Hero image: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered patch notes art. Image: CD PROJEKT RED
I think the best line in any patch note this week is buried halfway down CD Projekt Red’s list for The Witcher 3 Remastered, underneath the photo mode news that most people will have stopped to look at. It is a new preset called Bard’s Ballad, and it is the most sensible thing I have seen a big studio do with a difficulty menu in a long time. If you scrolled straight past it, I would not blame you, but go back and read it properly.
The studio says the preset is for players who experience mental fatigue or find it hard to concentrate, and that it exists to reduce what it calls cognitive load. It can be switched on when starting a new game on Just the Story, or later from the new Accessibility section of the settings. From there it becomes a list of choices: vitality that regenerates, breath that never runs out underwater, gear that never breaks, boats that cannot be wrecked, weight that stops mattering, faster sailing and a Witcher Sense that stays on without holding a button.
Notice what is missing from that list? Only the vitality boost touches combat at all, and even that leaves the monsters exactly as they were, while everything else simply takes away the chores. I mean, think about what actually wears a person down in an open world of this size. It is rarely the griffin. It is the repair bill, the slow over-encumbered walk back to a merchant, the thumb held down through a long search and the boat that goes down on the rocks halfway to Skellige.
I find it strange that most games put those two things on the same dial. If you want the story and you are tired, the usual answer is to turn every enemy into paper, and that gives you a different game rather than a gentler one, because you lose the part where Geralt is good at his job. Bard’s Ballad lets you keep the fight and lose the admin, and that is a distinction I would love to see copied everywhere.
The other thing I like is how honest it is about who it is for. The note does not dress the preset up or apologise for it, it says plainly that it is for people with mental fatigue or trouble concentrating, and then it gets out of the way and lets each person choose every switch for themselves. Isn’t that how every accessibility option should read, with the problem named, the fix offered and the rest left to the player?
Would I use all of it? Probably not, since I suspect I would keep weight switched on because I like deciding what is worth carrying, while durability would be off in a heartbeat. That is the whole point, though. It is a set of switches rather than a verdict on how good anyone is at games, and nobody else ever needs to know which ones you flipped.
There will be people who say this is making a hard game soft, and I do not buy it for a second. The Witcher 3 was never hard because a sword blunted or a boat hit a rock, it was just friction, and friction is only fun when there is energy left for it. On the nights when there isn’t, you should still get to be a witcher.
So if you have been putting off a return to the Continent because it felt like work, take this as your invitation and switch on only the bits you need. I already know which ones I am picking first.
Source: CD PROJEKT RED – See what’s new in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered