Bored and need to lower hype. What do you think are going to be the biggest complaints for the Witcher 3?

If The Witcher were primarily about killing misogynists you'd have a better point. It's pretty obvious that the Nazis are the bad guys in the Wolfenstein universe, that doesn't even need to be established. The problem with misogyny is that the attitude towards it often isn't anywhere near that clear. The real world is pretty misogynistic as it is and most video games do very little to challenge that. People tend to want the art and entertainment they consume to fit in with their worldview and for some people it's troubling that the vast majority of AAA studios aren't willing to really say anything about misogyny. Say what you will about DA:I but the Dragon Age universe is fantastic in this regard because its most important religious leader has to be a woman, the empress of one of its most powerful nations is a gay woman, their Jesus equivalent was a woman, Qunari society is partially matriarchal and depending on what choices you made in DA:O Ferelden can be ruled solely by a queen. Women occupy as many positions of power as men and they're rarely sexualized. That's an enormous breath of fresh air to a lot of people, myself included.

That's not to say that The Witcher and every other fantasy universe has to be just like Dragon Age, but it would be nice if more of them went in that direction. I think that's where some of this criticism of The Witcher is coming from. It's not being singled out as if it's some sort of aberration, people are trying to include it in a much broader issue. I think that's where disagreement stems from though. A lot of people who actually play video games very obviously don't want them becoming part of a larger cultural and artistic conversation but we're well past that point. Whether or not you consider them art, games are a very popular hobby and it's worth discussing the attitudes they represent and reinforce.

It's also definitely worth noting that Polygon still gave it an 8 which is a good score. 8-8.5 is personally what I'd give DA:I and I love that game, but I'm also willing to acknowledge that it's flawed in some very fundamental ways. This is an issue with how games are reviewed and with how game reviews are received. You can't review a game like a movie or an album and a 1-10 score doesn't tell you much. I really like how Kotaku has turned their reviews into lengthy opinion pieces with an overall recommendation of whether or not you should buy the game. That's actually useful, giving a game an 8 or a 9 isn't in a lot of instances. On the flip side, people act like anything that isn't a 9 or a 10 means the reviewer thought the game was crap. That's obviously not the case here or elsewhere. You can really enjoy something and have issues with it at the same time. Everything doesn't have to be 10/10 best thing ever or 0/10 worthless garbage. You can be concerned about how misogynistic something is and still like it. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.

tl;dr saying that The Witcher is misogynistic isn't saying that it's bad or that you're a misogynist if you like it or anything like that. You can have issues with the ways it portrays women and violence directed towards women and think that it's a great game despite those issues.

/r/witcher Thread Parent