So The Witcher 2 happened to me in a big way. I’ve loved computer games – games in general, to be honest – since I was knee high to a slime, but as you get older it’s a passion that’s difficult to sustain. Not just because you’re a grown up who is meant to be into grown up things (and I am into some grown up things – I like Chopin, and I go to the theatre, and I read the occasional Booker prize winner and I drink pink champagne…okay, so I’m not very grown up at all) but also because I think your sense of wonder gets eroded with time. You get used to things. You learn about tropes. The edges of your imagination go a little soft. It takes more to engage you, plot developments that once might have blown your tiny mind seem blasé. I suppose in some ways it’s just increasing sophistication in your attitude to texts, and the world, and being able to get away with less in your daily life. After all, if I’m abstracted at school because I’d rather be playing Final Fantasy XII, that’s all very well but there’s really no room to do that in a job, not only because there’s the chance of disciplinary proceedings but also because people are depending on me. But I remember going through my day in a haze of bewildered delight after an evening playing Baldurs Gate. The world! The storytelling! The strangeness of it all. At university, I actually sacrificed a relationship to Morrowind and, at the time, it seemed a reasonable exchange.
But it’s been a while since I’ve felt that way. I know it’s complicated, and not wholly negative, coloured as it is by the rosy tint of nostalgia. But, damn, I think The Witcher 2 got me good. I twitch to play it when I should be doing other things. I find myself thinking about it at odd moments, mulling over the decisions I have made, the things I have seen and the people I have met. I wonder what is coming next. And I cannot begin to express how much I enjoy that. My expectations feel deliciously de-anchored. I sometimes think that there’s nothing Bioware could write that would surprise me – when I play their games, it’s like sleeping with your ex, comforting, pleasurable, but nothing you haven’t had before. Even flaws are deadened by familiarity. But The Witcher is full of mysteries, and from a deep slumber my sense of wonder shakes itself awake.
Anyway. Enough about the genius of others. Let’s talk about meeee! As I celebrated in my previous post, I have finished chapter 3. Or more accurately stumbled over the finish line. And now, continuing in the fine old tradition of depicting my emotional state via animals, I feel like this:
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Partially as a consequence of the above mental faceplant, the end of Chapter 3 has turned out to be a rallying and regrouping point. The main problem is that I realised, midway through Chapter 3, that my journal system wasn’t working for me. I kind of started this process in this sort of mood: “design document shmesign shmocument” and now I’m thinking “y’know, what would be really helpful around here would be a design document.” But the thing is, when I first started modding I didn’t know enough about what the hell I was doing to have anything to put in a design document. I knew I had a main quest, of course, playing out over various “missions” but it didn’t occur to me at the time to break that main quest down into manageable chunks. So suddenly I’m in chapter 3 and I’m up to journal entry number 281 (I don’t have 281 entries, honest) covering multiple mission outcomes and it occurs to me, in a flash of blinding insight, that I should really have individual journal headings for each mission, even if they comprise the same quest, because it would make tracking everything about a million and eighty times easier.
But the thing is, I use the journal a lot. I track a fuck tonne off the journal, and reference it a fuck tonne too. Fuck tonne, by the way, is technical language. And so I had to decide whether I should press on with my functional but inelegant approach, which would likely implode or explode or bog standardly fail to work properly, at some point in the future. Or re-do the whole bloody thing from half-way through the process. After much soul-searching and agonised howling, I went for the latter. It took me an evening of solid work, chasing down and changing every journal reference in every script and every conversation across two campaign modules. And I still left a shit tonne. That’s another technical term.
Thankfully I do have a friend to help me with bug-smooshing, otherwise I would actually have gone nuts by now. She’s somehow vaguely enthusiastic about the process, which I would in no way take for granted, but leaves me completely boggled, since for me bug-testing is the computer game design equivalent of references and bibliographies. Necessary but time-consuming, soul-destroying and bloody difficult to do for yourself, since you tend to read over your own mistakes. I think that’s genuinely one of those brain chemistry things: because you don’t believe you’ve made a mistake, your brain kindly helps out and so you see what you’re expecting to see (no mistake) rather than what is actually there (blatant mistake). Bug-testing also makes you feel lowkey bad about yourself because most of the crap that comes up is so unbelievably banal and obvious you can’t believe you didn’t notice it going go. Like connecting doors to the wrong waypoints. Or failing to actually give characters the conversations you’ve so devotedly written for them. Or mistyping the tag of something. Gah. Argh. Curses.
In good news, I think we’re reaching the end of this process. And, yeah, this is surface bug-testing. There’s still tonnes of polishing to be done but at least we’ve managed to swat about 75% of the “this will break the whole fucking game” style bugs. So now it’s time to get off my arse and do Chapter 4 I guess.