Whoreson Jr., been assigned by Radovid to go find Phillippa Ergonomics, and had equipped himself an absolutely fucktacular piece of Fantasy Nonsense Swordcraft.
(I’ve discovered, btw, that Tumblr is garbage but Dreamwidth actually keeps your tagged posts together, so if you want to find and review all my Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt Witcher 3 playthroughs, they are neatly archived, advertisement- and algorithm-free, at their tag on my Dreamwidth via crossposts. now, the formatting’s fucked, but nobody really cares about my gratuitous use of italics anyway, so.)
It was the middle of the night and there were bards performing near Hierarch Square, and nobody was listening to them because it was the middle of the night, so DF took Geralt over there to at least stand there so they wouldn’t be alone the whole time.
While there, he decided that we should do the Black Pearl quest, which requires going to Skellige, because it would drop off the end of getting point rewards pretty soon if we didn’t. So we fast-traveled to Skellige.
We stole a boat. This seemed fine and reasonable until several level 19 ekhidnas, which as far as I can tell are just… sirens… decided to be on the boat. They knocked Geralt out of the boat and then he was in the water. It was a huge pain in the dick. Geralt climbed up onto a rock in the water, and attempted to fight the ekhidnas from this rock, which he couldn’t really be on properly, and there was all this scrambling and clambering, but it turns out ekhidnas, even overpowered ones, do die pretty easy.
We discovered that if Geralt is in thigh-deep water, the animation makes him walk around with his arms held out to the sides just like a little old lady in a water aerobics class.
We killed the ekhidnas and looted them, and then found the corpse of a guy with a key on him so we could loot the locked trunk on this rock, which like… okay… it was fine, it wasn’t that exciting. Finally we managed to get back onto the boat, and sailed on.
There’s this really obnoxious effect when you’re on a boat, where the “camera” pivots to be behind the boat watching Geralt sail it, and gets splashed with water for no reason. They’re motorboats, all the boats; they don’t move in any way that a sail would make the slightest bit of sense, and they’re driven just like a motorboat, even though there’s no attention paid to making that plausible. Listen they’re just all magically motorboats.
And, equally magically, there’s suddenly a camera lens, to get splattered with water? It’s obnoxious.
Anyway we find our guy. This quest, see, is an older man who wants you to help him get his wife a rare black pearl, and these pearls grow in oyster beds in this particular bit of Skeillige. As the man talks more it’s like… he’s kind of a retiree, see… he was in the army… fought in some battles…
“So,” DF said, a little dubiously, “he’s a VA patient.”
And the quest is, basically, do you have the potion that lets you breathe underwater forever, or do you want to do it the hard way? Sigh, the hard way.
The water’s really fucking deep, which is annoying. And it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at, so at first we just wound up with a shitton of buckthorn.
Amusingly, every time Geralt surfaces, the default camera angle just frames his ass the whole way up. Gratuitous butt shots all the way. And then we got super annoyingly beseiged by sirens, which fucking suck. Why can they fly!!! IDK.
But we got the pearl, and then swam pell-mell back to shore because of fucking course there were Drowners attacking our quest-giver-retiree guy. At least drowners can’t fly, and since there’s no friendly fire, our pal is fireproof so we could just igni the whole beach with impunity.
On our way back to the fast travel point we sworded a snow hare to eat it, but while it showed as a killed enemy icon, there was nothing lootable. So we sworded another one, and again it was in vain. You can commit bunny crimes, but you will not be rewarded. Alas.
Randomly we found a blacksmith, and got excited that maybe he was the Master Armorer that the dwarf’s wife at the Baron’s compound thingy in Velen was going on about, but no, he wasn’t, he was just an amateur. Weirdly, he was obsessed with Dandelion. We made some crack about how he’s held Dandelion’s Achievements in both hands… for a while after that, MM kept repeating “… achievements” in differing tones of emphasis, to great hilarity.
At that point the game sort of weirdly froze with Geralt making the polite hmm are you going to tell me anything useful face at the blacksmith. After a while, DF realized that the dialogue options were present, but invisible, so he managed to randomly highlight and pick one, sight unseen, and it got us out of the weird frozen scene.
So we got back to Novigrad and the guy paid Geralt for the pearl, and we got the punchline, that he wanted this pearl because his wife has dementia and he thought it might remind her who he was. Very sad, but also, like, he paid us so that’s good.
DF, tiredly, saved the game, as it was time for bed, and then threw Geralt off the dock into like, nine feet of water, to do some water aerobics and see how long it took him to drown. He didn’t really have the gumption to make him drown, though, so he just quit the game with Geralt down there, which we then forgot about so I’m gonna spoiler it and say that a month later when I came back (last night, as I write this recap, so that I can then write last night’s recap, LOL) we loaded the game and DF was like “what the fuck why is Geralt underwater with half his breath gone” so it turns out the game saved again, LOL. Anyway, that’s enough for now, and I’m glad to get this out of my drafts; I was too sad to write it when I thought maybe it was going to be the last one, but now I know I have at least one more.
I don’t think life’s going back to normal but after having gotten stuck at the farm waiting for COVID test results I just was having visions of not getting back out west at all, and that crisis is past, and well, anyway. Good night, and we’ll come back to this again.
