Making Bad Choices in The Witcher 3

The Witcher 3 provides gamers with ample opportunities to make moral decisions.  I enjoy these pressing moral choices and find myself agonizing over them way too much.  Alarmingly I have discovered that many of my seemingly good natured decisions have backfired.  (Spoilers ahead about earlyish gameplay in The Witcher 3!  Read with caution)

Geralt has been adventuring in Velen for a nice chunk of time and has had to make some tough decisions.  I'm going to lay out the choices I made and then their mostly bad consequences...yup, I chose poorly.

1.) Griffin attack victim (from White Orchard)
In the quaint, monster infested village of White Orchard, Geralt meets the local herbalist while searching for ingredients to use as a lure for an angry griffin.  The herbalist has been tasked with treating a woman who has been attacked by the beast and the victim isn't doing well--the herbalist informs Geralt that the woman has internal bleeding and will most likely die soon.  Geralt, being the kind soul that I have made him, decides to intervene and offers up a witcher potion that may or may not save the woman's life.  This proposition is risky because witcher potions are generally lethal to the normal population.  The choice boils down to letting the herbalist treat the woman with sedatives that won't save her life but will stave off the pain until she dies or risk using the witcher's potion to save her life.  Geralt then goes on his merry way and you don't really learn if the woman survived or not.

It's later in Velen that Geralt finally learns of the woman's fate.  As Geralt is visiting the friendly Nilfgaardian "work center" camp he is called aside by a soldier tho tells him that the woman survived.  For just a millisecond I felt really awesome, like I had made a great decision....then the soldier adds that the woman is basically a lifeless zombie who can't remember anyone and sleeps most of the day and that this fate is worse than death.  Not what I was shooting for....

2.) Rats!  The Curse Island--Fyke Island/Keira Metz questline
Early in Velen, Geralt meets the local cunning woman/healer/witch who turns out to be a sorceress in hiding.  Keira Metz is one of the powerful mages who was part of the Lodge of Sorceresses and who has been exiled after the death of King Foltest.  She seems sad and dejected at having been forced to live in the swampland that is Velen and I have to admit that the decisions I made were motivated by this factor.  Geralt stepped and fetched for her out of pity and she turned out to be just as devious as all sorceresses!  I should have seen that coming from a mile away....

Keira's quests have Geralt working to search an island that she claims is under the influence of a powerful curse left by a mage who performed experiments there.  Geralt is tasked with lifting the curse on the island and finding out what happened to the mage who was an associate of Keira's.  After searching a very creepy and haunted tower and gathering clues, Geralt reaches the top of the tower and finds the ghost of a local noblewoman.  This ghost claims that she was mistakenly killed during the peasant uprising that also killed off the other inhabitants of the tower.  Quite horribly she was given a potion that caused her to fall into a deep sleep that looked like death.  When she awoke she was paralyzed and eaten alive by rats.  Yes, it's that horrible.  She then convinces Geralt that by taking her remains to her beloved, a fisherman in a local village, that he can break the curse.

Nice shrine....

So I traipsed Geralt across the water to the fisherman's hut.  I watched as Geralt calmly informed him about what had happened to his girlfriend...."sorry, but rats ate her alive. "  The fisherman agreed to bury the remains and I felt like I had just done something nice and lifted the curse from the island.  As Geralt rounds the corner of the hut he hears a noise and is called back inside to see what happened--he is greeted with the site of the dead fisherman and a giant pile of rats...and the unleashed spirit of some sort of monster...a pelta.  Besides unleashing a monster on Velen you are also informed that the experimental rats from the tower escaped and caused an outbreak of the Catriona plague in a neighboring land that weakened the populace causing them to be conquered easily by Nilfgaard.

Not only did I manage to let loose a dangerous monster, I also doomed a population to death and disease and then domination by a foreign power.  I've learned a valuable lesson from this though...don't trust monsters...even the ones that seem somewhat innocent.