'The Witcher 2' Didn't Try to Offer Endless Freedom, and That's Why It Was So Good

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The Witcher 3's downloadable content is all here now, and with the release of a "Complete Edition" looming, I've spent the past couple months getting back in the swing of life in the Northern Kingdom by playing through all of the Witcher games in order. Along the way, I stumbled onto a pretty surprising realization: With its devotion to openness, The Witcher 3 lost some of the magic that made The Witcher 2 such a striking, memorable game.

The official website of The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt sells the game as the ultimate fantasy of going where you want to and doing whatever you want. You "chart your own path to adventure" while you "set your own goals and choose your own destinations." It's a game that requires you to "make hard choices" in order to get to one of "multiple endings that result from choices you make throughout the game." The game is a platform for freedom.

The Witcher 2 , on the other hand, is a game that embraces the tight brutality of unfreedom. It shows what happens when people are caught making decisions they might not want to within circumstances they cannot control. In a world of games where you can do anything, it is a game that puts up blockers and blinders at every level. It tells you that you can't make choices, that you can't have freedom, and it demonstrates what happens when people are trapped.

The game hinges on a choice made a third of the way into the game. Geralt, the protagonist mutant monster hunter who deals with the political problems of humans, is presented with two factions vying for power in the Northern Kingdoms. Temeria is in shambles after the assassination of King Foltest. Geralt is the prime suspect. Those "in the know" recognize that some villain committed the deed, and there's a scramble to both prove Geralt's innocence and find the real killer.

Two possible paths diverge at the end of the first chapter. In one, Geralt can side with Vernon Roche and his Temerian Special Forces. Roche uses his cloak-and-dagger methods to put on of Foltest's children on the empty Temerian throne. The other path has Geralt siding with Iorveth and the Scoia'tael—a group fighting for the liberation and representation of nonhumans (elves, dwarves, and others) in the Northern Kingdoms. The game is explicit about what this choice means: Siding with Roche means that you align with an oppressive maneuverer of statecraft; siding with Iorveth means that you vouch for a domestic terrorist.

Neither choice feels "good." This is not a game of paragons and renegades or light and dark sides. The Witcher 2's choices are fundamentally about what feels possible in any given moment. Where Mass Effect defers to giving us the freedom to decide the fate of the galaxy or our friendships and Minecraft offers an endless array of moment-to-moment choice, The Witcher 2 is a political cage that imprisons almost every possible action in the game. The Witcher 2 shows that freedom is hard to come by. It shows us that we're all penned in.

Video games have been selling themselves based on choices for a long time. No Man's Sky hands you the reigns and lets you go hog wild across the universe. You make the story, or at least you make your own stories, and it is all given via the magic of player choice. Alpha Protocol tracks how much you piss off your allies and changes the game based on their reactions. The entire Fable series sold itself on the claim that everything you do, from eating food to kissing villagers, matters in some small way.

When we talk about choice, like having an absolutely huge number of options available to a player, we're almost always talking about freedom. If we're talking about linearity, the subtext is that we're talking about being trapped. Video game promotions love to talk about choice, and freedom, in terms of how long it takes you to get tired of doing whatever you want whenever you want.

On the surface, The Witcher 2 pretends to be exactly like that. It dresses up as your average action RPG about powerful people doing powerful things. But when you push it, you realize it's as much about boundaries as the small, tight indie treasures like Hotline Miami or Thirty Flights of Loving. And that's important because its laser focus on being trapped by choice shows that we're all as much caught in structure as Geralt. When Geralt sighs because of the horror he witnesses daily, it's very easy to empathize with him.

Structural racism sets bounds on who has access to that food, or healthcare, or clothing, or shelter. Global capitalism sets the bounds for what fresh food is or is not available to you at given times and dates. The management of our lives by international conglomerates or by governments forms a latticework of commitments, obligations, and pressures that are constantly tearing us apart. Freedom, the lack of being beholden to any of that, makes a lot of sense to me as something to fantasize about. But dwelling on it, and in it, is the thing that games are uniquely able to do. Games can show us those systems and their pressures.

What The Witcher 2 shows us is the upper Aedirn in revolt.

It is a small kingdom with a recently killed king. The peasants are tired of being ruled. The nonhuman inhabitants are openly rebelling against the racist policies of the human rulers. The nobles are leaderless. General Saskia appears and unites these disparate groups under the promise of a free state where some form of democracy might take hold. There's hope.

If you follow Iorveth and go down the choice path of helping Saskia, Geralt takes part in events to secure independence for upper Aedirn. You rescue her from a coma. You help secure a battlefield. You solve remaining frictions between the nobles and the peasantry in anticipation of a new tomorrow.

Yet ultimately, these ground-level campaigns fail. Sorceresses and kings have other plans for the rich land of Aedirn, and Saskia is swept away as the region is absorbed by the greed of the surrounding kings. The commoner and the noble alike are merely pawns to be controlled. Their lives and their deaths are pieces to be moved on a map.

If you take Vernon Roche's path, you're put on another track entirely. Instead of the revolution, you end up at the beck and call of cruel King Henselt. Roche's path sees Geralt making Henselt's invading army more efficient. He entertains the soldiers in gladiatorial combat and roots out a force of traitors that is growing in the large military camp. Geralt becomes the hand of domination.

The effects of these choices are huge, not because of the great possibility they offer, but because of how they limit you. Choosing Iorveth or Roche means that you are fundamentally cut off from the political machinery of the "other side." The game's final chapter takes place at a political summit in an ancient city, and the events that occur there change the entire political landscape of the North.

If Geralt follows Vernon Roche, he can attempt to rescue the kingdom of Temeria by finding the rightful heir and preventing rival powers from absorbing the entire country into their borders. If he follows Iorveth, he abandons political intervention in order to cure the revolutionary leader Saskia of a curse and to strive for a new democratic nation to be formed. These options are vitally important for the structure of the world that you've been living in for 30-plus hours, but unless you have played both story portions you really don't understand the stakes of what is happening.

The Witcher 2 is a brave game. It is willing to block the player out of knowing things about the world and its characters in its dedication to showing how life is experienced by those characters. That might not seem like much, but the player backlash around Mass Effect 3 is still fresh. Players expect freedom, choice, and transparency around how they impact the game world. The idea that one could be siloed off from part of the game world and funneled into specific bundles of choices without any way of going back or learning about broader context is radical in the narrative-based blockbuster game genre. Dark Souls had to found its own school of contemporary game design to get around those expectations.

The reason that the gaming public reacted so positively to The Witcher 3's Bloody Baron quest is not that it was uniquely brilliant or genre-pushing. It was because it was a faint echo of something we would have seen in The Witcher 2: A flawed character putting Geralt in a bad place from which to make decisions. It was a quest about power and who gets to use it. It was a quest about who gets to tell who else what to do and on what terms. Spec Ops: The Line's finger-wagging is still held up as an example of how to deal with player fantasies of overcoming the world, but it is nothing compared to the political choice one has to make when choosing between rebels and their idealism or the state and its brutal, but safe, oppressive regime.

This is where The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt failed me. It's a brilliant game, and I loved playing it, but it threw out all of the forced choice. It made Geralt of Rivia into the superhero who can solve anything and remain unhindered by any choice that he made. It turned Geralt into an action figure. It robbed him of having to deal with the everyday and the boring. We need games that help us understand the intersection between the ordinary and the oppressive. The Witcher 2 should be remembered as one of those games.

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