Look at her. She knows what I did.
I recently finished the main plot of The Witcher 3. You might have been following my love affair with it through my stories on the topic, or my weekly “What Are You Playing” posts featuring Geralt in various states of undress. My reward for 110 hours of hard work? Accidentally being a terrible dad.
I’d heard from my colleagues that the game has multiple endings, which I knew had something to do with being a good father figure to Ciri. I interacted with Ciri with that in mind, carefully sizing up every Dad Moment, though I didn’t know which choices would actually affect the end.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/08/we-mostly-loved-the-witcher-3s-ending/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/1382917154958488642.jpg” title=”We (Mostly) Loved The Witcher 3’s Ending” excerpt=”The Witcher 3 has had a bunch of us under its spell for months now, but we’re at a point where several of us on staff have now finished the game. Now that we’ve wiped away the tears and closed the book on Geralt’s adventures, it’s time to talk about the end.”]
Honestly, I thought I was a pretty great dad. I told Ciri she didn’t have to be good at everything when she was upset after the battle at Kaer Morhen. I thought it was a valuable moment of growth for her, one both I and Geralt could stand to learn. I went with her to fight Imlerith because we were in this Wild Hunt thing together. I didn’t take her to see the emperor because as far as I’m concerned he’s not her dad.
I accompanied her to the meeting with the sorceresses because she seemed intimidated, and I wanted her to know I was there for the mundane dad stuff as well as the big fights. I told her to calm down when she wanted to trash Avallac’h’s lab because I thought she’d later regret lashing out at a friend. I took her to Skjall’s grave because obviously.
Did you know those are pretty much all the wrong choices? Because I didn’t.
I was on the edge of my seat as Ciri went through the portal, like I was sending my daughter off to college. As her flashbacks played out, I honestly thought they must have been from The Witcher 2. I didn’t recognise the moments she remembered. Who was this Geralt (with different hair, I might add!) pushing a drink at her while she sat with her chin in her hand? Which dad dragged her to brothels, so ignorant of her displeasure, when I had a whole catalogue of moments we’d hugged and laughed?
When the game cut to Velen a week later, I assumed it was all just some drama before Ciri came back and I found out what happened in the portal. I attacked the remaining Crone even as she told me I “could not survive this struggle.” She told me Ciri was dead, but I was certain she’d show up nevertheless, swooping in to save my arse with all the skills I’d taught her.
As Geralt slumped in the Crone’s house, clutching Ciri’s medallion as an impossible number of monsters swarmed in, I had a couple doubts. But I still kept thinking, OK, but where are the dad endings? I got a bunch of politics, and then the credits rolled.
Confused, I took to Kotaku‘s resident Witcher 3 expert, Luke Plunkett, via Slack.
Yuck it up with Fahey, readers. Things aren’t too funny from here.
To avoid spoilers, a room titled “Bad Dad” was soon started on Slack. It’s important to stress that I honestly, honestly thought everyone got the ending I did. That must be the big deal about the DLC, I thought. The DLC must be so good because it brings Ciri back.
(I later learned that it can, but not for me.)
I deserve this.
My colleagues helped me piece together what I’d done. There was a lot of incredulity about my skipping the snowball fight to go drinking, which I promptly watched on the internet while holding my head in my hands like Geralt in the Crone’s hut. I was shocked that these seemingly small moments mattered so much, but I was even more shocked that I had been so confident I’d been doing the right thing.
It was embarrassing to admit the pride I’d felt in what I thought were excellent interactions with Ciri. I’d weighed my words and acted according to my own instincts as much as the game would allow. I even thought at one point — up too late playing, a little drunk — that it was a shame I’ll probably never be a father since I could make this virtual daughter so happy.
As my colleagues reminisced about their much better endings (or even their acceptable ones, because I wasn’t even a good enough dad to get that), I felt gutted, robbed. I debated going back and replaying, but I’m one of those idiots who mostly saves over their save files. There wasn’t a save anywhere remotely far back enough to fix what I’d done.
Better times.
The problem seemed to be that I’d been playing as Geralt-As-Dad, rather than really thinking about Ciri. Luke told me, “It’s bullshit arbitrary video game psychology, yes, and in that way it’s no more elegant than, say, Mass Effect‘s virtues, but the game was testing you all along. Testing to see if you understood that this game wasn’t about Geralt’s adventures at all, it was about supporting Ciri and giving her the strength to finish her adventure. Which, you know, you failed. Because she died.”
Ciri even says at some point that it’s a story about her, not you. At the time I thought, Ah, yes, I know that. Like an idiot. I’ve been enamoured of Geralt, fascinated by his solitary existence and how much he stands out from humanity, charting his struggle to navigate the fuzzy morality of the world. (How he looks without a shirt doesn’t hurt either.)
In fact, during most of the game I was much more interested in following Geralt through the daily life of being a Witcher than the grand story. I didn’t like playing as Ciri, mostly because I’d spent so much time being Geralt that I missed my gear and my stats and my haircut. Looking back, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that continuing to focus on Geralt once I found Ciri was the wrong choice.
Heather Alexandra told me, “I think it’s easy to assume that The Witcher is a world where you have to make hard decisions. The difficulty is realising that you can’t make them for other people. Ciri is on her own quest. Once Geralt finds her, his journey is over. He can’t make choices for her. If she’s mad, let her be mad. If she is sad, let her be sad. She can deal with it.”
After this we stole some horses. They grow up so fast.
Luke added, “Ciri isn’t some neutral character, an anvil for your actions like a party member in Persona, she’s Ciri. She returns to you, having been missing for ages, as an adult. She’s her own person, with her own backstory and secret motives and cool sword. It seems only right that the game is cloudy in the way it deals with your relationship, because that’s what it must have been like! It’s like, OK, here’s how I’m going to handle this girl, but what the fuck do I know? She might secretly be hating everything I’m telling her, just like in real life.”
Even though it was just a video game, I had a bit of a moral crisis. I couldn’t get over how spectacularly badly I’d done while thinking I was doing such a good job. I used to be a prison chaplain for goodness’ sake — surely I should be good at feelings, even virtual ones? I started recalling all the real-life interactions where I think I’m putting other people’s needs ahead of my own, mining them for hidden failures. Who else in my life could I be ignorant of hurting?
Heather pointed out that these questions might be some of the point of The Witcher 3: “Intentions are tricky, and The Witcher knows it. Act too fast, even for the right reasons, and there’s a cost. You might break the curse on the Bloody Baron’s wife because that feels right. But if you’re not careful, she can still die even if you meant well.”
Sigh.
Even though I felt like complete shit, I felt kind of good, too. The Worst Possible Ending was unbearably grisly and intense and sad. But it also felt like it fit the world of The Witcher 3, where bad things happen to everyone. My Geralt used to run around solving everyone’s problems without ever being touched by them.
After my ending, the first time I ran into a character who told me their child had died, I snapped back at my computer screen, “Yeah, get in line, pal.” Through his loss, Geralt had suddenly become a part of the world he’d previously stood so aloof from.
The question then became: what now? I still had Hearts of Stone and Blood of Wine to play. Before I’d reached my Witcher 3 end, I was excited there was so much more game to play, but now I could barely even look Geralt in the eye.
This is me now.
I took a week off, then grudgingly headed back into Hearts of Stone. The DLC has been appropriately titled for Geralt post Bad Dad Ending. The Geralt I play now carries the weight of Ciri’s sacrifice around like a rock. He doesn’t go out of his way to do the right thing. He takes his sweet time wandering over to folks who call out to him, and he charges much more for contracts than he used to. The ghost of his decisions haunts him, his foolishness and the cost of doing what he thought was right.
I pause much longer at decision screens now, and the violent or selfish options aren’t as much of a stretch as they once were. Heather calls it “Geralt throwing himself into work to escape grief,” which sounds about right. Luke hopes that I’ll stick with the DLCs, telling me “they are rad and fun and literally involve parties. If a Witcher 3 party can’t cheer you up, then nothing can.”
But Geralt doesn’t deserve parties. He deserves pain and misery and living with what he’s done. Appropriately, the first few hours of Hearts of Stone have been pretty rough. There’s a lot of violence and two tough boss fights in a row, and they both felt like the punishment Geralt deserved. I don’t know if I can sustain another 80 hours of play feeling like this.
The whole game feels so oppressive and dark and trauma-filled, and all of that is in Geralt now, instead of just what’s going on around him.
Geralt takes his shirt off. All hope isn’t lost.
This would be a sad way to end my time with The Witcher 3, but over the weekend I found that hope isn’t all lost. On Saturday night I got to the “Dead Man’s Party” quest in Hearts of Stone. I was surprised how positive and moving I found it. The questions of pleasure and joy, of who Geralt is and how that affects those who care about him, felt tailor-made for his particular circumstances.
Bad Dad Geralt definitely wasn’t going to be happy without being possessed, but once he was, it felt good to embody him in a livelier form. I’ve learned these lessons from video games before, but the particular nature of my role in what had happened, of who Geralt was and who he’ll go on to become, struck a particular nerve.
None of us can avoid making mistakes, however hard we try, but we can avoid making things worse by how we decide to deal with the aftermath.
The possibility of pursuing a romance with Shani is hanging over Geralt now, and for the first time I’ve found myself wondering if it will affect my DLC future with Yen, rather than how much longer I’ll have to deal with thinking about my terrible ending. For the first time I felt like I could roleplay Geralt into redemption, if I just stuck with it. There’s a lot of Witcher 3 left. We’ll see how it goes.
Comments
19 responses to “I Accidentally Got The Worst Ending In The Witcher 3”
I taught Ciri to be responsible and stand on her own feet. Then she became the m*****-f****** Empress! I was so proud of my little pumpkin…*sniff*
Wow. I got the same bad ending and just thought it was supposed to be that sad…. finished all the DLC and never realised she could have been saved.
Reminds me of the scene in the original Deus Ex where the men in suits storm Paul Denton’s apartment and he tells you to run.
I got killed the first time and didn’t go close to taking one guy down, so the second time out I just ran off as instructed. Came back later to find Paul dead… was so upset that I took his pistol, upgraded and used it for sentimental revenge later in the game.
Then I went to a mates house and saw that in his game he’d saved him! That was an amazing video game moment for me- it was literally my driving force for the whole game. It was so unprecedented at the time to have that kind of choice.
This is why I never reload earlier saves, even if things go a way I don’t like – Living with bad videogame decisions in RPGs almost always makes the game more powerful/real emotionally than if you do everything perfectly.
It’s not that I’m a sucker for punishment, I’ll try and make what I view as the right choices, but it’s almost universally been my experience that when things didn’t go the way I wanted and bad things happen to characters I’m invested in, it makes the experience much more powerful. We get this from other forms of in media but I think it can be much stronger in videogames because you know that those bad outcomes were on you, a result of your choices. It’s why I’m really bothered by railroading-into-tragedy in games that claim to be choice-based – it robs anything bad that happens of actual emotional impact because you know it wasn’t actually your fault. Similarly, I was annoyed that for anyone to die in ME2 you pretty much had to intentionally make obviously terrible choices, meant the whole game felt very safe and tame.
Give me subtle choices that can have unintended side-effects that kill off my favourite characters and trash relationships – when that happens, sure I’m not happy, but it’s not ruining the game for myself when these things happen, it’s making it more real and deepening its impact.
If you play games as art, you should never save-scum to undo choices you didn’t like the outcome of. You’re robbing yourself of feels.
HAHA! I’m normally with you in that you should just let your choices ride, but I do make exceptions, particularly when the game has a really sh*tty dialoge system which means you don’t know what your character is going to say when you make you selection (eg. Dragon Age: Inquisition, Fallout 4).
Even then I normally let things go, but I have my limits. There’s a scene in Mass Effect 2 where Shepard (man Shepard for me) is getting grilled by a female reporter, I was getting pretty annoyed and when I saw the ‘renegade’ icon come up I thought it was a great chance to tell her to go f*ck herself, but when Shepard dropped her with a massive right hand I was so shocked/ amused that I had to reload.
Oh yeah, the one exception I make is “That dialogue choice, my character did not say what I thought they’d say.” Because that’s not living with you making a bad choice, that’s living with the fact that RPGs have largely adopted a terrible dialogue system because they want to appeal to an audience that’s afraid of reading for some reason.
I got this ending first time around, before the DLC was out.
Then, when Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine came out, I decided to start a fresh game to take full advantage of them, and I finally got my happy ending last week.
*MAJOR SPOILERS*
My first play through, I got one of the good endings – but it was the “Ciri becomes a Witcher” ending. I got most of the “right” choices:
– Had the snowball fight with Ciri.
– Visited Skjall’s grave.
– Helped her trash elf bro’s lab.
But made the wrong choices on the “visit the Emperor” and “let Ciri talk to the lodge by herself” sections.
My NG+ playthrough I went for the full Empress happy ending.
I’m in two minds about the happy endings.
The Witcher ending is arguably more “selfishly” happy – Geralt gets to keep hanging out with Ciri day in and day out, and Ciri doesn’t have to deal with all the politics she so hated.
But the Empress ending is more altruistic, and also sets up Geralt’s retirement after B&W better. If Ciri became a Witcher, I don’t see Geralt ever really retiring properly and leaving her. He’d probably end up like Vesemir. Whereas with the Empress ending, Geralt can happily retire to Corvo Bianco with Yen. Plus, as Empress, Ciri would be able to make real, long-lasting changes. If she wants to save the world (again), this is the way to do it. Not traveling the countryside for contracts.
I forget at which point, but sometime before Geralt finds Ciri, someone tells Geralt, as a sort of prophecy, to support Ciri’s decisions.
I kept that top of mind during my first playthrough, and wound up getting what is in my opinion the best ending. Where Ciri lives and joins Geralt on the Witcher path.
I didn’t go visit Emyhr with Ciri because my Geralt took every opportunity to annoy the emperor of the world’s most powerful nation.
It’s in the tavern at White Orchard. Have you played Hearts of Stone yet? If not, that “someone” that tells you this turns out to be much more than just a merchant of mirrors.
I know who you mean, but i had the impression it was a woman. I played through white orchard so long ago, even before heart of stone was released.
I have wondered after that meeting at a crossroads at midnight, where he claimed to know me from white orchard, something i cannot remember at all, if there were some changes made after the dlc was installed.
To be fair, I had a huge gap between White Orchard and HoS as well. But I’m pretty sure I remember reading an interview with CDPR where they said it was always Gaunter who told you about Yen. It was a result of them needing to plan ahead so much so HoS could fit in with the main game, or something. So they did a lot of foreshadowing.
I got the bad ending first time as well, probably the biggest letdown I’ve ever had with a game. I went back and redid my choices eventually, but the experience (after I’d devoted 100 hours to the game, and that’s pre-expansion) utterly soured me on it.
I get what they were going for, but the decisions that affect the ending are too arbitrary. I didn’t take her to her dad and took her to the grave, that made sense. But my problem was not doing the snowball fight, not sitting out on the meeting with the sorceresses and telling her not to throw a tanty in the lab. For the first and third one, apparently all I needed to do to save her life was not treat her like a grown-up. Meanwhile, the decision on whether or not to steal the horses (which I actually did reload after my initial choice led to a fight with her circus friends because hey, if there is an ending based on Ciri’s relationship with Geralt, surely beating up the people who looked after her when she had nobody else is going to hurt my chances, right?) did nothing, as did all the other times I was given a choice in dialogue to be encouraging as opposed to goal-focused, which I presume is what they were going for.
The only other game I can think of that did endings like that (clear good and bad, based on multiple choices throughout campaign, not signposted) is Metro 2033 and I liked those endings. Probably because it’s only a 12 hour linear game as opposed to a massive RPG so I didn’t feel like I wasted my time. Also, getting a bad ending in Metro fits with the tone of that world, whereas for all it’s touted grim-darkness, Witcher 3 genuinely felt like it was building to a happy ending. Everything was going fine until it dropped an apocalypse on me in the last 15 minutes and I had no idea I was apparently such a terrible father figure to Ciri until I went and looked up the choices.
Totally agree with you here. I haven’t touched the Witcher since my first play through after getting the bad ending. I was so angry! So much time invested in the game and the bad ending was handed to me for some really minor decisions.
I ended up with the “Ciri becomes a Witcher” (I think the golden ending?) And I felt the opposite of you. I thought I was being too distant by never really offering any advice and just letting her do whatever she felt like. I felt like I had no right to offer advice when she’d gotten by just fine without my absent arse. I expected a bad ending and when I saw Ciri walk into the pub for a drink with GeraltI was shocked and elated, then dissapointed that I fdidn’t get to go on any adventures with her. As you said though; it’s her journey, her adventure and Geralt should just feel lucky to be a part of it.
I love Witcher 3, and played the hell out of it, but I thought the mechanic about Ciri dying or living was rubbish. First of all, it’s not made at all clear why it works like that. Why does Ciri being happier/self-confident translate into surviving against the White Frost? “Because it does” is basically all the answer we got. It’s also not made clear ahead of time, like the author of this article found out, that the “wrong” choices are wrong. For example, going with her when she meets the Lodge. It’s not Ciri Geralt doesn’t trust, it’s the group of power hungry sorceresses, but the game treats it as Geralt being a controlling dick.
When I heard there were multiple endings I went online to find out what they were and how to get the one I wanted. As a result I got to experience a satisfying but bittersweet ending where Ciri left Geralt to be empress. Had I instead got anywhere close to the ending this guy got I would have absolutely lost it in anger.
TBH, I made the same decisions as you mostly, but I got a happy ending where Ciri became a witcher. But it seems pretty confusing on what choices affect the overall outcome. For example one guy on this page comments that he had the same ending as me but he made different decisions, whereas you made similar decisions as me, but got a shitty ending. I dunno, chin up man, you didnt do anything bad with your decision making!
Yeaaa.
I played Witcher 3 when it came out. Finished with Ciri being… think witcher too. And ended up without lover.
Thought I would like to play with new GPU and have Yen at the ending.
But I was so sad at the end. I got the worst ending. Wondered how. Found ten minutes ago.
Really many times dialogs options are nicely shortened, but I am often NOT in the same mood as writer. So by saying – you do not have to be best at everything I did not mean – you are looser Ciri. I meant – you can be better at different things.
Also choosing option to let her in camp at the ending, instead to let her go with me, was because I simply did not know ANYTHING, about plan they were supposedly to talk about. I thought to let her in camp, until we know what is exactly going on and what will be involvement of bad icy guys. Also I was open to discussion, to let her convince me. I would probably let her with me if she insisted. But instead game said – Nono, Ciri, you are a baby.
The only time I reloaded, because it was too serious for me because I could not bear it.
Was when I had to kill exhausted and injured witch in dungeons.
I said – I won’t kill her.(We try to save her first).
But instead char said – I won’t kill her. Yen: I’ll do it you asshole. 😀
Btw I had this problem in Witcher 2 too. Think it was better in Witcher 1, which still rules in my heart because of gameplay. Yaya, just Batman clickfest and hardcore RPG. But console-ish feel of W2 and W3 is terrible.
Witcher 1 best lore and feel.
Witcher 2 best story of W games
Witcher 3 best open world RPG contract killing of W games.