the broke-ass gwentless version
Jun. 7th, 2020 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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So we’re doing the Get Junior quest but the thing is, we’re also doing this entire playthrough with NO GWENT. Like, we’re just– we’re not doing it. Absolutely not.
“This game has a poor parkour system,” DF complained, as he sprinted through Novigrad, jumping over railings. This is more nerve-wracking than it might otherwise be because of the one time he did that and plummeted to his death when it turned out to be a hundred-foot drop.
The first bandit we encountered in tonight’s session turned out to be moderately fireproof, which was inconvenient, but he dropped a chicken sandwich as loot so like, he was redeemed in death.
We were trying to get into Junior’s casino. The guards were like ‘no’ and our options were ‘i’ll kill you’ or ‘[axii] yes’ or ‘ok i give up’, so like. of course we axii’d them.
Earlier in the game Geralt would just be like, Jedi mind trick from the OT, “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” but as the game has progressed and he’s got higher levels in Delusion, he’s more like (here i have to admit i saw the most recent star war by referencing the only line i thought was good in the whole thing, argh) “I’m supposed to be here. You’re relieved I’m here.” and now he’s gone past that and now he’s like “You’re so glad I’m here you’re going to shake my hand. You’re so glad I’m here you’re going to give me a kiss. Thanks!”
It’s getting weird, Geralt. I get that you’ve got few other moments of satisfaction but like. Please don’t push this any farther, bro.
And the game gives you 40 xp every time you use Delusion so it’s almost always rewarding you for taking that option. I wonder how they decided when it was going to be an option and when not. There are definitely times when Geralt could’ve used it when they absolutely did not let him. It’s just– like, I get that you shouldn’t routinely jedi-mind-trick people so it ought to be something you pull out rarely but the occasions when they offer it are so… IDK man. Like, they give it to you to calm down the Shrieker’s victim’s kid, but if you just talk to him it works too. IDK! IDK. I Have Digressed.
So we did this quest all dumb, if you’re reading along for tips or something (why) don’t do what we did. We didn’t talk to Cleaver (if you do Gangs of Novigrad first you get all that stuff), we went to the casino and then didn’t actually want to play Gwent, and we wound up, spoiler alert, doing the quest in such a way that we missed a whole bunch of the sub-objectives, missed out on a bunch of XP and loot and stuff, and kind of short-cutted our way to the finale. But we still got all the final objectives. So, don’t do what we did.
Since we didn’t want to play Gwent in the casino, and hadn’t gone and gotten Cleaver’s help first, we wound up just killing everyone in the casino. Sensible, right? Well, it got us killed once, and DF passed the reloading time by picking up every one of his children’s toys from the coffee table that made noise. (There’s a bit of merch from the movie Moana that’s Maui’s fishing hook and when you press a button Moana sings really tinnily. I don’t know why anyone puts batteries in those things.) Anyway.
We considered a strategic retreat but it reloaded straight into the middle of the fight so like, uh, peace was never an option. DF immediately Aarded a bunch of dudes down the stairs, and used that move to great effect throughout. (Outdoors, his opening move is Igni, but that doesn’t set enough people on fire in close-quarters indoors, it turns out, so you gotta Aard instead.)
When we’d first come in there’d been assorted Strumpets around (which MM has been trying to classify/catalogue by how much clothing they wear and whether they’re indoors or outdoors), and in the wreckage, I suddenly gasped and asked if the Strumpets had fought back or made it out somehow, and DF confirmed that he hadn’t seen them since the fighting started. Which, like, of course, I can’t imagine Geralt killing sex workers, but I dunno, no NPCs in this game have any goddamn sense so I could see them attacking him and getting mowed down. I mean, I guess in that case I wouldn’t mind him killing them, because their role there changes from sex worker to attacker if they take up arms and one might as well be equal-opportunity about that.
Once everyone was dead, we picked up loot. One guy had an astonishing ten units of fisstech on him. DF’s fisstech collection, in his stash point, grows every session. Guess Geralt’s just taking his coke into retirement with him at the end of this game. “It’d be so great,” DF mused, “if I could just find a way to throw it repeatedly into the face of whatever this game’s final boss is… just overdose whatever the fuck it is on fisstech and kill it that way.” Since there’s no mechanism to interact with it in any way besides picking it up as loot, or maybe selling it as junk, it’s unlikely any such thing could happen, but it would be pretty funny. Maybe I’ll try to work that into a fic– Geralt’s like, well i’m not going to leave this coke lying around, and then he’s carrying it around and he’s like oh shit i’m just gonna throw it up this wyvern’s nose for shits n giggles and it winds up killing the thing…
ANYHOW
Most of the dead casino people had chicken sandwiches on them. Predictably. We looted our way absently through the downstairs and went up to see what was up there. Somehow there was another passel of guys up there, who’d listened to their compatriots being slaughtered downstairs and been like “eh, whatever” but as soon as Geralt came up the stairs were like, rabid to throw hands with him.
We found a halfling tied to a chair with his face all beat up, and he gave us the in the end not all that surprising news that Junior is working as a Redanian operative, which apparently put him at odds with the other crime bosses– especially Sigi who, I think, given his political past, is aggressively neutral. I askedakilah12902 what we’d missed out on by doing this quest ass-backward and she was like eh. maybe more money?
“Nah,” DF said, “we’re doing the broke-ass Gwentless version of this game.”
Further data for MM’s tentative Hierarchy Of Ladies Of Variable Virtue: as we were running through somebody’s semi-private garden, we encountered a Courtesan, who was wearing a thong and a corset and nothing else and was too good to talk to us.
“Thong and a corset…” MM sang, knocking the two bits rhythm onto the coffee table…
DF laughed so hard he accidentally navigated Geralt right off the edge of a causeway. He wound up in a canal, and then… had to climb his way back up to the good neighborhoods, which was a solid several minutes of running around town while MM and I debated the merits of thongs as outerwear. I mean– really– so our baseline Emancipated women, mages, wear shirts open to the navel for no reason. Strumpets seem to often wear like, booty shorts, which I’d be fascinated to know how those are made using the technology of the era– if stretch fabric hasn’t been invented then how the fuck do you get something so form-fitting?? But courtesans are in thongs… IDK, we were well-distracted for a while.
DF managed to parkour his way up onto a roof that he then could not get off of. “How the fuck did I do this,” he said, and went around trying to jump down to lower roofs. “I don’t think I can get off of this,” he said. “What the fuck.”
Eventually he tried a jump in the likeliest direction, and…
💀
amazing, he literally died falling off a roof. This game is incredible. (I don’t know how he got up there.)
We took a pause because my dude was boredly texting me the things he was watching on YouTube. I’m going to make a separate post about that because uh, Puddles’ Pity Party, what the fuck.
But anyway. ‘Pon de replay, we did a bunch more, but more cautious, parkour, trying to figure out where the fuck the entrance was to Junior’s hideout. There’s this rando in the streets of Novigrad who keeps seeing Geralt and dropping to his knees, which is mildly uncomfortable and we keep running away rather than interacting with him.
Anyway we found Junior’s hideout, which the dwarves (cleaver’s gang) had sacked. Not a ton to find, but the dwarves’ idle chatter as they stood around tended to focus somewhat obsessively on Snow White’s virginity, which was a little weird and gross. But obviously doing this out of order has meant this is sort of not… working ideally…
So we went to Dijkstra. Along the way DF navigated Geralt directly through a brazier and set himself on fire, which was funny. Ran around the streets of Novigrad on fire for a bit but didn’t take any lasting damage. Got to the bathhouse and ran through the door so hard he slammed into the wall opposite.
“It’s good,” said DF meditatively, “that the people are still outside drumming at 1:43 a.m.” Novigrad is a party town.
We wound up searching another room, I’m fuzzy on how we got there– I was still distracted with YouTube and texting my dude– and we had to do something with a wine bottle to unlock a hidden door. “The wine from your birth year,” it says, and Geralt’s like “ah, Ciri’s birth year or Dandelion’s?” but then he puts the bottle in the 1245-1255 slot and it opens the door, so… there was no answer given, but I happen to know that in Netflix-verse Dandelion’s birth year is in the 1220s sometime so I think this is supposed to be Ciri’s birth year, and I love the implication that Geralt just knows both of their birth years off the top of his head and probably could guess their ATM passcodes too.
So we get in, read a note that makes it explicit that Dandelion and Ciri are working together with Junior to rip off Count Reuven (Dijkstra), and that Dudu the doppel was involved somehow, and then he hears footsteps and goes down to find that Dijkstra and Triss Merigold have showed up to check on his investigation.
Weirdly they’d brought along some henchmen whose idle animations in the background involved them poking around and periodically groaning. I don’t know what that was supposed to be?
Geralt spins an elaborate lie about what he’s found, and Dijkstra stares at him and says, “Well, you’re full of shit.” “Fine,” says Geralt, and spins another lie. “… Still full of shit but closer,” Dijkstra says. But then he’s like, “well, I’m trying to get information, not fucking marry you, so I guess that’s fine,” and MM was like oh my gosh I like this guy??? He is kind of… likable, I suppose. He’s weirdly straightforward for being so devious. I did get the idea that he’s kind of… absolutely ruthless, but also strictly principled? Lawful Neutral, which is MM’s jam, so.
Anyway, from there we did a quest to talk to Vernon Roche, who is like, some fuckin guy from Witcher 2 but at present he’s in charge of the last vestiges of the Temerian military, sort of guerilla-fighting to keep some kind of national identity in the face of the Nilfgaardian occupation.
We were on our way out to the quest marker and saw a little ? on the map and thought maybe we’d swing by and find out what it was. We immediately were like, oh, those are Level ??💀 harpies so that’s a big Nope from us, and as we were riding away, one of the harpies swooped over and touched Geralt and he instantly died, so that was humbling.
Geralt remains, despite being a level 15 or 16 by now, a Wee Precious Flower Prince. (I have no idea how high this game goes. I’ve seen a bunch of quests in the mid-30s-level range, and we saw one sword that you had to be level 45 to unlock, so I guess the levels do go pretty high.)
We were all pretty punchy at this point in the evening, and MM was like, of the harpies, “see the birds, so pointy pointy, anoint my head, anointy nointy” and then they had to explain the reference to me [Steve Martin movie from the 80s]. Now that’s in my head, so…
I’m gonna break there. There are a few of these left; I’m doing them from notes after the fact now, as Geralt has gone back to his hard-drive slumber and I’ve driven away across the state. But there are a few more to come, and I’m breaking them into smaller chunks so I have time to write them.
So we’re doing the Get Junior quest but the thing is, we’re also doing this entire playthrough with NO GWENT. Like, we’re just– we’re not doing it. Absolutely not.
“This game has a poor parkour system,” DF complained, as he sprinted through Novigrad, jumping over railings. This is more nerve-wracking than it might otherwise be because of the one time he did that and plummeted to his death when it turned out to be a hundred-foot drop.
The first bandit we encountered in tonight’s session turned out to be moderately fireproof, which was inconvenient, but he dropped a chicken sandwich as loot so like, he was redeemed in death.
We were trying to get into Junior’s casino. The guards were like ‘no’ and our options were ‘i’ll kill you’ or ‘[axii] yes’ or ‘ok i give up’, so like. of course we axii’d them.
Earlier in the game Geralt would just be like, Jedi mind trick from the OT, “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” but as the game has progressed and he’s got higher levels in Delusion, he’s more like (here i have to admit i saw the most recent star war by referencing the only line i thought was good in the whole thing, argh) “I’m supposed to be here. You’re relieved I’m here.” and now he’s gone past that and now he’s like “You’re so glad I’m here you’re going to shake my hand. You’re so glad I’m here you’re going to give me a kiss. Thanks!”
It’s getting weird, Geralt. I get that you’ve got few other moments of satisfaction but like. Please don’t push this any farther, bro.
And the game gives you 40 xp every time you use Delusion so it’s almost always rewarding you for taking that option. I wonder how they decided when it was going to be an option and when not. There are definitely times when Geralt could’ve used it when they absolutely did not let him. It’s just– like, I get that you shouldn’t routinely jedi-mind-trick people so it ought to be something you pull out rarely but the occasions when they offer it are so… IDK man. Like, they give it to you to calm down the Shrieker’s victim’s kid, but if you just talk to him it works too. IDK! IDK. I Have Digressed.
So we did this quest all dumb, if you’re reading along for tips or something (why) don’t do what we did. We didn’t talk to Cleaver (if you do Gangs of Novigrad first you get all that stuff), we went to the casino and then didn’t actually want to play Gwent, and we wound up, spoiler alert, doing the quest in such a way that we missed a whole bunch of the sub-objectives, missed out on a bunch of XP and loot and stuff, and kind of short-cutted our way to the finale. But we still got all the final objectives. So, don’t do what we did.
Since we didn’t want to play Gwent in the casino, and hadn’t gone and gotten Cleaver’s help first, we wound up just killing everyone in the casino. Sensible, right? Well, it got us killed once, and DF passed the reloading time by picking up every one of his children’s toys from the coffee table that made noise. (There’s a bit of merch from the movie Moana that’s Maui’s fishing hook and when you press a button Moana sings really tinnily. I don’t know why anyone puts batteries in those things.) Anyway.
We considered a strategic retreat but it reloaded straight into the middle of the fight so like, uh, peace was never an option. DF immediately Aarded a bunch of dudes down the stairs, and used that move to great effect throughout. (Outdoors, his opening move is Igni, but that doesn’t set enough people on fire in close-quarters indoors, it turns out, so you gotta Aard instead.)
When we’d first come in there’d been assorted Strumpets around (which MM has been trying to classify/catalogue by how much clothing they wear and whether they’re indoors or outdoors), and in the wreckage, I suddenly gasped and asked if the Strumpets had fought back or made it out somehow, and DF confirmed that he hadn’t seen them since the fighting started. Which, like, of course, I can’t imagine Geralt killing sex workers, but I dunno, no NPCs in this game have any goddamn sense so I could see them attacking him and getting mowed down. I mean, I guess in that case I wouldn’t mind him killing them, because their role there changes from sex worker to attacker if they take up arms and one might as well be equal-opportunity about that.
Once everyone was dead, we picked up loot. One guy had an astonishing ten units of fisstech on him. DF’s fisstech collection, in his stash point, grows every session. Guess Geralt’s just taking his coke into retirement with him at the end of this game. “It’d be so great,” DF mused, “if I could just find a way to throw it repeatedly into the face of whatever this game’s final boss is… just overdose whatever the fuck it is on fisstech and kill it that way.” Since there’s no mechanism to interact with it in any way besides picking it up as loot, or maybe selling it as junk, it’s unlikely any such thing could happen, but it would be pretty funny. Maybe I’ll try to work that into a fic– Geralt’s like, well i’m not going to leave this coke lying around, and then he’s carrying it around and he’s like oh shit i’m just gonna throw it up this wyvern’s nose for shits n giggles and it winds up killing the thing…
ANYHOW
Most of the dead casino people had chicken sandwiches on them. Predictably. We looted our way absently through the downstairs and went up to see what was up there. Somehow there was another passel of guys up there, who’d listened to their compatriots being slaughtered downstairs and been like “eh, whatever” but as soon as Geralt came up the stairs were like, rabid to throw hands with him.
We found a halfling tied to a chair with his face all beat up, and he gave us the in the end not all that surprising news that Junior is working as a Redanian operative, which apparently put him at odds with the other crime bosses– especially Sigi who, I think, given his political past, is aggressively neutral. I asked
akilah12902 what we’d missed out on by doing this quest ass-backward and she was like eh. maybe more money? “Nah,” DF said, “we’re doing the broke-ass Gwentless version of this game.”
Further data for MM’s tentative Hierarchy Of Ladies Of Variable Virtue: as we were running through somebody’s semi-private garden, we encountered a Courtesan, who was wearing a thong and a corset and nothing else and was too good to talk to us.
“Thong and a corset…” MM sang, knocking the two bits rhythm onto the coffee table…
DF laughed so hard he accidentally navigated Geralt right off the edge of a causeway. He wound up in a canal, and then… had to climb his way back up to the good neighborhoods, which was a solid several minutes of running around town while MM and I debated the merits of thongs as outerwear. I mean– really– so our baseline Emancipated women, mages, wear shirts open to the navel for no reason. Strumpets seem to often wear like, booty shorts, which I’d be fascinated to know how those are made using the technology of the era– if stretch fabric hasn’t been invented then how the fuck do you get something so form-fitting?? But courtesans are in thongs… IDK, we were well-distracted for a while.
DF managed to parkour his way up onto a roof that he then could not get off of. “How the fuck did I do this,” he said, and went around trying to jump down to lower roofs. “I don’t think I can get off of this,” he said. “What the fuck.”
Eventually he tried a jump in the likeliest direction, and…
💀
amazing, he literally died falling off a roof. This game is incredible. (I don’t know how he got up there.)
We took a pause because my dude was boredly texting me the things he was watching on YouTube. I’m going to make a separate post about that because uh, Puddles’ Pity Party, what the fuck.
But anyway. ‘Pon de replay, we did a bunch more, but more cautious, parkour, trying to figure out where the fuck the entrance was to Junior’s hideout. There’s this rando in the streets of Novigrad who keeps seeing Geralt and dropping to his knees, which is mildly uncomfortable and we keep running away rather than interacting with him.
Anyway we found Junior’s hideout, which the dwarves (cleaver’s gang) had sacked. Not a ton to find, but the dwarves’ idle chatter as they stood around tended to focus somewhat obsessively on Snow White’s virginity, which was a little weird and gross. But obviously doing this out of order has meant this is sort of not… working ideally…
So we went to Dijkstra. Along the way DF navigated Geralt directly through a brazier and set himself on fire, which was funny. Ran around the streets of Novigrad on fire for a bit but didn’t take any lasting damage. Got to the bathhouse and ran through the door so hard he slammed into the wall opposite.
“It’s good,” said DF meditatively, “that the people are still outside drumming at 1:43 a.m.” Novigrad is a party town.
We wound up searching another room, I’m fuzzy on how we got there– I was still distracted with YouTube and texting my dude– and we had to do something with a wine bottle to unlock a hidden door. “The wine from your birth year,” it says, and Geralt’s like “ah, Ciri’s birth year or Dandelion’s?” but then he puts the bottle in the 1245-1255 slot and it opens the door, so… there was no answer given, but I happen to know that in Netflix-verse Dandelion’s birth year is in the 1220s sometime so I think this is supposed to be Ciri’s birth year, and I love the implication that Geralt just knows both of their birth years off the top of his head and probably could guess their ATM passcodes too.
So we get in, read a note that makes it explicit that Dandelion and Ciri are working together with Junior to rip off Count Reuven (Dijkstra), and that Dudu the doppel was involved somehow, and then he hears footsteps and goes down to find that Dijkstra and Triss Merigold have showed up to check on his investigation.
Weirdly they’d brought along some henchmen whose idle animations in the background involved them poking around and periodically groaning. I don’t know what that was supposed to be?
Geralt spins an elaborate lie about what he’s found, and Dijkstra stares at him and says, “Well, you’re full of shit.” “Fine,” says Geralt, and spins another lie. “… Still full of shit but closer,” Dijkstra says. But then he’s like, “well, I’m trying to get information, not fucking marry you, so I guess that’s fine,” and MM was like oh my gosh I like this guy??? He is kind of… likable, I suppose. He’s weirdly straightforward for being so devious. I did get the idea that he’s kind of… absolutely ruthless, but also strictly principled? Lawful Neutral, which is MM’s jam, so.
Anyway, from there we did a quest to talk to Vernon Roche, who is like, some fuckin guy from Witcher 2 but at present he’s in charge of the last vestiges of the Temerian military, sort of guerilla-fighting to keep some kind of national identity in the face of the Nilfgaardian occupation.
We were on our way out to the quest marker and saw a little ? on the map and thought maybe we’d swing by and find out what it was. We immediately were like, oh, those are Level ??💀 harpies so that’s a big Nope from us, and as we were riding away, one of the harpies swooped over and touched Geralt and he instantly died, so that was humbling.
Geralt remains, despite being a level 15 or 16 by now, a Wee Precious Flower Prince. (I have no idea how high this game goes. I’ve seen a bunch of quests in the mid-30s-level range, and we saw one sword that you had to be level 45 to unlock, so I guess the levels do go pretty high.)
We were all pretty punchy at this point in the evening, and MM was like, of the harpies, “see the birds, so pointy pointy, anoint my head, anointy nointy” and then they had to explain the reference to me [Steve Martin movie from the 80s]. Now that’s in my head, so…
I’m gonna break there. There are a few of these left; I’m doing them from notes after the fact now, as Geralt has gone back to his hard-drive slumber and I’ve driven away across the state. But there are a few more to come, and I’m breaking them into smaller chunks so I have time to write them.
