The fallen order of witchers

This afternoon, after some tedious work getting all the updates working, I finally started playing my recently purchased copy of The Witcher, an eastern European RPG from 2007 based on a Polish series of fantasy novels. I've just completed the prologue/tutorial so far, but I'd like to share a story.

After a lengthy opening pre-rendered cutscene (which unfortunately didn't have any sound due to a bug, I assume), the game opens with . . . a very long in-engine cutscene, beginning with the protagonist, Geralt, being carred unconscious on a wagon back to the mountain fortress of the witchers, an infamous group of mutants who hunt monsters, according to the game's omniscient narration. All swell, until Geralt opens his mouth: "I don't remember anything."

Well, if there's anything to create a negative first impression, especially in an RPG, it's amnesia. I know of two games that dealt with it well (Torment, where the basic mystery of it is done away with fairly quickly, and Sanitarium, where it's the entire point of the game), and already it feels tacked on considering that the game has made very clear who the main character is--Geralt of Riveria, the White Wolf, one of the most famous of the surviving witchers.

I realize soon enough that the device is a necessary evil for the game to equally behave as a traditional RPG and allow the player to control Geralt. Amnesia allows the game to introduce the narrative and mechanical aspects of the world as if they were new to the character as well as the player, which is of course the usual reason for its inclusion in RPGs, and also to have the player start with a first-level character, as opposed to the great monster slayer that Geralt is already. (Which seems a bit disingenuous to me. What's the point of playing a famous hero if you don't start super powerful?)

Anyway, the cutscene finally (and I do mean finally, it is damned long) gives way to the combat tutorial as a band of hilariously incompetent bandits attack the castle. But as the prologue goes on, involving Geralt, his sorceress girlfriend Triss, and four other witchers (well, three witchers and a trainee) defending the castle against what they discover is a much more calculated and dangerous incursion, a number of strange things begin to strike my mind.

The first is as I'm sent to sound some bells in a high tower to damage a giant monster vulnerable to loud noises. In a cutscene (arg!), the stairs, which circle a bit that falls to open ground rather than a stone floor, begin collapsing. Geralt gets to the top but the bandits pursuing him are left behind as I watch agape and wonder, how does an inhabited castle have collapsing stairs? The next time Geralt meets up with the other witchers their leader apologizes and comments that one of the others was supposed to fix it, to which the witcher in question McCoys that he's not a mason.

For the rest of the sequence I'm too concerned with stopping a powerful sorcerer, regaining some magic powers, and getting upset over the trainee's death at the hands of an assassin awesomely called "The Professor" to notice other odd things, but once combat is over and I'm sent to collect the ingredients for a healing potion for Triss, things get stranger. As the witcher leader warns me that there are still some stragglers about the castle--bandits they didn't kill--I begin to question the narrative integrity of this game.

Would they really let any of the bandits get away? It seems ridiculous except as a device to provide more combat during this fetch quest. And where are the rest of the witchers, anyway? The opening cutscene showed a huge castle, yet all I've seen are five other people here. Shouldn't the rest of the castle been helping to defend against the attack? That would have made it too easy, of course. And would there really be no significant defenses against an incursion into the witchers' most secret sanctuary, the laboratory they never allowed even Triss to enter?

As I explore the castle, I'm confused by its appearance more as a ruin than an active fortress. There are huge cracks in the walls, more collapsed staircases, a flooded basement, and many rooms that are either empty or hold only a few random pieces of junk--a dusty, broken chest, a twisted metal bedframe. Beyond the central area the witchers stay in with the wounded Triss and a few select rooms--a library, Triss' bedroom at the top of a tower--the castle is an abandoned relic.

I begin to question my cynical analysis of the game, and slowly I realize the story behind all of this. The four witchers and Triss are the only people left in the fortress, they alone maintaining a glimmer of whatever former glory the witchers might have once possessed. And they're not enough to maintain a massive castle, of course, and so they maintain a few areas they use and leave the rest to rot. The bell tower was seldom used, and the witchers aren't masons, and so the stairs had never been repaired. The stragglers were left to roam the castle because the witchers didn't have enough men to confidently root them out and still defend their central living area. The laboratory was undefended because everyone in the castle was already fighting.

At first I'm not sure if this is the truth or just me coming up with an explanation that gives the game more credit than it's worth, but when I return with the potion ingredients and speak to the witcher leader, one of the optional dialogues leads to him telling the story of an attack on the castle some twenty years earlier, in which the then twenty-four witchers and several dozen trainees were all murdered, save for himself, who survived by hiding among the corpses. (I assume he simply fails to mention the numerous servants that must have kept the castle running, but in fariness, he probably wouldn't mention them, being beneath the consideration of such a powerful man.)

There's another fact that emerges from this dialogue, too: there will be no more witchers. While the laboratory contained the tools necessary for the brutal process of chemical and magical mutation that produces them (which is itself an interestingly scientific position in a fantasy setting), they didn't have a mage powerful enough to perform the necessary rituals, and it's unclear whether the witcher leader even knew said rituals, himself being quite young when the rest of the order was slaughtered.

And thus my respect for the game shoots up immensely. Perhaps they could have done a better job introducing the status of the witchers and their castle, but once it becomes clear, the story is tragic and touching. And it lends a fatalistic quality to (at least the start of) the game's main quest, which is to find the mysterious sorcerer who led the attack. The witchers split up for the four corners of the world in search of clues not hoping to stop some great evil or save the world but simply looking to avenge their fallen comrade and retrieve their stolen potions that are of no use to them. Even if they succeed, it's likely that more of them will perish in the quest, and they'll have gained nothing for it. But they can't gain anything anyway--they are the last of the witchers, and they know it.

Which, despite everything else, is a great way to start to game.