Witcher 3 is an incredible game. It’s one of the best open world RPGs ever made, and in terms of giving the player choices and decisions to make, of giving actions consequences, it’s certainly head-and-shoulders above the rest. Geralt’s choices matter, and not always in an obvious way. They have effects hours and hours down the line, in totally different contexts. It makes Witcher 3 feel like a game where your actions matter… but in one area, they don’t at all. That’s the legal system, or lack of one.
The Witcher 3 Needs A Better Legal System
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In Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you can essentially steal with impunity. Sure, if you grab stuff openly from a village, outdoors, in sight of the rare guards, you may get in trouble… at least, that’s what the game’s tutorial told me, although it has never once come up despite continued and brazen theft. And if you’re in some peasant’s house, you can steal away with no consequences whatsoever. Not even a complaint.
I think this is a huge problem. Witcher 3 is a game about consequences and choices, and making the choice to steal from peasants—peasants who the game encourages us to think of us as starving, struggling people with few prospects—has only one consequence: Geralt gets lots of important items worth lots of gold, or helpful in crafting. There is no downside.
Often, quests will give you the option to forego payment from a peasant after doing a quest. If you accept, it’s probably because you—Geralt—think those peasants need the money a heck of a lot more than you do. It’s a noble choice, to Geralt’s short term misfortune. And yet you can forego that reward and then immediately proceed to rob that peasant’s house blind. You can rob your own friends blind, when you visit their homes, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. It is solely to Geralt’s benefit.
It seems like a major oversight. Even Skyrim, a game much less concerned about moral choices, had a robust legal system. You couldn’t sell stolen items to normal merchants; you couldn’t break into people’s houses in the middle of the day without risk; if you were spotted, guards would be called; if you were caught, you’d be hurled in prison.
It’s ridiculous that a game that’s so heavily focused on morality and choices could let you steal with impunity. It’s one of a handful of areas where Witcher 3 feels less like a fully developed open world RPG and more like something like Bioshock Infinite, where the world feels populated for the convenience of the hero. Yea guys, that’s a dig. In most ways, the world of The Witcher feels like it happens whether Geralt is around or not. It’s a living world. But then Geralt marches in, takes whatever he wants, and nobody cares. It’s a huge disconnect, and a huge disappointment.
