SPOILERS: On The Witcher 3's Ending

THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT.

So I completed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt over the weekend. What a game. I've no idea what my final playtime was (can you find that somewhere?) but I've not felt so immersed and compelled in a videogame world for some time. CD Projekt Red have created an open world that feels more lived-in, more real, than anything that's come before. Wild Hunt is a new tidal mark for open world games, and my expectations of the genre have been upped forevermore because of it.

But, of the game's multiple endings, I got a really bad one. The worst one, pretty much. I'm going to spoil it all now, so stop reading if you don't want to know.

So Ciri goes into that portal, and faces the white frost. All of a sudden, she's struck by memories of Geralt being stern or inappropriate. And then a white light envelops her and we fade out. Next thing we know, it's a week later. Geralt is on a murderous revenge rampage in the swap, with Ciri apparently dead. He kills the final Crone, finds Ciri's pendant, and collapses, sobbing, to his knees either oblivious to or uncaring about the dozens of ghouls surrounding him.

As an ending, I actually really liked it. The dark tone of the story so far was taken to it's darkest conclusion. What has really peeved me is the way the game has decided to award me the "bad" end. I feel as if The Witcher 3 has punished me for trying to be a rational father figure and man to Ciri, my adoptive daughter.

The way the game chooses your "good" or "bad" ending state hinges on five conversational choices in the final quarter of the game. Here's what I did and why I think the logic for some of these choices kinda sucks:

1. Either tell Ciri "you can't be good at everything", or distract her by instigating a snowball fight.



The nature of The Witcher 3's dialogue system makes some options a little reductive, as was the case here. I thought it was a good idea to teach her a valuable lesson. You can't win at everything, right? Don't we teach that to our children? Choosing that option leads to Geralt and Ciri sharing a drink, a scene that didn't come across as all that awkward or acrimonious at the time. Instead, the "good" choice was to just distract her with a snowball fight. Important life lesson, or short-term distraction: I thought I was making the fatherly choice at the time.

2. Choosing whether to bring Ciri to her father, Emperor Emyhr, or not.

 

From the start of the game, the power and reach of Nilfgaard and Emperor Emyhr is drilled into you. You'd been hired by the Emperor to find Ciri and bring her to him, and it seems absurd to not do so. Ciri deserves a chance to speak to her birth father, to have her own conversation. You also get admonished greatly by Ciri for taking the Emperor's money for completion of your contract. Alright, I can see how that move would offend, but we're constantly reminded of how poor and lowly the witcher trade is. Every few contracts, a customer tries to screw you out of money, and the rewards are hardly generous in the first place. "Money's hard to come by in this trade", Geralt says more than once to his employers - surely Ciri could understand this after a lifetime of tutelage?

 

3. Let Ciri go alone to visit the Lodge, or not.

 

How's this one for logic? Either let you daughter, who you just crossed continents to find, go and meet a group of deeply untrustworthy sorceresses alone, or you accompany her. In what world would and father figure not go with her? The game takes a stance that Ciri has to do everything herself, that Geralt shouldnt be protective of her - but who can blame him (or us)? We've spent dozens of hours to get to Ciri's side, why punish us for not wanting to leave it, to keep her safe? It's not like she is popping to the shops - pretty much every sorceress in this game and the last has been shown to have a deeply selfish streak at best, and a murderous lust for power at worst. Why would you leave Ciri and her power open to abuse?

 

4. Either let Ciri trash Avallach's home, or calm her down.

 

Deliberately trash the home of the guy who your entire plan hinges on, the only guy who knows how to use the maguffin that'll help end the story, a guy whose worst sin so far was being a bit creepy. Or tell Ciri to calm down and avoid her throwing a temper tantrum. The first option is apparently the nice one. Does anyone else think Ciri comes across a little ADHD? Dissuading your daughter from committing criminal damage makes you a bad father, apparently.

 

5. Skjall's grave: visit it, or don't.

 

This is the only choice that I don't really have a problem with. Why would you deny Ciri the opportunity to visit Skjall's grave? You can say "we don't have time", but then Geralt spent fifteen hours playing Gwent and participating in the Epsom derby while his daughter was missing so fuck him, I guess.

 

 

And those are your choices. I felt the consequences of a couple of the decisions weren't logical. Ciri's been raised and reared under Geralt's watchful eye. She's going to be deeply attached to him. I don't understand why a couple of these decisions caused her to die, because she never seems to have anything but love for him. Yeah, she scowls a couple of times when Geralt admonishes her, but that's parenting. You teach your children lessons they don't want to hear at first, but after they take a moment they appreciate the effort you give them.

 

It's not made clear enough what the heck happens in the white frost, either. Ciri steps into it, all of a sudden remembers her father giving her a ticking off in Avallach's lab, and gives up? It seems a huge leap. Even if you make every choice in the "negative" fashion, I still don't buy that those choices would deteriorate Ciri's relationship with Geralt so much that it'd kill her.

 

I dunno, maybe I'm just mad because I'm a terrible father. Like I said, I loved the ending itself - I just feel like the game's logic in getting me there was tenuous. In my mind though, it's still a one-of-a-kind game.



The real genius of No Man's Sky

The guys behind unreleased space exploration game No Man's Sky must be geniuses of marketing. They've already converted it into a cult classic with rabid fans in the thousands.

Coming out at some undetermined date in the future on PS4 and PC, No Man's Sky looked like an ambitious, unique project from the beginning. Developed by Hello Games, a team of just ten employees whose only other finished games are Joe Danger and Joe Danger 2, it involves a truly gigantic open world, covering the span of a galaxy with each and every planet visitable by the player. Sounds awesome, right? Hello Games sure know it - and they know exactly how to market it, too.

Considering the small scale of their team, No Man's Sky is always going to be a game that has to flatter to deceive a little bit. Procedural generation has to fill in the lines of the world where it would be impossible for ten people to build everything themselves. Complex algorithms determining planet structure, life and atmosphere will shape the galaxy. The aim of the player, they say, is to continually upgrade your ship to get to the centre of the universe. Why? We don't know.

"We don't know" would be used often if you asked anyone that has seen the game in action about it. Hello Games have build their marketing campaign on a no-show, no-tell basis. E3's gameplay demo was curt and abrupt at just three minutes, and felt determined to keep a handful of cards clutched tightly out of view. And by doing this, they're playing the community harder than a Ribena-powered teenager plays Joe Danger.

 

 

No Man's Sky already has some of the hallmarks of what we define as a "cult classic". It's a project little-known to those outside the gaming community. It's made by a small team on a modest budget. And it's already picked up a sect of vocal fans that'll spout its praises.

 

No Man's Sky has become the poster boy for a wholly unlikeable type of gamer - the elitist. I am incredibly hyped for this game, but I'm not the only person reserving some excitement until questions are answered. So little about the mechanics and plot of the game has been revealed that we're beginning to get into a Gabbo situation where we don't have any idea what we're hype for.

 

This is causing commenters to accuse the game of being repetitive, pointless or rote. I make some of their concerns valid. The "all planets look the same" argument is clearly an invalid one - the game has a gorgeous pastel vibe to it that makes it spring out of the screen at you - but the questions over why you actually play the game remain unanswered by developers. Luckily, we have an army of pious fanboys ready to answer the call of duty.

 

I've seen No Man's Sky compared to Minecraft, in that it's a sandbox with potential only limited by your imagination. But it's not a comparison that holds true for me, at least from what we know of the game. The scope for player interaction and making the game world your own in Minecraft is huge. The building mechanics allow us to create literally anything we want. No Man's Sky has shown little of the sort so far. Upgrading your ship takes materials, but we haven't been told how that works yet. There's no hint of any sort of construction or crafting on the level of Minecraft yet. Player interaction, too, is uniquely limited. You won't see other players, apparently, but you will see some of the effects other players have had. Wipe out a species in your game, and that one might not feature in another player's. It sounds like an intriguing system but I'm yet to see a reason why it exists beyond just it does. Creature scanning and logging of species in some sort of sci-fi zoology fashion is one confirmed feature, but at the moment all of this is for it's own sake. When it's hand-crafted and hidden out there for you to find, it feels like a reward - Pokemon, for example. With procedural generation, I can't help but feel like you're just throwing yourself into a random number generator and hoping for something unique and worth seeing.

 

To ask what the point is of No Man's Sky is not to lack imagination. You could say it shows the opposite that people see this grand open world and are desperate to discover the depths and intricacies of exploring it. Some gamers are not wanderers, and some gamers do not enjoy self-motivated upgrade hooks.  Hello Games' lack of show and lack of tell is starting to frustrate some, but it's creating a fervour around the game which will only serve it well financially after it releases. I know I can't wait to see what it's all about.

Coast to Coast: The cost of our education policy

The current government is picking up where its predecessors left off - turning our school system into a pointless, punitive mess.

If you don't work in the school system, you might not realise what a monumental year this is for teaching, with huge changes coming in the ways your children are tested, measured, judged and provided for. School quality is to be changed to a measure called Progress 8, wherein a mix of 8 GCSEs are used as a yard stick for quality.

What you also probably won't know is that your kids are going to be punished severely for being unfortunate enough to be living under education secretaries that have no regard for their wellbeing. Variety is no longer encouraged for our children, and in the last decade or so we've seen an erosion of the differing flightpaths that meant anyone with the workrate to succeed stood a great chance.

Labour's push to turn the majority of young people into university education backfired horribly, creating a surge of graduates educated in unspecialised subjects and devaluing the credit undergraduate degrees earned you. Going to university for the sake of it, because you were smart, not necessarily because you had a field you wanted to deepen your expertise in. As a guy that did a three-year law degree purely because I was pretty good at it at A-Level, I can attest to that.

Then came the coalition and a shift towards punishing the young for taking advantage of a system the politicians created. A tripling in university costs, a delegation of responsibility to free schools (disastrous) and academies (why?), and a rhetoric from the wholly unlikeable Michael Gove that your kids have it too easy. Any parent who raises their child with the right amount of dilligence and attention will know that the good modern school puts the children under more pressure than ever before. Constant examinations and targets are set from an early age, and children are taught through blunt repetition to parrot their statistics to any Ofsted officers that might stick their head through the door. There is little learning in schools now, simply training for the next assessment.

The mandatory schooling age has been raised to 18 - a clever way to cut a chunk from unemployment figures - but there is still so much to be done to help those who are unacademic succeed. The new Progress 8 measure places huge weighting on English and Maths, which is fair enough, but Nicky Morgan's plans to make every child take five "core" GCSE's is so ignorant of reality.

Vocational subjects aren't getting less relevant. They're getting more relevant than ever. In a world where so many vocational jobs are being replaced by machinery, we need to give these kids the base knowledge early on, so they can specialise quickly enough to stand a chance. There's thousands of job opporunities for vocationally-minded people in all industries. Graphic designers, construction workers, mechanics and safety operators are always going to be needed, but we aren't letting our children know that these choices are okay to make.

Alternate forms of examination, that have helped unacademic children grab themselves a semblance of societal qualification in this stupid system, are being scrapped. "Too easy", they call the IGCSE in English, a coursework-focused qualification that's being chopped next year. Tell that to the bottom set year 11 children I taught, who cried with happiness when they scraped themselves a C grade by the skin of their teeth. They knew that, with that one letter, the world would judge them as a smarter individual and a better person. They knew that, if they'd gotten two marks less and a D grade, that they'd be forgotten about and left with very few options.

Your children aren't oblivious to their fate, but it's so sad that they can do nothing about the hardships forced upon them by Westminster in the name of performance, nostalgia and ideology.