This post contains major spoilers from Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. If that worries you, turn back.
I've just finished up the second chapter of Thronebreaker and I thought I'd do some reflection. This chapter sees ur travelling through the lands of Aedirn. We're here to seek the favor of king Demavend after being cast down from our own throne. The chapter still has us battling Nilfgaard and we even have a big conflict with the Scoia'tael. We have to make some god awful difficult choices as well.
One thing I did during this chapter was to downtune the difficulty. While it was fun to play on the hardest difficulty I was getting a little fed up with the battles. I realized what I want from this game is the story rather than the challenge of the card battles. That means I'm basically destroying every battle I come across now but that's fine.
Nilfgaardian rampage
Nilfgaard is hard at work in Aedirn as well. Taking over Lyria and Rivia wasn't enough for them so they're also trampling all of Aedirn. As we move through the map we come across towns, hamlets and villages who are all either burned to the ground, slaughtered or has given themselves over to Nilfgaard.
This leaves us with a bit of choices. Do we let the villagers live on under their new rulership or do we intervene? I pretty much made every choice I could to go against the Nilfgaardians. Even it it was at the expence of peasants and commoners. Every chance I got to storm an outpost, burn their stuff down or even trample the grave of a highly decorated officer, I took it. To hell with those assholes. Fight fire with fire.
The Scoia'tael
In between dealing with different Nilfgaardian threats we deal with some Scoia'tael. For those who don't know the Witcher universe the Scoia'tael are basically guerillas and freedom fighters. Humans often refer to them as terrorists. They've basically come to be because humans have been rasists and discriminated them so much. They live to make life a living hell for humans.
Most of the time you'll find elves among the Scoia'tael and that's what we're dealing with here. We need to go through a pretty big forest and one of the first things that greet us is a giant tree with both dead and living humans strapped up to it. They're maggot ridden and suffering and it's just a horrible thing. We get the choice to cut them down or to leave them be. I pussy out and leave them be, thinking it's most likely a trap. I instantly regretted it and wished I had saved them but there was no going back.
As we get through the woods we make camp in some ruins. The Scoia'tael starts surrounding us and a battle is inevitable. They try to lure us out by claiming we're camped in a sacred cemetery of theirs and that it would be a disgrace, even for us, to shed blood there. I don't fall for that crap so we battle it out in the ruins. I slaughter all of them and leave their corpses for the wolves and monsters.
For the King
When we get to the capital it's under full siege of the Nilfgaardians. We learn that the king is holding a last stand somewhere in town and we head for his rescue. The whole town has evacuated so that really makes no sense. Turns out he's defending a brothel because he got one of the strumpets pregnant. This old dog. I'm not one to judge though.
We defeat the Nilfgaardians and the day is saved. We then escape the burning remains of the city. When we ask for king Demavends help to reclaim our throne he refuses. After what's just happened he needs his troops for himself to rebuild and defend. Understandable if I'm being honest.
Instead he sends us to Mahakam, the land of the Dwarves, which is pretty cool. We've always heard a lot about Mahakam, both in the earlier games, in the books and in the TV-series but we've never seen it for ourselves. I've slowly started working my way through Mahakam, which is chapter 3, and so far it's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to seeing what this chapter has to give.
New cards and characters
We meet some pretty cool characters which gives us some pretty strong cards to use in battles. The most notable ones are Black Rayla and Xavier Lemmens. Black Rayla is one of the first characters we meet during the chapter and she acts as our guide through Aedirn. Coincidentally she's also the kings advisor and bodyguard so that's helpful. She absolutely hates the Scoia'tael.
The second guy is Xavier Lemmens who we save from the smoldering ruins of a city. He's an engineer and a pretty good one at that. With nothing more to live for and as gratitude for us saving his life he joins our army.
These two cards synergizes really well together in battle. Black Rayla is a strong base unit but also has the ability to summon a new card from the deck. You even get to choose the card which is extremely helpful. Xavier then, which is also a strong base card, can give any other units two extra charges of their ability. That means if I play both of these cards in the same round I can get a total of five cards on the battlefield while only playing two from my hand. That's hella strong.
We also got our own dog due to some lucky choices. Knickers is awesome because we don't even need him in the hand to play him. He's summoned from the deck whenever you play a hero card, which Black Rayla and Xavier Lemmens is. That brings us up to a total of six cards on the battlefield from only two cards played. You can basically win a whole round just by playing these two cards.
I'm excited to push through chapter 3. Mahakam has been mentioned so much throughout all the different Witcher material it's almost a place of legend at this point. Almost every dwarf we ever meet has a good thing to say about it. There's also a lot of lore books and notes in the Witcher 3 that talks about it. Let's see if it lives up to the hype.
All un-sourced images in this post are screenshots taken by me.