i’m not even supposed to be here today
May. 21st, 2020 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2ZoFjUP
Last night’s Witchering was brief, as the children kept getting out of bed so DF kept playing his glitter-robots shoot-em-up game until pretty late. (Witcher is… much scarier to a tiny person who is not supposed to be downstairs and may be unnoticed at the other end of the long hallway for a moment or two while the adults attempt to determine whether the noises are the pitter-patter of little feet or something needlessly atmospheric on the surround sound.)
After the 5 year old had come down to complain that it was getting dark and she didn’t like that (what she’s felt about nightfall on every other day of 1,800some days of life, we leave up to the imagination of the reader here; we’re not sure why this was a surprise) and had been elaborately shooed back upstairs, DF finally booted up the Witcher 3, and we settled in for… mostly a bunch of mopping-up of the smaller low-level quests around Velen, preparatory to going to Novigrod for More Plot Shit.
Immediately, we found a collection of Bad Dudes. “Oh,” DF said, “that’s adorable. A level 3 cannibal.” He shredded the encampment, picked up exactly two crowns from each corpse (nice of them to have split it so evenly to begin with?), opted not to loot them of their blackjacks, moved on. Bizarrely, the game opted to do a slow-mo cinematic of every single kill? Which were all quite dramatic, as Geralt’s got a bunch of dismemberment bonuses apparently, and so he was just cutting bodies diagonally and sending heads flying and whatnot. But like, we really didn’t need to see slow-mo cinematics of every gory kill. It wasn’t… bad, it was just sort of baffling.
So we carved our way through a bunch of low-level bandits and cannibals and deserters and whatnot.
Sometimes when you’ve cleared out an encampment of Bad Dudes, once they’re all dead you get a touching little cutscene that says something along the lines of “Area Cleared! The Populace Can Return!” but what’s hilarious is that the cutscene is the same three burly men walking slowly toward the buildings every time. The outfits change but the character models don’t. And additionally, it happens immediately, so Geralt is going back and looting the bodies of his kills of their swords and money and chicken legs and such while children are playing around them and women are bustling by and getting offended when he bumps into them and so on. So it’s deeply bizarre, in general, as a scenario.
But you get a shitload of XP most of those times, so that’s great. It’s just bizarre. Additionally, there’s often a merchant right there immediately so you can instantly sell all the junk you’ve just looted from the dead bandits. (”Nine Novigrod Longswords for this fellow, so he can sell them to the next round of bandits…”)
“Haaay guyss,” DF lisped at one point, “we’re going to Bandit Camp.” A few moments later he was like, “Man all this hits different when you’re ten levels above your enemies. Is this what it’s like to play on Story Mode?”
Having run out of raw meat to use as his eat-this-to-regen-health-during-combat, he perused his options of food items he’d picked up or been gifted or looted or whatever. “Hey,” he said, “I have a shitload of beer. It’s got stats, it’ll work, I should try that.” So he equipped beer into his quickdraw slot to use to rehydrate during fights.
This gave me a hilarious mental image of a modern a/u where Geralt’s in a fight and pauses mid-melee to shotgun a beer from a can, crushes the can on his forehead, and then kills a monster with it. “Witchers can’t get drunk, can they?” DF asked. “Uhhhh,” I said, “they absolutely can and it’s plot-significant, at least peripherally.” “Huh,” DF said. “Well, we’ll see how many beers it takes to get Geralt drunk during a fight.”
One. The answer is one. Against a bunch of level 9 deserters (Geralt is currently level 11), DF consumed the beer in the quick-use slot and instantly Geralt’s vision went dark and blurry and his reaction times slowed. “Oh this is great,” DF said. He was at that point attempting to use Igni against a shieldman and the beehive behind him, trying to line it up so he could get both in one shot.
He succeeded.
“I guess I’ll put this dumpling I got from the cannibals into the quick-use slot instead,” DF said. “Uhhh… should we… not eat that?” MM asked. DF shrugged. “I mean, it’s already a dumpling, why waste it?”
As we worked our way southward in Velen, nominally being led by the Defender Of The Faith quest (somebody’s vandalizing shrines and an old lady begged us to fix any we found that were damaged), we started running into things we could Not handle. A corpse with a key and a letter on it led us to an old house where a Level Red Skull Death Grave Hag materialized, so we ran away and eventually Got Into The Sea in a desperate bid to lose the thing. We swam a distance, got out of the sea, and were immediately beset by… something high-level enough that looked like a Drowner but we just ran instead of trying to read the label because it also had the Red Skull Of Way The Fuck Above Your Level on it (mucknixers, apparently), and we ran through that and found an abandoned site that didn’t seem to have any monsters in it but was… just full of freshly-dismembered corpses.
“I Did Not Ask,” said DF, and proceeded to collect all the loot before running the fuck away from an unspecified life sign that appeared off to one side.
Something killed us, and we had to redo the Getting Into The Sea (and Then Out Of It) portion. DF cast Quen for the first time all game, preparing for a fight, and then was like oh. No, this is the abandoned campsite, where Everybody’s Dead, Dave. So he re-looted it, and the Quen expired, unused.
We kept going, heading for a shrine, and found a shitload of Level 23 ghouls. “Hey big ghoul, hey big ghoul, hey big ghoul, heyyy byyyye,” DF singsonged as he ran the fuck away.
The shrines were being vandalized by a trio of drunken Oxenfurt college kid Edgelord Atheists, who we were unable to pacify whilst still stopping your rampage. So the game has you fistfight them.
“If you lose this do you just fail the quest and get super embarrassed?” DF asked. “I mean… I’m the Punching Champion of Velen by now, it’d be super humiliating to go down to a trio of punkass undergrads.”
He beat them, and then looted them, but he didn’t take any of their money. He only took their booze. One of them had a lootable item called Green Mold so we took it; it’s either an undergrad science experiment or it’s just gross but either way he didn’t need that in his pockets and now we have it so later we can be like what the fuck is that?
Then, DF intended to use the nearest fast-travel point to get back to the safer neighborhoods of Velen, and realized on arrival that that was where the Level 23 Ghouls were hanging out. Like, literally touching the post. “Maybe if we run?” he said, and ran in, and it turns out that you cannot use a fast travel marker while in combat. “Well fuck,” he said, and kept running, regenerating health as fast as he could because even being fucking near those critters was bad for one’s constitution.
A creepy house with… mm.. that’s some spectral light, those are probably wraiths, let’s see the level… Red skull of death! Keep running. Run away! Run away! “I’m not even supposed to be here today,” I wailed. (I was gonna put in a gif but it’s goofy. Listen I’m referencing the ancient move Clerks. It’s fine. Ignore me, I’m old.)
We had to cut through a pack of wolves and wargs to escape, but then we had more Raw Meat to equip to replace the long-gone cannibal dumpling. (”Maybe Geralt should be drunk for this part,” DF mused, as we kept running the fuck away.)
Finally we got to a fast-travel marker that wasn’t beset by Death Critters. Went up, visited the pellar again, bought some esoteric herbals, crafted a bunch of new recipes from various loot drops.
“All we need for Enhanced Beast Oil is bisongrass and a cockatrice heart,” DF said. He pondered it. “Is the Shrieker a cockatrice?”
It is. That’s the next quest we gotta do anyway.
So, bed.
Last night’s Witchering was brief, as the children kept getting out of bed so DF kept playing his glitter-robots shoot-em-up game until pretty late. (Witcher is… much scarier to a tiny person who is not supposed to be downstairs and may be unnoticed at the other end of the long hallway for a moment or two while the adults attempt to determine whether the noises are the pitter-patter of little feet or something needlessly atmospheric on the surround sound.)
After the 5 year old had come down to complain that it was getting dark and she didn’t like that (what she’s felt about nightfall on every other day of 1,800some days of life, we leave up to the imagination of the reader here; we’re not sure why this was a surprise) and had been elaborately shooed back upstairs, DF finally booted up the Witcher 3, and we settled in for… mostly a bunch of mopping-up of the smaller low-level quests around Velen, preparatory to going to Novigrod for More Plot Shit.
Immediately, we found a collection of Bad Dudes. “Oh,” DF said, “that’s adorable. A level 3 cannibal.” He shredded the encampment, picked up exactly two crowns from each corpse (nice of them to have split it so evenly to begin with?), opted not to loot them of their blackjacks, moved on. Bizarrely, the game opted to do a slow-mo cinematic of every single kill? Which were all quite dramatic, as Geralt’s got a bunch of dismemberment bonuses apparently, and so he was just cutting bodies diagonally and sending heads flying and whatnot. But like, we really didn’t need to see slow-mo cinematics of every gory kill. It wasn’t… bad, it was just sort of baffling.
So we carved our way through a bunch of low-level bandits and cannibals and deserters and whatnot.
Sometimes when you’ve cleared out an encampment of Bad Dudes, once they’re all dead you get a touching little cutscene that says something along the lines of “Area Cleared! The Populace Can Return!” but what’s hilarious is that the cutscene is the same three burly men walking slowly toward the buildings every time. The outfits change but the character models don’t. And additionally, it happens immediately, so Geralt is going back and looting the bodies of his kills of their swords and money and chicken legs and such while children are playing around them and women are bustling by and getting offended when he bumps into them and so on. So it’s deeply bizarre, in general, as a scenario.
But you get a shitload of XP most of those times, so that’s great. It’s just bizarre. Additionally, there’s often a merchant right there immediately so you can instantly sell all the junk you’ve just looted from the dead bandits. (”Nine Novigrod Longswords for this fellow, so he can sell them to the next round of bandits…”)
“Haaay guyss,” DF lisped at one point, “we’re going to Bandit Camp.” A few moments later he was like, “Man all this hits different when you’re ten levels above your enemies. Is this what it’s like to play on Story Mode?”
Having run out of raw meat to use as his eat-this-to-regen-health-during-combat, he perused his options of food items he’d picked up or been gifted or looted or whatever. “Hey,” he said, “I have a shitload of beer. It’s got stats, it’ll work, I should try that.” So he equipped beer into his quickdraw slot to use to rehydrate during fights.
This gave me a hilarious mental image of a modern a/u where Geralt’s in a fight and pauses mid-melee to shotgun a beer from a can, crushes the can on his forehead, and then kills a monster with it. “Witchers can’t get drunk, can they?” DF asked. “Uhhhh,” I said, “they absolutely can and it’s plot-significant, at least peripherally.” “Huh,” DF said. “Well, we’ll see how many beers it takes to get Geralt drunk during a fight.”
One. The answer is one. Against a bunch of level 9 deserters (Geralt is currently level 11), DF consumed the beer in the quick-use slot and instantly Geralt’s vision went dark and blurry and his reaction times slowed. “Oh this is great,” DF said. He was at that point attempting to use Igni against a shieldman and the beehive behind him, trying to line it up so he could get both in one shot.
He succeeded.
“I guess I’ll put this dumpling I got from the cannibals into the quick-use slot instead,” DF said. “Uhhh… should we… not eat that?” MM asked. DF shrugged. “I mean, it’s already a dumpling, why waste it?”
As we worked our way southward in Velen, nominally being led by the Defender Of The Faith quest (somebody’s vandalizing shrines and an old lady begged us to fix any we found that were damaged), we started running into things we could Not handle. A corpse with a key and a letter on it led us to an old house where a Level Red Skull Death Grave Hag materialized, so we ran away and eventually Got Into The Sea in a desperate bid to lose the thing. We swam a distance, got out of the sea, and were immediately beset by… something high-level enough that looked like a Drowner but we just ran instead of trying to read the label because it also had the Red Skull Of Way The Fuck Above Your Level on it (mucknixers, apparently), and we ran through that and found an abandoned site that didn’t seem to have any monsters in it but was… just full of freshly-dismembered corpses.
“I Did Not Ask,” said DF, and proceeded to collect all the loot before running the fuck away from an unspecified life sign that appeared off to one side.
Something killed us, and we had to redo the Getting Into The Sea (and Then Out Of It) portion. DF cast Quen for the first time all game, preparing for a fight, and then was like oh. No, this is the abandoned campsite, where Everybody’s Dead, Dave. So he re-looted it, and the Quen expired, unused.
We kept going, heading for a shrine, and found a shitload of Level 23 ghouls. “Hey big ghoul, hey big ghoul, hey big ghoul, heyyy byyyye,” DF singsonged as he ran the fuck away.
The shrines were being vandalized by a trio of drunken Oxenfurt college kid Edgelord Atheists, who we were unable to pacify whilst still stopping your rampage. So the game has you fistfight them.
“If you lose this do you just fail the quest and get super embarrassed?” DF asked. “I mean… I’m the Punching Champion of Velen by now, it’d be super humiliating to go down to a trio of punkass undergrads.”
He beat them, and then looted them, but he didn’t take any of their money. He only took their booze. One of them had a lootable item called Green Mold so we took it; it’s either an undergrad science experiment or it’s just gross but either way he didn’t need that in his pockets and now we have it so later we can be like what the fuck is that?
Then, DF intended to use the nearest fast-travel point to get back to the safer neighborhoods of Velen, and realized on arrival that that was where the Level 23 Ghouls were hanging out. Like, literally touching the post. “Maybe if we run?” he said, and ran in, and it turns out that you cannot use a fast travel marker while in combat. “Well fuck,” he said, and kept running, regenerating health as fast as he could because even being fucking near those critters was bad for one’s constitution.
A creepy house with… mm.. that’s some spectral light, those are probably wraiths, let’s see the level… Red skull of death! Keep running. Run away! Run away! “I’m not even supposed to be here today,” I wailed. (I was gonna put in a gif but it’s goofy. Listen I’m referencing the ancient move Clerks. It’s fine. Ignore me, I’m old.)
We had to cut through a pack of wolves and wargs to escape, but then we had more Raw Meat to equip to replace the long-gone cannibal dumpling. (”Maybe Geralt should be drunk for this part,” DF mused, as we kept running the fuck away.)
Finally we got to a fast-travel marker that wasn’t beset by Death Critters. Went up, visited the pellar again, bought some esoteric herbals, crafted a bunch of new recipes from various loot drops.
“All we need for Enhanced Beast Oil is bisongrass and a cockatrice heart,” DF said. He pondered it. “Is the Shrieker a cockatrice?”
It is. That’s the next quest we gotta do anyway.
So, bed.
