eRe4s3r wrote on Dec 23, 2019, 09:01:
I gotta hand it to the show, it reminded me why i always picked Triss in Witcher 3... Jennefer is.. for the lack of any fancy words, a true to class asshole.

Yennefer is also plain fugly compared to Triss. Gimme Triss any day of the week. I would MAYBE touch (not even fuck) Yennefer after a decade in prison but given a choice it'd be Triss 10/10 times.

Oh, and fuck Netflix. Gaming > all.

I quite liked the show and do like the main 3 actors. Some of the side-character actors and CGI are a bit iffy at times though.

I do think that the showrunner and writers could have done a much better job of easing into the characters and world building. There's a lot of expositiony dialog, locations and character names tossed at the viewer right off the bat and unless you've read the novels or played the games, it can be a confusing info dump. It also doesn't help that the adventures of each character takes place in different time periods of their lives and side-characters that die in one scene for a main character can suddenly appear alive and well in a scene for another main character.

Eventually those who will stick with the show will figure out what's going on with the time jumps but the lack of easement and hand-holding transitions will just confuse people who are new to this world and jarring style of storytelling. This is kind of apparent with how the critics are hammering the show in their scores and comparisons to GoT. Fortunately the user-scores are high for The Witcher but that does show the stark dissonance when it comes to what "professional critics" think and what viewers think. The only other similar property I can think of is The Last Jedi which critics loved the shit out of whereas fandom seemed to mostly dislike it.

I've only seen the first episode and it definitely hooked me. I'll be watching the rest of them when I have time.

I got up to episode 3 this past weekend while watching it with my sister and her boyfriend. Both of whom have zero Witcher knowledge.

The boyfriend fell straight asleep into a snore somewhere in episode 2. My sister was holding on for my sake as I could tell she was lost beyond all hell but got into it by episode 3.

I'd say the first episode was good although you are trying to figure out whose who which was Okay for me (coming from W3 game), but for someone without knowledge, very rough. Then throwing out city/town names when a viewer with zero knowledge has no clue what they are talking about.

Episode 2 dragged. Had like zero action and was all convo which was Okay but even I got bored somewhere in there. Episode 3 brought me back and I thought it ended fantastic. Totally looking forward to the remaining 5 episodes which I'll get to on X-mas day.

All in all, they did a good job. The production values are high, the music was great. I didn't know much about the jumping between timelines until someone at work mentioned it and then it made sense. Odd choice that they would do that when you are trying to grab the audience who doesn't know much about Witcher and not confuse them even more.

I finished the Netflix Witcher series, thought it was mostly good, occasionally very good. Bouncing around chronologically was a weird choice, and I bet they lost some of the audience there. I need to reread the books, but it feels like Nilfgaard's mages are quite a bit more dark than in the novels? Everything is human self sacrifice, from tracking to smoke to fireballs? Still, I enjoyed the show overall.

It seems like Geralt may have a second, steel sword in his golf bag/backpack thing, but so far it seems like he just uses the silver vs everyone. Minor nitpick.

re: Baldur's Gate : damn, I need to finish an Enhanced Edition playthrough, before BG3 comes out. That's another 300+ hours.

I gotta hand it to the show, it reminded me why i always picked Triss in Witcher 3... Jennefer is.. for the lack of any fancy words, a true to class asshole.

I liked the show though

Interviewer: XBOX or Playstation?

Cavil: PC!

Love it

P.S. I get Creston's nitpicks but to me they are refreshing in todays age of handholding the viewer if anyhing requires more brainpower than putting two and two together. Love the show, and love how you need to pay attention especially early on. But yeah, I can see how a lot of people would be frustrated with that.

Dash wrote on Dec 23, 2019, 01:15:

Cutter wrote on Dec 22, 2019, 15:26:
Yes, unfortunately it is a bit too GOT'y. Less politics and more questing, thanks.

...Does it being "too GOT'y" mean its going to be great, right up until the very end, and shit the bed?

It... might? Afaik, there isn't an ending to Geralt's adventures in the novels. The only "ending" that Geralt ever gets is due to Witcher 3 (and in various brothels - hiyooo) and the show is based off of the novels and not the game (as the showrunner has said many times).

Edit: Although I doubt the show will last past 3 seasons (it's already renewed for season 2) unless the show does amazingly for Netflix. They seem adverse to going past 3 seasons of a show unless it's named Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, or Voltron.

This comment was edited on Dec 23, 2019, 02:45.

Cutter wrote on Dec 22, 2019, 15:26:
Yes, unfortunately it is a bit too GOT'y. Less politics and more questing, thanks.

...Does it being "too GOT'y" mean its going to be great, right up until the very end, and shit the bed?

NKD wrote on Dec 22, 2019, 21:58:
The Witcher series is waaaay better than I expected. Henry Cavill is just an amazing Geralt. He channels Witcher 3 Geralt almost perfectly. Yennefer and Ciri are great, and the rest of the cast is pretty solid as well. I especially liked Tissaia and Stregobor (Myanna Buring and Lars Mikkelson respectively)

Jaskier/Dandelion is an absolute treasure. Great songs too.

Agreed on all points. Toss a coin to your Witcher, oh Valley of Plenty!

I got so used to ginger Triss though that I forgot that she isn't actually a redhead in the books, so seeing her without her red hair was strange.

I know. Triss should just be a redhead.

I'm not sure how it's anything like Game of Thrones. More happens in 8 episodes of The Witcher than happens in the first 30 episodes of Game of Thrones.

I also don't really know why people thought it was going to be just like Game of Thrones. Netflix said they wanted a show with as much success / presence as Game of Thrones, not an actual GoT clone.

If anything, the quick pacing and jumping between the time periods seems to have confused a lot of viewers.

This is my MAIN complaint against it. It's EXTREMELY poorly explained when things take place. You can figure it out if you are extremely observant (they basically scale everything against Calanthe, time-wise, and every episode will have some comment towards Calanthe / Cintra that lets you figure out roughly how this particular event fits in the time-frame, but you have to be very observant to catch these moments, and you have to be aware of their significance to begin with.)

I've read the books multiple times, played all the games, and even I had trouble remembering that "Oh yeah, this takes place like 30 years before". They should have put SOMETHING in there to help viewers who are not familiar with this world to figure out that most of the stuff being told has happened in the past.

I think the only things that are happening in present tense, so to speak, is the stuff that happens to Ciri. Everything else is in the past.

It's also very, very sparse with regards to useless expository dialogue. It demands a lot in terms of being able to piece things together yourself.

Yes, and while on the one hand that's very good, on the other hand, it's extremely unfriendly to new viewers. My wife knows nothing of the Witcher world other than the few times she's watched me play some of the games, so I had to explain things to her quite often for them to make sense to her. If another viewer doesn't have someone available to explain all this shit, they just get confused and stop watching. This is extremely poor treatment of new viewers. In fact, I hope they just go in and fix that. Just a simple year overlay on stories would help people out immensely.

My other big complaint is that they didn't tell The Last Wish right. (Spoilers!!) in the book, the Djinn is about to kill Yennefer. It's too powerful for her. And the ONLY way for Geralt to save her is to tie his destiny to hers, so that if the Djinn kills her, he also kills Geralt, which it didn't want to / couldn't do on account of Geralt being its master. In the show, that sense of imminent death is not present AT ALL, so Geralt's wish makes little sense. Why didn't he just wish the thing he originally wanted (to be freed of the shackles of Destiny vis a vis Ciri), thereby finishing his third wish, freeing the Djinn, and Yennefer would still have been fine. They really should have done that better.

My final nitpick was that the dragons weren't anywhere near as large as I remember the books making them out to be, which was a shame.

But other than that, this is a GREAT fucking show.

Cutter wrote on Dec 22, 2019, 15:26:
Yes, unfortunately it is a bit too GOT'y. Less politics and more questing, thanks.

That's gonna be kinda hard when they stick to the books. The books are basically ALL about the politics and how shitty humanity is. Geralt doesn't do much Witchering in the last ~ 4 books. In fact, in two of those books, Geralt basically feels sorry for himself non-stop and you get roughly 45000 references to how badly his knee hurts. It's agonizing.

This comment was edited on Dec 22, 2019, 23:50.

So many intriguing details, now I´m truly interested, thanks man !

The Witcher series is waaaay better than I expected. Henry Cavill is just an amazing Geralt. He channels Witcher 3 Geralt almost perfectly. Yennefer and Ciri are great, and the rest of the cast is pretty solid as well. I especially liked Tissaia and Stregobor (Myanna Buring and Lars Mikkelson respectively)

Jaskier/Dandelion is an absolute treasure. Great songs too.

I got so used to ginger Triss though that I forgot that she isn't actually a redhead in the books, so seeing her without her red hair was strange.

The fights are fantastic, particularly in Blaviken and The Battle of Sodden Hill.

I'm not sure how it's anything like Game of Thrones. More happens in 8 episodes of The Witcher than happens in the first 30 episodes of Game of Thrones. If anything, the quick pacing and jumping between the time periods seems to have confused a lot of viewers. It's also very, very sparse with regards to useless expository dialogue. It demands a lot in terms of being able to piece things together yourself.

yes we do. Us PC Gods demand it.

You have a game to play quests, we don't need to see it in live action.

Yes, unfortunately it is a bit too GOT'y. Less politics and more questing, thanks.