Was Nilfgaardian Empire based on real-life Roman Empire? How cool that is?

>The Great Sun (or in Elder Speech, Ard Feainn) has been the major religion in the Nilfgaardian Empire since the rule of an unknown Emperor preceding Fergus.
>The inhabitants of the Northern Kingdoms know very little about the cult of the Great Sun. The head of this religion is a high priest, which may also be the Nilfgaardian emperor

witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Sun#cite_note-1

That and the fact they only considered true Nilfgaardians those born in the capital an the surrounding areas are the only things that make them similar to Romans.

The court reminds me of the Spanish Empire as some user said.

Nah, I agree with the people in the thread saying HRE or Spain - they've got a 15th century gothic vibe going on, plus their names are pseudo-German sounding.

I guess the slave ownership is kind of Roman though.

What fucking language do Nilfgaardians speak? It sounds like German, but the dialect is weird. Is it Swiss?

IIRC it's somewhat based on Welsh, though it seems to have a lot of Germanic elements.

They got not much in common with Rome. Nilfgaard used it's wars to destroy the enemies' economy to force them to buy Nilfgaardian shit after they made peace. Roman's never used tactics like that.

Also Rome let conquered people live under roman rule while Nilfgaard tried to settle their own people on the newly conquered lands while driving the old inhabitants away.

There is no Senate or anything in Nilfgaard. The Emperor just tells his vassals what he wants to do directly and they go and make it happen.

I have always seen it as a mix of Prussia and Russian Empire.

Nilfgaard is a mix of real-life empires (Austria, Ottoman Empire, Prussia, Russia)

witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Elder_Speech

Elder Speech is the base, which is very heavily inspired by Welsh; Geralt's title in Elder Speech is Gwynbleidd, or White Wolf, whilst in Welsh it would be Blaidd Gwyn. Nilfgaardians speak the same language in a bastardized dialect that's all but indistinguishable from Dutch. They obviously used ethnic Dutch VAs in at least a few scenarios.

To elaborate a little bit, Gwynbleidd is pronounced how it's written, "gwyn blade". In Welsh the dd is more of a th sound, so it'd sound something like "gwyn blythe".

Always thought they were supposed to be the turks.

>there are people that like this regurgitated Elric Polish garbage

Heh.

nilfgaard is a lame name

>IT'S POPULAR SO I HAVE TO HATE IT

Go Back to /v/

this, the entire region is basically inspired by northern european wendish slavs fighting vs the german conquest.
There's even pseudo-russians, poles, and minor french/italian states under the HRE

le meme xD
your video game taste is already objectivelly shit

Actually there is (or was) the Senate in Nilfgaard. At very least the building called, you guessed it, 'the Senate' is still standing.

Some of them have Dutch or German names which are almost invariable pronounced wrong.

It's nazi vermany(look at their helmets) mixed with the roman empire, you inevitably get a HRE like result if the HRE ever were a real unified expansionist force but there are no traces of big fragmentation in nilfgaard.
Expansion into eastern europe was done by the teutonic order and bohemia during the middle ages.

You mean like your spelling? And I don't think my taste in games is shit, considering I hate the Witcher. I would sooner play a real game like PST or Gothic.

It's amazing how many illiterate babies that haven't even read the Witcher, never mind other fantasy series, get so defensive over a shitty series with pathetic world-building.

The only thing special about it is that it's the only thing the Polish have achieved and likely ever will.

I thought it was just romans and vikings mashed together but that makes more sense

It is not based on any specific historical entity.

>regurgitated Elric

Even Elric's creator admitted that Elric and Geralt have little in common.

I know that Temerria is similar to France, but what about Kaedwen?

Northern Kingdoms are more like Polish duchies of 12-14th centuries, some being westernised while other being heavily influenced by the Baltic and Ruthenian cultures.

>Elric = Geralt
Fucking seriously? All they have in common is white hair, two swords and magic. Might as well say that Geralt and fucking Drizzt Do'Urden are the same character.

>Also Rome let conquered people live under roman rule while Nilfgaard tried to settle their own people on the newly conquered lands while driving the old inhabitants away.
Actually Rome did that a lot in Greece and Spain.

pathetic loser, i read the witcher.
The game itself has some of the best characterization, environments and storytelling. It is objectivelly one of the best games made in recent times and no Veeky Forums neckbeard from /v/ could change that.

your "real games" are fucking trash get a life

It's amazing how many illiterate babies think they actually know more than others, go read a book dumbass.

It sounded like nig-ga

>i read the witcher, trust me
>"objectivelly"
>planescape torment and gothic are trash
>doesn't even have his own comeback

underage b&

And their personality. And their reliance on potions. I mean, yeah, I guess it's not the same story ripped beat for beat. Is that what you would like?

There are arguably more differences between the Prince of Nothing and Dune than there are between Elric and Geralt, yet Bakker admits PoN is basically a Dune rip-off spiced with LotR.

[citation needed]

>>i read the witcher, trust me
prove me wrong, dumbass
>>"objectivelly"
in game design, it is a marvel.
>>planescape torment and gothic are trash
your shitty opinion on what games are good doesn't matter...?
>>doesn't even have his own comeback
yes i do, my comeback is that The Witcher is a series that is deserving of the praise countless gamers and developpers give it
>underage b&
i do look like bait but i'm not underaged

literally nothing you say about the quality of games or of literature actually matters

How can you still not get that I'm mocking you for your spelling of "objectivelly"? And now "developpers." Holy fuck.

>yes i do, my comeback is that The Witcher is a series that is deserving of the praise countless gamers and developpers give it

I bet. Just like the praise people gave Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2, amirite? Those wise developers and video game journalists, ayyyy.

Let's forget the fact that it's a retarded story in which you're a bitchboi the entire time, and that CDProjekt abandoned narratives from the other games (see: Scoia'tael). And let's also forget the fact that even that drunk hack Sapkowski hates what they did with it.

If this becomes /v/ tier discussion as is happening you can bet your ass that this thread is going down. Keep it on topic

>And their personality. And their reliance on potions.
Top kek, you actually didn't notice I was sarcastic.
Geralt has no reliance on potions. They're as much a tool to him as his oils and bombs, whereas Elric needs them not to fucking die.
Geralt has white hair, but he isn't albino.
Geralt has two swords, but they're just two different types of weapon to him, not a fucking macguffin.
Geralt uses his piddly signs, Elric puts Vilgefort to shame.
On the other hand you have Drizzt: he needs magical potions to heal after every other fight, also has white hair, also uses piddly magic, also has two swords (which are actually also plot points a fair amount of time!). Oh and they also both travel around getting rid of bandits and dangerous beasts due to their highly moral nature, undeterred by the cuntness of the locals who hate them for what they are rather than what they do. Oh did I mention the frequent dwarf sidekick and the near constant cuckings and betrayals they suffer?
Is the rivian saga the same as the Forgotten Realms now?

oh sooOOOrry english is only my third fucking language

Mass Effect 3 and DA don't even get nearly as much praise from gamers and devs as The Witcher. When the third came out Artstation was all over the creativity of artists who worked on that project. Literally no one i know play ME3 or DA2 and i don't read shitty game mags because i have a life and don't let others' opinions guide me.

You actually have no knowledge of literacy in videogames nor in books for that matter. Sapkowski WROTE IT you absolute dumbfuck.

it's seriously time for you to fuck off back to /a/, /v/, or wherever "akthually" neckbeards liek you come from

>being polish
>not constantly undermining the king
Kurwa

>Just like the praise people gave Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2, amirite?
But those two games are like, universally vilified. What the fuck are you talking about? Paid for reviews that nobody cares for?

let's talk about something that matters

I'm on the boat with the opinion that the Nilfgaardian Empire is inspired by the HRE, thoughts?

>thoughts?
I don't understand why does it have to be only one source of inspiration. Seems pretty clear to me that it's an amalgam of ancient roman and holy roman elements. You know, the whole "well organized bureaucratic empire" and the whole "goddamn krauts ruining Poland" aesthetics.

well, that can be correct.
I think that might be closer actually than any single empire, the writer himself is a satirist afterall and knows how to use symbolism.
I agree

>minor differences and semantics are now legitimately differentiating attributes

I bet you think The Force Awakens is an original work too.

And I don't know about Drizzt, never read anything from D&D.

And you speak the other two just as badly? Because I speak two other languages too, and yet I don't use that as an excuse to justify my mistakes in English.

>sapkowski wrote the witcher 3

Are you absolutely retarded? Sapkowski gets drunk as fuck and tells people about how the games are shit and how they ruined his series, and does damage control in the five minutes he finds of sobriety. He doesn't even consider the games canon or a proper anything.

>"I am not envious of the game's undeniable success, I'm far from it. … There is but one original Witcher. That one which belongs to me. And nothing will take it away from me.”

Oh, and here's what your precious Polack thinks of people like you,

>In addition to throwing a little flack at game developers, The Witcher creator also had to address some beef he recently threw at gamers in general. At the Polcon sci-fi convention in Poland, Sapkowski said he didn’t know anyone that had played the games because he “stay[s] among intelligent fellows.”

Underage cunt.

>[citation needed]

Sigh.

It was a whole decade ago on Michael Moorcock's official forum. The first Witcher game just arrived and some folks (perhaps trolls) brought up the whole "Geralt is plagiarised Elric" thing. Their arguments were on abysmal level, something along the lines of "both are superhuman, both wield swords, both are albino" and so forth. They even failed to mention that Geralt is a character from a book series that started way back in 1980s, as opposed to being anew entirely new video game character.

Moorcock was furious at first and said he's going to sue the everloving shit out of CDPR. But after getting to know more about who Geralt is and perhaps after consulting his lawyer, Moorcock wrote that both are unrelated characters.

>universally vilified

Universally is a very strong word. You'll find plenty of people that enjoy both. And I can think of plenty of people that hate Witcher 3 (myself included). CDProjekt betrayed every legitimate fan they built up and that supported them from the first game (I bought the original thrice for those dumb bastards) and then decided to use all the money they made to create some superficial, le open-world XD and le ebin story!!! RPG to please the plebs.

The fact that it's good on a technical level won't stand the test of time for very long. In 20 years, it will just be a mediocre open-world RPG that strayed completely from the series and the promises they made when they started out.

But I guess people like this underage faggot in this thread and AngryJoe like it, so they made the right call, huh? Nothing like shitting not only on the books themselves, but also on the things you established in the previous two games.

Nobody cares about Sapkowski anymore in Poland. The man's importance ended somewhere around 15 years ago when his second book series turne out to be a turd.

He's absolutely butthurt about it.

So you actually don't have source and you're just spewing shit out of your mouth? Okay. And at first you said he outright admitted the two have nothing in common. Now you're moving goalposts and making a completely different statement.

Why can apologists never decide?

You should still respect him for the work he did. Even if I'm not a fan of his, the books are still far above the games in quality.

Only if you consider video games to inherently be inferior to genre fiction

That goes without saying, but there's still games and movies that are far better than books. You'd have to be a lunatic to believe that games can rival an actual work of literature, though. (Not saying the Witcher is one, to make that clear).

There's very few games I can think of that even have a good original story. Maybe Legacy of Kain? It's probably the best time-travel and vampire story I can think of. Other than that, there's not much.

I was a participant in that thread. Go find it yourself

>You'd have to be a lunatic to believe that games can rival an actual work of literature, though. (Not saying the Witcher is one, to make that clear).

People thought the same thing about comic books. Then "the Watchmen" were published.

genre fiction is NOT literature, Veeky Forums would throw a hissy fit if they caught you saying that.

Does anyone care about what Veeky Forums says?
Even Veeky Forums?

>reference a thing that doesn't exist
>go find it!!!

Nice integrity, bub. Good to know you're full of shit as I thought.

>implying

You don't seriously think that has merit, do you? The only reason it appears to be good is because comics on the whole, are fucking shit. Of course it stands out. It wouldn't if it was an actual novel.

Veeky Forums are a bunch of screeching faggots that don't even read and mouthpiece whatever their professors say. But I wasn't really referring to genre fiction--though it's hard to say where genre fiction begins and where literature ends.

Obviously Lovecraft and Howard aren't lit. But Tolkien? Eh. I don't know. The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion have a lot of literary merit.

>Then "the Watchmen" were published.
The watchmen has to be the single most overrated comic ever written. It's like all people who read it have no knowledge of comics beyond capeshit, it's the only explanation why one would consider it not only a particularly standout work (top kek), but even a work of high literary value (that's just sad).

I believe that for genre fiction to inherently be superior to video games it has to have achieved literature status, otherwise it's not.

>genre fiction ... to have achieved literature status
Can't happen. Genre fiction is an inherently dispregiative label, if a book is good enough to approach literary levels it will just not be 'accused' of being mere genre fiction.
The point should rather be, can historical novels be literature? Or fantasy and sci-fi?
I dare say most critics would say yes.

There's nothing Roman about it. Not every powerful empire is based on Rome

why the autismo? whatever have a (you)

>Milfgaardian

Video games deliver a different experience than a book. They aren't identical mediums, so their respective qualities differ.

You'd have to be an asinine pedant to think that saying books are inherently better than video games is a smart thing to say.
Are most video games trash? Unequivocally. Are most books trash? Without a doubt. But saying one is inherently "better" than the other is a poor man's attempt at sounding well-versed in the arts.
No doubt, if you were to try to explain what makes a book intrinsically better than vidya, you'd just list off what books do and then say video games don't do it as well, totally ignoring that they're two different entities.