Dear Player: The Wind in The Witcher

Get your anoraks on (and alter their connotations) as I tell you a story about weather in games. From the earliest skybox to the first particle effects and on into the VR future, game design has increasingly recognised the importance of atmosphere. One of the key illusions of the Game is the filling of negative space with the appearance of air. Some of the most demanding graphical improvements in gaming have focused on fleshing out atmosphere with light bloom and smoke, dust and rain. Concrete volumes and abstract tokens are one thing, but rendering the smallest and most pervasive of things is quite another. I think it’s time we reflected on the meteorological diversity of games; why does the wind blow in The Witcher?

Before looking at the expansive and breath-taking atmospheres of recent open worlds, we should reflect on the tense and stifling atmosphere of ‘linear’ gaming. Many kinds of virtual weather began life as obstacles and threats. Weather disguised the edges of the game – it literally clouds the margins, blurring the technological limits of the game with the narrative or ludic limits imposed for the sake of ‘challenge’. Fog-of-war limits the draw on hardware resources by reducing the amount of visible units, allowing A.I. to build its bases in the abstract, and move its troops by numbers before rendering the forces in combat. More importantly, however, it gives the player the illusion of weakness. Limiting the field of view with inky darkness or the conventional tropes of foggy mist makes the game world threatening and enticing. The player is made to feel imperfect and human, despite their bird’s eye view in a virtual world. By clothing itself in atmosphere, a game conceals its mechanics, allows us to feel surprise, and yes, weakness, in the way that we deeply desire.

The fog of draw-distance leans more heavily on practical necessity. Weather, lighting effects, fogs, blurs and horizons combine to hide the fact that the game has limits, that the platform needs time to generate the future. Fog, again, can make a strength of a weakness – softening the edges of sprites, concealing spawn points, but also crudely mimics the human sensorium. Weather stands at the point where the edge of the game meets the edge of the human – if far-away buildings come steadily into focus as we approach, then the game succeeds in passing off the breaking-point of the hardware as the breaking-point of human sight. Indeed, by exploiting the limits of what we expect, a game can pass off its lacks as our own. ‘It’s a good thing you can’t see over the horizon, ‘cause it hasn’t rendered yet.’

Weather is not just decoration, nor is it just a pathetic fallacy, it is central to creating and convincing us of the space of play. It’s involved in some of the most fundamental operations that make the game world appear ‘human’. In a two-step move ‘fog’ both artificially limits the amount of information we receive, but also convinces the player that this is natural. We can feel risk, by having our hands bound, and we can also feel responsibility, because our bonds are hidden. Games that play with weather, however, can also make us feel terror.

Silent Hill uses its short draw distance to its advantage, by pairing it with it’s own ‘fog of war’. The shroud of smoke that circles the player haunts them wherever they turn and wherever they run. Scenery and threats emerge as indistinguishable volumes, shadows forming out of inchoate gases, fog blurring the seams where the player triggers a spawned object. A monster’s approach is even marked by an unresolved signal – radio static, the audio equivalent of fog. Our world is both seemingly infinite and claustrophobic. Nothing, beyond what we can see, exists in ‘3D’, but we get the feeling that something lurks there. Empty roads become horrifying deserts. Indeed, the fog suggests a space that is not ‘empty’ but rather full to the point of opacity – static.

This is a kind of ‘quantum horror’ – where all threats are in a super-position of existence and non-existence. The world and our perception of it are one and the same in a game, and what we cannot see, constitutes a potentiality. Deeper still, Silent Hill associates the breaking point of a scary illusion with fear itself. The border of the game platform’s RAM is the fog, we feel affectively what we can know abstractly – the monsters before us are both there and not there, actual and virtual. In a sense, we confront our own solitude in the single-player game.

By contrast, Proteus uses seasons and weather patterns to create a retreat, a space to contemplate in solitude – rather than run in fear. While its landscape retains a pixelated aesthetic, mist and rain intrude, belying the hi-resolution reality of the landscape. Atmosphere distorts colour with distance, pleasingly merging the jagged edges of pixel planes, working to immerse the player. Moreover, the pixelated objects retain both n element of graphical nostalgia and the visual quality of sprites. While a low-resolution sprite might replace a high-polygon model at distance, in Proteus we are allowed to get ‘close’ to the sprites, as if taking on a fairy’s perspective of the forest. The far becomes near, and artifice becomes leisure – we wonder through procedurally generated worlds, without threat and without meaning.

While Eidolon uses some similar atmospheric effects in its minimalist graphic style, it possesses meaning and threat in abundance. A post-human adventure around a forested landscape, we connect the threads of this world’s history by stumbling upon documents, and conjecturing in our notebook. With small evocative hints we learn that we inhabit a deserted post-pandemic and post-singularity America. The weather, equally minimal and poetic, naturalises the landscape, and implies a vastness of time with its soft gradients and shaders. Like a paper cut-out, the world seems crafted and yet natural, empty and yet beguiling. The sun sets, casting a contrast between land and sky that seems more like a photograph than a painting, and yet it is the soft simple palette that renders a ruin and a tree with the same alien and wondrous quality that makes it all feel magic-realist.

Rain, however, makes you cold, vulnerable. Text descriptions convey the threat of this beautiful world – it’s water is ‘freezing’. Perhaps no game better equates rain and tension than Metal Gear Solid. The concrete quality of rain, from MGS2 to Ground Zeroes, bears down upon the player, fixing the surface of objects, tracing the shadow of the player. This feeling of being-in-world with the rain reaches its fullest expression (unsurprisingly) in Rain, a game in which the player, and all the other NPCs are invisible, except for the outlines they cast in the rain. Here the player, and the game at large, only exist as negative space, displacement of rain – pure atmosphere. This is a present-absence that ties the game mechanically to its core mood of melancholy. In a similar way, Spate uses the heavy film-noir connotations of rain to saturate its platforming world. As a side-scroller, rain effectively becomes the constant foreground, creeping closest to the picture plane. The sodden weight of it all is palpable, and its distorting effect is enhanced by the absinthe we can drink at the press of a dedicated key. A story about melancholy and mourning for a lost daughter, the rain represents the self-destructive drinking of the protagonist in this phantasmagoric world. As in the opening sequence of Bioshock: Infinite, it reminds us of our guilt. In myriad ways then, weather gets us to invest in a world, it can bind our hands but also make us feel responsible for our actions.

Which brings us to the wind in the Witcher. Witcher III renders the player a component of a rich and diverse topography. Everything from rain to sun is realised in minute simulated detail. Light alone is a masterpiece in this game, it can create dynamic contrasts that seem to eek every possible tone out of every possible colour at every possible time of day. Light carves out huge volumes of air, from the open skies of Velen to the vast verticality of Skellige. It’s not so much that this is a game in which you could almost reach out and touch its contents, but that you feel as if you can reach out and feel the open miles before you.

Distances are vast, even within the field of view. Unlike earlier games, weather convinces us of openness, rather than naturalising limits. In Skyrim the open world is dressed in snow, but between blizzards its atmosphere can feel like an airless vacuum. The difference in density is reflected in content – Skyrim’s world is empty by the Witcher’s standards, and snowy tunnels barely conceal the edge of loading screens. Content in Skyrim is behind closed doors or locked underground, and rarely in the open air. In the Witcher, by contrast almost everything is open to the sky. Loading screens have been blown down by the wind it seems, as doors open seamlessly between smoke of the fireplace and the rosy glow of dawn on the heath.

This world is buffeted by constant winds, and it is this, rather than rain or fog, that exemplifies CD Project RED’s approach. Unlike Silent Hill, The Witcher’s weather does not occlude the environment but enlivens it, animates it. When trees and bushes twist and shudder in time with our avatar’s hair, we feel keenly that this world is as alive as us. There is no ‘quantum horror’, no ‘present absence’ of which we are aware – the world and the player are in synch. Rather than binding us, the wind carries us forward. Neither a fantasy of empowerment, nor a fantasy of weakness, we instead feel alive in the moment – contingent and dependent upon this world as much as it is on us. Illusion and immersion are pushed to new heights. As we re-populate villages or exterminate nests we feel as if the world experiences ‘us’ as much as we experience ‘it’. Consistent with the game’s moral ambivalence and cynical balance, the weather, too, is indifferent to us. Rather than performing a semiotic function like pathetic fallacy or film noir grimness, the weather feels natural, which is to say – it feels rich without having to perform meaning. It exists. And no matter when and where it is, it feels apt.

In The Witcher, at last, we find an atmosphere in which the space between objects feels as palpable as the objects themselves. Here weather makes the game neither our alien other, nor a shallow extension of ourselves, but instead let’s its world breathe.

Merlin Seller

|Game Studies Blog|

Dear Player: The Wind in The Witcher