backdrawing swords is bullshit
Jun. 12th, 2020 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2MV5OKc
… sorry this has been sitting in my drafts getting pecked at for like a week now. listen farm life is tough. but I have two more episodes after this of Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt, and then who knows, maybe I’ll be back at MM’s house in the future. Whoooo knowwwwws….
ANYHOW we got to the Secret Temerian Rebel Base, and had to make sarcastic conversation with some guy about birds before he’d let us in. There was a young woman there wearing a shirt open to her navel, which set MM off on a massive tangent about where this places her in the Sorceress –> Tart –> Strumpet –> Courtesan Hierarchy Of Non-Peasant Female Characters. She had a name, and was not a mage, but we didn’t find out any more about her. I think potentially there’s a quest about her. Roche was very, like, uhh… noble and emotional? A lot of posing for Google Earth pics, with this guy. He was… I don’t remember that strongly what he actually looked like but spiritually he was very square-jawed, if you know what I mean? Super idealistic and prone to gazing off into the distance and making grim pronouncements. Not sure I liked him but like, probably worth throwing your lot in with him at least for plot reasons.
There was some weird rhythmic grunting going on in the background at the Temerian Rebel Base the whole time and it was only as we were leaving that we realized that it was
Soldiers doing pushups
Doing pushups???
I don’t even know what that was supposed to be about.
Then we went to a chess club, with Vernon Roche, and we were like okay no way is this really a chess club, it’s totally like a creepy sex club or something.
Well, first we stopped at an herbalist’s. Geralt walked in, and then DF immediately turned him around and had him walk right back out, go straight to the guy’s garden, and pick every flower in it. Then he turned back and went inside again. I mean, rude, but, it’s not like the game is going to punish you for it at all.
We get inside and the herbalist, a halfling, is like, “ah, you want some potions to roofie a girl with? Maybe you need some medication to get your dick up?”
“Uhhh,” Geralt says, “nnno?”
“I guess I have some other stuff,” the halfling says, more or less. We went about buying some stuff to make potions, and contemplated maybe putting in An Singular Skill Point, Maybe, into Not Dying Immediately From Any Potions.
(At this point we had to pause to figure out whether the ominous rumbling was the surround sound, thunder, or something more ominous from the nearby downtown. It was thunder, in the end, but like. It wouldn’t do to forget, in our fantasy escapism, about real-world events.)
We left the herbalists, encountered some guy who had a scrawny wyvern in a cage and was selling it as a basilisk, had to kill the wyvern when it escaped, but got no money or XP from it and really nothing wound up particularly resolved. It was weird, but like. I guess. That’s. A thing that happened? IDK. (The only amusing part was that as it burst out of the cage, DF had accidentally not drawn his sword and so when he attacked, he just punched it, which given that it was only lvl 10, actually did stagger it slightly. It would have been quite funny if he’d punched the thing to death in front of all these staring yokels.)
Anyway we got to what we assumed was a kinky sex club masquerading as a chess club, and discovered none other than King Radovid of Redania, who it rapidly became obvious is BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE. He was like… the chessmen… their pulses, I hear their pulses… their BLOOD… and Geralt sort of stared at him blankly in increasing incredulity.
We sort of nervously agreed to whatever Radovid wanted, because he was 1) a king, 2) in a fabulous metallic (velvet?) tabard, 3) raving about blood and chess, and 4) why the fuck not. Oh, also, 5) he cheerfully gave us the location of Junior, who was the guy we wanted in this whole quest, so like, he’s going to ask a favor in return but we’ll take that as it comes. Apparently Junior is repulsive enough that Radovid’s all set with him, which is saying something given that Radovid’s super into burning people alive.
Radovid… yeahhhhhh not a fan of Radovid. Definitely along the same lines as Roche but where you were clearly meant to find Roche noble, you were also clearly meant to find Radovid unsettling and creepy. He’s not like… incoherent? But that boy ain’t right.
Whoops, as we left we got a Quest Failed notice about Gangs of Novigrad, because we hadn’t actually… done it. Ah well. Turned out we didn’t need it.
On the way out, DF decided to try again to resume his brief practice of only ever mounting Roach by jumping on straight over her rear. This involved numerous attempts, no successes, and a lot of awkward shoving toward the horse’s ass. Meanwhile, a Redanian guard stood impassively staring, possibly thinking “Is this man about to be kicked to death or is he trying to fuck that horse?”
After a bit of this, DF was like, “Oh… that’s not Roach,” and we awkwardly ran away.
“Just for Esses and Gees,” DF said, contemplating something, and MM was like “What… does that mean,” and I had to translate. “Shits and giggles, girl, shits and giggles.” “How did you know that?” she wondered, and I was left wondering 1) who says Esses and Gees, and 2) who hasn’t heard the phrase “just for shits and giggles” before?
Anyhow. We headed for Junior’s hideout, and ran into some bandits or guards or something. “That guy is wearing only underpants and boots,” MM said, sort of excitedly, as an underpants-wearing NPC attacked Geralt. “Oops! Now he’s on fire. It’s harder to enjoy his thighs when he’s on fire. Oh, slow mo death for Thigh Man!” Sometimes the game has Geralt finish enemies in slow-mo, and it did that for this man, who died on fire and cut in half.
“Why is your sword out?” I asked as DF ran through part of the city.
“If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me that,” DF muttered, but then got distracted by looting fallen bandits. “Ah, for my fisstech collection,” he said, with great satisfaction. “Keeping drugs off the street should be an achievement.” “Yeah, instead of all those stupid Gwent achievements…”
“Oop,” DF said, “more dudes, gonna put on some Dude Oil.”
“I should get a sorceress shirt,” MM mused.
“What, like, open to the navel?” I asked.
“I am quite certain you own something like that,” DF said. “Perhaps even an assortment of somethings like that.”
“Oh, yes,” MM said, “when I said ‘get’ I meant, like, as in, go upstairs to get.” Well, that would certainly spice up these playthroughs. I was astonished that DF did not encourage her. Listen more people should watch video game playthroughs in cosplay. I was not going to cosplay as a mage though, not willing to stuff an OED into my g-string.
Anyway. We get into Junior’s hideout and it is. It is like. Stuffed full of dead prostitutes. Like, maimed, strangled, hung, violently murdered prostitutes, in like, ridiculous quantities? What the fuck. We were collectively grossed-out. To his credit, Geralt was also extremely upset by this.
“I cannot wait to kill this piece of shit,” DF said grimly, navigating his way through the absolute forest of mostly-nude female corpses.
We burst into the room where Junior himself is in his underwear, and his response is, I am not making this up, “What the sandwich fuck?”
What does that mean?
Geralt beats the shit out of Whoreson without any player input, it just goes to a cutscene of him just beating the man to a fine paste. Then he hauls him up and monologues at him, in what was probably supposed to be a moving speech but mostly it was… well, it was long.
He does, for the first time in the game, acknowledge that he has been running around like an asshole for an extended period of time and he is fucking exhausted and out of fucking patience, so that was a good little character note I suppose. He also is like listen I’m asking you about this woman and you should know before you answer me that she is my daughter and I am going to kill you either way so the manner of your answer may determine the speed and manner of your death, capisce? and Junior still somehow is like “i stabbed that bitch but it was her fault”, which just goes to show you, some assholes have no fucking sense of self-preservation. Not that Guy In His Underwear In A House Literally Stuffed Full Of Dead Women He Clearly Killed For Weird Gross Sex Reasons was ever not going to get himself fucking filleted by Geralt Respects Women And Carries A Lot Of Weapons.
The cutscene goes directly into a lengthy section you have to play as Ciri. On the one hand, it’s great that Ciri gets to be so important and all. On the other hand, it is a straight-up enormous pain in the dick to have to play an extended section, now after having spent dozens of hours developing a play style and inventory and things as Geralt, as a whole different character with different skills.
The crucial and irritating thing is that Ciri has no regeneration. So if her health drops in the initial scene, you can’t possibly survive the melee combat that follows. Sigh.
Well– the first thing that happens is there’s a cutscene with Dandelion! This is Dandelion’s first in-game appearance! He has a horrible nasal American accent and seems to be designed to be irritating. He fusses at Ciri a bit and she’s given a choice between having him come with, or telling him to stay behind, which is what he obviously wants; we chose to leave him behind, and climbed up the indicated route to Junior’s hideout.
Hilariously: we got up onto the balcony of Junior’s house and immediately recognized that it was in fact THE BALCONY that Geralt had earlier plunged to his death off of during The Ill-Advised Parkour Expedition. ARGH. So the only way off it was to go in the window.
We get in there, and there’s Junior, and Ciri monologues at him for a second, and then goes to draw her sword, and the animation has her MISS by like SIX INCHES and she just mimes drawing a sword and then has it in her hand.
We were so distracted by this that Junior hit us twice and we fucking died. TWO HITS. Well that sucks.
Reload, discover the parry timing is different. Ciri gets killed again. Argh. Reload. The dodging mechanism is cool and she’s got this new thing where she can phase through objects (The Blink), which we’d experimented with a bit on the street but it handles different in combat too. Died again, fuck. Reload. Argh! Reload! Argh! It was super super super irritating.
“Four guys in a tiny room with no Signs and no bombs,” DF said, pondering.
“She’s gotta have something in her bra, can you check?” MM asked.
“Uh,” DF said, “I don’t know how clearly you can see the screen but you can see basically her whole bra, and no there’s no storage space in there…”
MM squinted, then moved slightly closer to the screen. “Ah,” she said. “That’s…”
“This outfit was Designed By A Man,” DF said. “Like, more so than usual.”
But eventually DF got the hang of it, and then was like oh you don’t fucking need to ever parry, you just blink straight through people and then get them from behind. Ah. Well, once you know, it’s pretty easy.
So he fought Junior to unconsciousness (obv. you can’t kill him or Geralt won’t be able to later), got Dudu out of there by Devious Means, and then fought through the next two waves of guards with little difficulty. a small room with no signs and no bombs.
Anyhow we survived that, and then the Ciri bit ended and it went back to Geralt. Geralt was like, “OK, now it is time to fucking kill you,” and murdered Junior with extreme prejudice, which was sort of satisfying and sort of not because then you’re just left there in this room with this ridiculous pile of dead hookers.
Thence we went directly to Radovid, who had wasted zero time in being like “ok I gave you Junior now you give me something.” Okay, why not?
Radovid remains fucking creepy, and obviously is meant to like. evoke some greater backstory? And he’s going on about how like, “A certain witcher helped me once…”
Is Geralt that witcher? Is he supposed to know, or care? Clearly this is a reference to the events of Witcher 2, or possibly the first game I don’t know at all? But like. Who cares? That game was not interesting? Nobody played it. So clearly the worldbuilding fell a bit flat here, but I’m sure it’s a great reward to anyone who bothered with any of the previous installments.
So Radovid wants us to go find Philippa Einkorn or whatever her name is. The sorceress he blinded. clearly he wants her for nice reasons, and we’re clearly going to cooperate and hand her right over, because that’s totally our speed. Mmhmm. Sure. Yeah. Get right on that, boss. Later.
On the way out the guard is creepy about Geralt’s swords. “That one’s nice steel,” he says.
“It’s a matter of the hand, not the steel it’s holding,” Geralt says, super hoarse and moody about it, and I badly wanted to make that into a dirty joke but was unable to.
DF had to do some inventory management. “Fiddle with your stuff,” MM said, as a longtime gaming widow familiar with the process. “I should put all this fisstech into my stash,” DF mused. He’s got like. Ten kilos of coke in there by now. Someday in the future Geralt’s gonna retire to his nice wine estate in Toussaint and just have, like, fisstech around in candy dishes, like “IDK what humans put out for their guests but I have so fucking much of this stuff, people must like it right? We’re retired, we’ve got time for that crap.
(Somehow in here we went on a digression about real-world food; I was proposing baking a loaf of French bread, and someone was like “a batard” and I was like “oh a nice crusty batard” and then it became a Crusty Bastard, so like. I’m not sure where I was going with this but I do like the notion.)
In the course of Stuff-Fiddling, DF accidentally destroyed some runestones and had to reload from his last save, which is like… not a thing he generally does, not for gameplay reasons, but he wanted those runestones, so.
He wound up equipping Geralt with a ridiculous fucking fantasy sword, the Princess Xanthia or something, and it’s so stupid that its flared blade just hangs out of the scabbard and is loose down Geralt’s back.
He’s going to be walking through a crowd and just behead a toddler like that. it’s fucking ridiculous.
Anyway. This led us off to another RL diatribe, and DF saved the game and quit it and then went and retrieved a sword. He owns many swords, and all the metal ones are in a closet just off the family room where the Xbox is, so he went and grabbed a wooden one off the wall instead, because that’s still on display and thus easily-accessed.
He then proceeded to use the sword, which is about a 40-41″ blade, to demonstrate, using his 6′1″ body, that it is not possible to draw a sword from a scabbard carried on the back, the way it is depicted in the games. Which we all knew, but for some reason he just felt like demonstrating it. Even if you have the sword like… hooked in place at the top, and just the lower half of it in a scabbard, it still wouldn’t work unless the top of the scabbard was below the line of the ribs in the back. Otherwise there just isn’t enough length in a human arm to draw a sword of that length.
The way to have a back-carried sword is to treat it like a long gun, that has to be unslung and then drawn for use. But that wouldn’t be nearly as cool as just. I mean. The #aesthetic.
It’s so goofy, and we had a very amusing time with the wooden sword, but then it was time for bed.
… sorry this has been sitting in my drafts getting pecked at for like a week now. listen farm life is tough. but I have two more episodes after this of Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt, and then who knows, maybe I’ll be back at MM’s house in the future. Whoooo knowwwwws….
ANYHOW we got to the Secret Temerian Rebel Base, and had to make sarcastic conversation with some guy about birds before he’d let us in. There was a young woman there wearing a shirt open to her navel, which set MM off on a massive tangent about where this places her in the Sorceress –> Tart –> Strumpet –> Courtesan Hierarchy Of Non-Peasant Female Characters. She had a name, and was not a mage, but we didn’t find out any more about her. I think potentially there’s a quest about her. Roche was very, like, uhh… noble and emotional? A lot of posing for Google Earth pics, with this guy. He was… I don’t remember that strongly what he actually looked like but spiritually he was very square-jawed, if you know what I mean? Super idealistic and prone to gazing off into the distance and making grim pronouncements. Not sure I liked him but like, probably worth throwing your lot in with him at least for plot reasons.
There was some weird rhythmic grunting going on in the background at the Temerian Rebel Base the whole time and it was only as we were leaving that we realized that it was
Soldiers doing pushups
Doing pushups???
I don’t even know what that was supposed to be about.
Then we went to a chess club, with Vernon Roche, and we were like okay no way is this really a chess club, it’s totally like a creepy sex club or something.
Well, first we stopped at an herbalist’s. Geralt walked in, and then DF immediately turned him around and had him walk right back out, go straight to the guy’s garden, and pick every flower in it. Then he turned back and went inside again. I mean, rude, but, it’s not like the game is going to punish you for it at all.
We get inside and the herbalist, a halfling, is like, “ah, you want some potions to roofie a girl with? Maybe you need some medication to get your dick up?”
“Uhhh,” Geralt says, “nnno?”
“I guess I have some other stuff,” the halfling says, more or less. We went about buying some stuff to make potions, and contemplated maybe putting in An Singular Skill Point, Maybe, into Not Dying Immediately From Any Potions.
(At this point we had to pause to figure out whether the ominous rumbling was the surround sound, thunder, or something more ominous from the nearby downtown. It was thunder, in the end, but like. It wouldn’t do to forget, in our fantasy escapism, about real-world events.)
We left the herbalists, encountered some guy who had a scrawny wyvern in a cage and was selling it as a basilisk, had to kill the wyvern when it escaped, but got no money or XP from it and really nothing wound up particularly resolved. It was weird, but like. I guess. That’s. A thing that happened? IDK. (The only amusing part was that as it burst out of the cage, DF had accidentally not drawn his sword and so when he attacked, he just punched it, which given that it was only lvl 10, actually did stagger it slightly. It would have been quite funny if he’d punched the thing to death in front of all these staring yokels.)
Anyway we got to what we assumed was a kinky sex club masquerading as a chess club, and discovered none other than King Radovid of Redania, who it rapidly became obvious is BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE. He was like… the chessmen… their pulses, I hear their pulses… their BLOOD… and Geralt sort of stared at him blankly in increasing incredulity.
We sort of nervously agreed to whatever Radovid wanted, because he was 1) a king, 2) in a fabulous metallic (velvet?) tabard, 3) raving about blood and chess, and 4) why the fuck not. Oh, also, 5) he cheerfully gave us the location of Junior, who was the guy we wanted in this whole quest, so like, he’s going to ask a favor in return but we’ll take that as it comes. Apparently Junior is repulsive enough that Radovid’s all set with him, which is saying something given that Radovid’s super into burning people alive.
Radovid… yeahhhhhh not a fan of Radovid. Definitely along the same lines as Roche but where you were clearly meant to find Roche noble, you were also clearly meant to find Radovid unsettling and creepy. He’s not like… incoherent? But that boy ain’t right.
Whoops, as we left we got a Quest Failed notice about Gangs of Novigrad, because we hadn’t actually… done it. Ah well. Turned out we didn’t need it.
On the way out, DF decided to try again to resume his brief practice of only ever mounting Roach by jumping on straight over her rear. This involved numerous attempts, no successes, and a lot of awkward shoving toward the horse’s ass. Meanwhile, a Redanian guard stood impassively staring, possibly thinking “Is this man about to be kicked to death or is he trying to fuck that horse?”
After a bit of this, DF was like, “Oh… that’s not Roach,” and we awkwardly ran away.
“Just for Esses and Gees,” DF said, contemplating something, and MM was like “What… does that mean,” and I had to translate. “Shits and giggles, girl, shits and giggles.” “How did you know that?” she wondered, and I was left wondering 1) who says Esses and Gees, and 2) who hasn’t heard the phrase “just for shits and giggles” before?
Anyhow. We headed for Junior’s hideout, and ran into some bandits or guards or something. “That guy is wearing only underpants and boots,” MM said, sort of excitedly, as an underpants-wearing NPC attacked Geralt. “Oops! Now he’s on fire. It’s harder to enjoy his thighs when he’s on fire. Oh, slow mo death for Thigh Man!” Sometimes the game has Geralt finish enemies in slow-mo, and it did that for this man, who died on fire and cut in half.
“Why is your sword out?” I asked as DF ran through part of the city.
“If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me that,” DF muttered, but then got distracted by looting fallen bandits. “Ah, for my fisstech collection,” he said, with great satisfaction. “Keeping drugs off the street should be an achievement.” “Yeah, instead of all those stupid Gwent achievements…”
“Oop,” DF said, “more dudes, gonna put on some Dude Oil.”
“I should get a sorceress shirt,” MM mused.
“What, like, open to the navel?” I asked.
“I am quite certain you own something like that,” DF said. “Perhaps even an assortment of somethings like that.”
“Oh, yes,” MM said, “when I said ‘get’ I meant, like, as in, go upstairs to get.” Well, that would certainly spice up these playthroughs. I was astonished that DF did not encourage her. Listen more people should watch video game playthroughs in cosplay. I was not going to cosplay as a mage though, not willing to stuff an OED into my g-string.
Anyway. We get into Junior’s hideout and it is. It is like. Stuffed full of dead prostitutes. Like, maimed, strangled, hung, violently murdered prostitutes, in like, ridiculous quantities? What the fuck. We were collectively grossed-out. To his credit, Geralt was also extremely upset by this.
“I cannot wait to kill this piece of shit,” DF said grimly, navigating his way through the absolute forest of mostly-nude female corpses.
We burst into the room where Junior himself is in his underwear, and his response is, I am not making this up, “What the sandwich fuck?”
What does that mean?
Geralt beats the shit out of Whoreson without any player input, it just goes to a cutscene of him just beating the man to a fine paste. Then he hauls him up and monologues at him, in what was probably supposed to be a moving speech but mostly it was… well, it was long.
He does, for the first time in the game, acknowledge that he has been running around like an asshole for an extended period of time and he is fucking exhausted and out of fucking patience, so that was a good little character note I suppose. He also is like listen I’m asking you about this woman and you should know before you answer me that she is my daughter and I am going to kill you either way so the manner of your answer may determine the speed and manner of your death, capisce? and Junior still somehow is like “i stabbed that bitch but it was her fault”, which just goes to show you, some assholes have no fucking sense of self-preservation. Not that Guy In His Underwear In A House Literally Stuffed Full Of Dead Women He Clearly Killed For Weird Gross Sex Reasons was ever not going to get himself fucking filleted by Geralt Respects Women And Carries A Lot Of Weapons.
The cutscene goes directly into a lengthy section you have to play as Ciri. On the one hand, it’s great that Ciri gets to be so important and all. On the other hand, it is a straight-up enormous pain in the dick to have to play an extended section, now after having spent dozens of hours developing a play style and inventory and things as Geralt, as a whole different character with different skills.
The crucial and irritating thing is that Ciri has no regeneration. So if her health drops in the initial scene, you can’t possibly survive the melee combat that follows. Sigh.
Well– the first thing that happens is there’s a cutscene with Dandelion! This is Dandelion’s first in-game appearance! He has a horrible nasal American accent and seems to be designed to be irritating. He fusses at Ciri a bit and she’s given a choice between having him come with, or telling him to stay behind, which is what he obviously wants; we chose to leave him behind, and climbed up the indicated route to Junior’s hideout.
Hilariously: we got up onto the balcony of Junior’s house and immediately recognized that it was in fact THE BALCONY that Geralt had earlier plunged to his death off of during The Ill-Advised Parkour Expedition. ARGH. So the only way off it was to go in the window.
We get in there, and there’s Junior, and Ciri monologues at him for a second, and then goes to draw her sword, and the animation has her MISS by like SIX INCHES and she just mimes drawing a sword and then has it in her hand.
We were so distracted by this that Junior hit us twice and we fucking died. TWO HITS. Well that sucks.
Reload, discover the parry timing is different. Ciri gets killed again. Argh. Reload. The dodging mechanism is cool and she’s got this new thing where she can phase through objects (The Blink), which we’d experimented with a bit on the street but it handles different in combat too. Died again, fuck. Reload. Argh! Reload! Argh! It was super super super irritating.
“Four guys in a tiny room with no Signs and no bombs,” DF said, pondering.
“She’s gotta have something in her bra, can you check?” MM asked.
“Uh,” DF said, “I don’t know how clearly you can see the screen but you can see basically her whole bra, and no there’s no storage space in there…”
MM squinted, then moved slightly closer to the screen. “Ah,” she said. “That’s…”
“This outfit was Designed By A Man,” DF said. “Like, more so than usual.”
But eventually DF got the hang of it, and then was like oh you don’t fucking need to ever parry, you just blink straight through people and then get them from behind. Ah. Well, once you know, it’s pretty easy.
So he fought Junior to unconsciousness (obv. you can’t kill him or Geralt won’t be able to later), got Dudu out of there by Devious Means, and then fought through the next two waves of guards with little difficulty. a small room with no signs and no bombs.
Anyhow we survived that, and then the Ciri bit ended and it went back to Geralt. Geralt was like, “OK, now it is time to fucking kill you,” and murdered Junior with extreme prejudice, which was sort of satisfying and sort of not because then you’re just left there in this room with this ridiculous pile of dead hookers.
Thence we went directly to Radovid, who had wasted zero time in being like “ok I gave you Junior now you give me something.” Okay, why not?
Radovid remains fucking creepy, and obviously is meant to like. evoke some greater backstory? And he’s going on about how like, “A certain witcher helped me once…”
Is Geralt that witcher? Is he supposed to know, or care? Clearly this is a reference to the events of Witcher 2, or possibly the first game I don’t know at all? But like. Who cares? That game was not interesting? Nobody played it. So clearly the worldbuilding fell a bit flat here, but I’m sure it’s a great reward to anyone who bothered with any of the previous installments.
So Radovid wants us to go find Philippa Einkorn or whatever her name is. The sorceress he blinded. clearly he wants her for nice reasons, and we’re clearly going to cooperate and hand her right over, because that’s totally our speed. Mmhmm. Sure. Yeah. Get right on that, boss. Later.
On the way out the guard is creepy about Geralt’s swords. “That one’s nice steel,” he says.
“It’s a matter of the hand, not the steel it’s holding,” Geralt says, super hoarse and moody about it, and I badly wanted to make that into a dirty joke but was unable to.
DF had to do some inventory management. “Fiddle with your stuff,” MM said, as a longtime gaming widow familiar with the process. “I should put all this fisstech into my stash,” DF mused. He’s got like. Ten kilos of coke in there by now. Someday in the future Geralt’s gonna retire to his nice wine estate in Toussaint and just have, like, fisstech around in candy dishes, like “IDK what humans put out for their guests but I have so fucking much of this stuff, people must like it right? We’re retired, we’ve got time for that crap.
(Somehow in here we went on a digression about real-world food; I was proposing baking a loaf of French bread, and someone was like “a batard” and I was like “oh a nice crusty batard” and then it became a Crusty Bastard, so like. I’m not sure where I was going with this but I do like the notion.)
In the course of Stuff-Fiddling, DF accidentally destroyed some runestones and had to reload from his last save, which is like… not a thing he generally does, not for gameplay reasons, but he wanted those runestones, so.
He wound up equipping Geralt with a ridiculous fucking fantasy sword, the Princess Xanthia or something, and it’s so stupid that its flared blade just hangs out of the scabbard and is loose down Geralt’s back.
He’s going to be walking through a crowd and just behead a toddler like that. it’s fucking ridiculous.
Anyway. This led us off to another RL diatribe, and DF saved the game and quit it and then went and retrieved a sword. He owns many swords, and all the metal ones are in a closet just off the family room where the Xbox is, so he went and grabbed a wooden one off the wall instead, because that’s still on display and thus easily-accessed.
He then proceeded to use the sword, which is about a 40-41″ blade, to demonstrate, using his 6′1″ body, that it is not possible to draw a sword from a scabbard carried on the back, the way it is depicted in the games. Which we all knew, but for some reason he just felt like demonstrating it. Even if you have the sword like… hooked in place at the top, and just the lower half of it in a scabbard, it still wouldn’t work unless the top of the scabbard was below the line of the ribs in the back. Otherwise there just isn’t enough length in a human arm to draw a sword of that length.
The way to have a back-carried sword is to treat it like a long gun, that has to be unslung and then drawn for use. But that wouldn’t be nearly as cool as just. I mean. The #aesthetic.
It’s so goofy, and we had a very amusing time with the wooden sword, but then it was time for bed.
