First, let me say that I am LOVING this game, way more than I thought I would. It's rocketed to the top of my (very short) GOTY nominees for this year. However, does anyone else think that the mission called "Carnal Sins" was wildly out of place and noticeably and uncharacteristically poorly written?
It takes place after one of the boring "fetch things related to Dandelion" quests that just kind of exist and all of a sudden BOOM, Priscilla's had an unscheduled tracheotomy and I'm in the middle of CSI: Novigrad. I immediately meet a shady doctor who's like "Dude, let's go to the morgue and do a gross autopsy on a dwarf, what part do you want to cut into first" and I'm like "Genitals, duh." Later we meet a shady coroner and the doctor's like "This is my mentor who taught me" and I'm thinking "Wow, he looks younger than you" and the doctor says very suspiciously "You haven't changed in thirty years!" and I (out of game) am immediately like "Well, clearly he's some sort of vampire or something and has access to formaldehyde (which was used in the killings) so he's probably the murderer." But Geralt completely misses the line because he's thinking about boobs or something and it's never brought up in conversation, even when I'm talking about the coroner to the doctor later. I do my cursory investigation and the coroner sends me a message that says "There was totally another murder, come see the autopsy" so I go there and he pulls a note out of the guy's chest that says the name of the next victim (conveniently this is part of the murderer's MO). So I go to her house and she's just been killed and I'm chasing the murderer, and I'm thinking "Ok, maybe I was wrong about the coroner because why would he send me here if he was just going to come here and murder her, and also how did he have time to get here and ritually kill her?" So she's got another note with the next victim's name and I go there and OF COURSE it's a naked woman with a clothed guy in the room, because apparently there is a law against guys actually taking their clothes off ever, and mandates that women be nude at least four hours of every day. I'm no prude but it's a little obvious when you go to a bathhouse and literally every woman is completely naked and every guy is wearing a towel.
Anyway, so the completely clothed guy is torturing the nude woman, but Geralt intelligently deduces that he ISN'T the murderer, even though the woman is gagged and screaming, because he doesn't have his formaldehyde. So he immediately runs off to see the coroner who--SURPRISE--is totally a vampire and if he explains why he sent me to the lady's house even though he was just about to go there and kill her I wasn't listening because I was too embarrassed for the game at that point. Anyway he was EXTREMELY easy to kill even though the glossary had prepared me for a difficult battle and I got a sword which was marginally better than the sword I was using, so yay. I go to see Dandelion and Priscilla to see how she's doing and she's recovering quickly and talking despite the fact that she was LITERALLY STABBED THROUGH THE LARYNX BY A VAMPIRE, and that's never explained in the least, nor is it ever explained how Geralt missed the obvious clue that the doctor gave him about the coroner not aging.
Unspeakable. I actually think that the game sort of lost its way when I got to Novigrad. Quests became boring and the atmosphere became very dull in comparison to what had gone before. I'm hoping things pick up where they left off again now that I'm through with all the dull city quests and I'm about to sail to Skellige.
