Is the witcher the perfect example of neutraldark?

Yeah, but most people are just pretty normal. It's not really that dark, at least relative to real life.

When you look at the big picture, the Witcher World is pretty relatable to our own, which is part of the appeal of the series : a more "grounded" setting.

In the world of the Witcher, Merchants trade, guards patrol, poors struggle, rich profits, and kings and lords enjoy their lofty positions when they're not dragged back to the cold reality by politics. Elves and dwarves are minorities, and when you look up the world "pogrom," and the curent crises in the western world, their treatment and reactions to it shouldn't come as a surprise, but as an inevitable consequence.

The "grimdark" impression stems mostly from the fact that Witchers are outcasts in the societies of this World : vagrants sellswords, portrayed as mutants freaks, unfeeling, children-abducting monsters by long-dead people in need of a boogeyman, except it stuck to the collective imagination, and no-one bothered to make people think otherwise since then.
It's because the stories are told from the perspective of such a man, who on top of that cannot help but stumble into situation way in over his head, that people describe it as "grimdark."

But, in the book as in the vidyas, the common folk are portrayed as living their mundane life, with its lot of joy, sorrow and boredom. The looming prophecies are never depicted as anything more than vague doomsaying, and the treatment of nonhumans, while pretty grim, isn't unlike any other dying "culture" realizing its agony and trying hard to prolong its life, or at least go out with a bang, an ideology used by a major power to fuel a proxy war.

I repeat myself, but the Witcher World aims to portray a world where magic, whilst nearly-omnipresent, has ultimately little bearing on the overall behavior of men, making the resulting universe very similar to our own, and portrayed as grim because the protagonist is, by character and trade, extremely prone to frequent run-ins with shitty situations.

Same logic applies to 40k actually.

No one is going to play a game about a farmer on an agriworld whose most exciting event in his 90 year life of farming wheat is watching a few tiny flashes of light at night one time when an Orkish Rok lumbered into the system and got blown up by a orbital defense satellite.

>Same logic applies to 40k actually

No, and it doesn't have to.

Yeah, no. "To live in such times is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable" I believe is a line in one of the many blurbs.

I'd love to get into the Witcher games, but I was told that 1 and 2 play pretty poorly, and I'm going to spend money on a game I'd like a bit more than some good world building, good gameplay trumps all.

Do you know what the daily life of a North-Korean farmer is like?

The same as that of a South-Korean farmer. Just without internet, and an empty belly.

Frankly, I don't think you guys understand.

There's also the tolkienesque/folklore.
Where words have power.
"Cursing" actually works, sometimes.

If you liked Gothic series, you'll like Witcher. Combat system is kinda meh (the difference between actually knowing what you're doing and just mashing buttons at random isn't all that great and you can get through the game with the latter just fine) but the story is good, if a bit linear.
As for the setting - it was all nice and likeable (in the scummy slavic way) until Ciri shows up.

>Do you know what the daily life of a North-Korean farmer is like?
>The same as that of a South-Korean farmer.
Well, one is lucky to have a pet dog to feed.
The other is lucky to have a pet dog to eat.

Maybe so on a personnal level, but the overarching narrative is that humans are in the mother of all clusterfucks and went full fanatical purifier as a result.

The overarching narrative of The Witcher is that witchers isn't a trade anyone should pursue, that politic is heartless and you should stay away from it, that power has a high likelyhood of turning you into a dick, that nonhumans are doomed because they're different and the uneducated masses will never figure out they're nothing more than a convenient boogeyman, and that Nilfgaard will eventually win.
All of these can be translated to issues we face in our world today, with its meaning more or less intact.

40k isn't nearly as nuanced and relatable, at least in any of its overarching plot. We aren't under siege by half a dozen blood-frenzied aliens, the technology we have we mostly understand, and we know where it comes from, and if we are indeed in the process of writing ourselves into a corner, it isn't nearly as clear-cut as 40K.

My first words were "when you look at the big picture." When you look at the big picture, 40K is infinitely more fucked than witcherverse.

Cursing works almost all the time if you really mean it, that's one of the twist of The Witcher. It's a very high-fantasy setting in the sense that magic is everywhere, and everyone can use it in one form or another if they really mean it.

>it's the beginning of the age of inventions (stuff like water treatment plants)
>people are generally well educated
>the whole civilised world is going to be united by a progressive and rather comfy empire
>monsters are getting rapidly eradicated
>there is at least one goddess watching over people
I'd say it's rather neutralbright

Wouldn't a more accurate translation of Wiedzmin be WARLOCK ?

Yeah but that has implications. Wiedzmin or Vedmak is more benevolent.

Most of this is dragged down the alignment chart by the fact that some people are dicks and will exploit and twist these achievement for their own benefit. When you add it all up it's more of a neutral-neutral world with high fantasy elements.

But because people think "neutral-neutral" is boring they'll focus on one aspect of the world and slap a more exciting denominator because buzzwords.

It all comes down to the alignment chart being nothing more than an awkward crutch for roleplaying, as always.

If you're picturing the 40k world for a regular person and it doesn't suck ass, rethink it.

>My first words were "when you look at the big picture." When you look at the big picture, 40K is infinitely more fucked than witcherverse.
That for sure.

But the thing is, the 40k setting is infinitely larger than the Witcherverse.

40k's setting is so absurdly huge, you could fit infinite regular people living normal lives, and you'd still have infinite space for people living horrible torturous lives.

I get your point, but my argument was that The Witcher isn't nearly as grimdark as some might think it is, and it certainly isn't nearly as grimdark as 40K, the very setting from which "grimdark" was coined.

Because the alchemy is literally vidya mechanics chucked in. That's why. It's barely there in the source material. Sure, Geralt get's constantly high on different contotions, but he doesn't even make them - he just resupplies at local alchemist shops and temples.