Heart of Stone, the new expansion for The Witcher 3, basically consists of three long, experimental and amazing new quests. Kirk spoke the other day about the first one, but I now want to talk about the second.
USE YOUR WITCHER SENSES TO AVOID THE SPOILERS BELOW.
The second major questâOpen Sesameâbegins in the auction house in Oxenfurt. What starts with a casual afternoonâs bidding on some swag (including a pair of glasses that if you win you can actually equip and spend the rest of the game looking like a doofus) ends with Geralt thwarted at the auction block, resulting in a plan to break back into the place at night and rob the joint.
What follows is a grand heist, very much in the vein of Grand Theft Auto Vâs centrepiece missions, with Geralt having to head out and recruit a team of experts to help him and a mysterious stranger obtain through theft what they couldnât achieve through commerce.
Other Witcher 3 quests, like The Bloody Baron or even the preceding ghost wedding, are memorable for how your morally ambiguous decisions can make for wildly differing outcomes. With Open Sesame, much of the action is locked in, and your decisions only make for slight deviations from a core plot. Itâs what happens (or doesnât happen) along the course of that plot that makes this so good.
Most modern RPGs have you play through a quest supposing thereâs a âgoodâ or ârightâ way to do it. That if you make the right decisions and do the correct things youâll be rewarded with an optimal result
Not in Open Sesame. Youâre constantly presented with the illusion of quest-defining options and possibilities, but the fun here is in seeing how utterly meaningless they all are, because at the end of the day this isnât Geraltâs quest.
See, it kicks off when youâre approached by a mysterious stranger, who has a plan to break into the auction houseâs vault. He needs something in there, you need something in there, so he thinks youâll do well by working together. Youâre his first recruit, and itâs made clear that the whole operation is his plan. Geralt isnât his partner, heâs an employee. And itâs a plan that goes pear-shaped almost from the very beginning.
My first job in Open Sesame was to go and recruit either a demolitions expert or a locksmith, who would help us get past the vaultâs locked doors. I went to the demolitions guyâs house first and found him…in a bad way. Distraught that his wife had left him, he was up on his roof, threatening to blow both himself and his home sky-high.
I talked him down, thinking I had performed the optimal task required, but no sooner had I told him that I was going to merely consider him for the jobâI still had to talk to the locksmithâhe went inside and killed himself. Brutal. Congratulations, locksmith.
Next, I needed a burglar to help us get into the place. My first choice, a skilled halfling, was found…dead at the bottom of a river. I hadnât been too slow getting to him, or made the wrong choice, he was just dead, because sometimes The Witcher 3 likes to remind you that its world spins with or without Geraltâs actions, and in some cases that means youâre shit out of luck.
So onto my mysterious employerâs second choice, a career acrobat, whose recruitment was assured only after Iâd performed some crossbow stunts for her circus show, shooting some melons off an elfâs feet, head and hands. Add âcircus performerâ to the list of creative professions Geralt has been employed in during the Witcher 3, alongside actor and poet
With my crewâsorry, the mysterious strangerâs crewâassembled, it was time for his plan to be laid out, my head to nod that it agreed, and for this daring heist to be carried out.
In keeping with the questâs theme, it all goes wrong, and almost everything that does so is because it was a bad plan. As I played through this trainwreck we alerted guards. We took hostages, which Geralt was very uneasy about. The acrobat got scared and fled. The owner of the auction house, Horst Borsodi, was awoken and locked himself inside the vault with guards.
After bungling and fighting your way through this succession of cock-ups, you finally end up in the vault. Where itâs revealedâgasp!âthat the mysterious stranger youâve been working for this whole time is actually Horstâs brother Ewald, who has an axe to grind over his siblingâs inheritance.
Horst, wisely recognising that he and his guards are no match for a guy capable of literally saving the world, offers you a choice: take some cash and betray your employer, or stick with Ewald and see it through.
Itâs an empty choice. Both brothers are assholes, and there are no bonds of loyalty or purpose behind your employment. Whoever you side with will kill the other (I stuck with Ewald, who above bludgeons Horst to death with a goblet), you get what you were looking for and you walk out, shaking your head at the futility of it all.
The feeling as you leave the vault in the middle of the night into the open air of the Oxenfert docks is one of the emptiest you can experience in this game. Thereâs no fanfare, no gratitude from an innocent youâve rescued, no sense that youâve done anything at all except be part of something that went badly and got some people killed.
I like to think, though, that this was the point. If thereâs one thing The Witcher 3âs signature quests enjoy doing more than anything else, itâs subverting your expectations of whatâs about to happen and what youâre able to achieve. In this case, itâs all about power and control, and how despite your actions in the game you donât have as much of either as you do in other RPGs.
Think back to TW3âs main game. Yes, thereâs the whole âCiriâs story is her ownâ thing, but remember fighting the giant on Skellige, and the guy in the wooden cage can either be crushed by the giant or rescued? Playing as Geralt, who ran that quest, that guyâs death barely registered as a blip.
But in Open Sesame, you are the blip.
The quest also plays nicely into the larger tone and setting of Heart of Stone, which has you completing tasks set down by Satan himself, while at the same time trying to help a guy who sold his soul to the devil and treated his wife so badly that even her ghost doesnât want to live anymore.
Youâre shackled to bad men doing bad things for almost the duration of this expansion, which while feeling slightly out of place with the âsave humanityâ quest of the main game is also a refreshing change. If the ghost wedding earlier in Heart of Stone reminded us that Geralt isnât as interesting as we sometimes think he is, Open Sesame reminds us that heâs not as heroic as heâs made out to be either.
