Some of the elaborate elements of "The Witcher 3" may have escaped the attention of ordinary players.
The author of the YouTube channel Any Austin is back with another gaming investigation. This time he decided to explore The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt.
The blogger's attention was drawn to the Pontar River: he decided to check how realistic it is. Any Austin pointed out a strange thing that can be observed on the map — the river starts in the lower right corner and flows to the ocean, but in the gameplay of The Witcher 3 the water is simply static, and you can also find a swamp with a whale skeleton, far from the ocean.
At first it may seem that CD Projekt RED made a mistake, but further investigation showed the developers' attention to detail.
At first, the blogger assumed that the authors of The Witcher 3 simply decided to simplify the system and therefore did not model the flow. However, the check showed that there is a separate river system in the mountains and the water flows in it, i.e. it does not seem that the lack of flow in the Pontar River is due to some technical limitations.
Any Austin, while studying the banks of the river, noticed traces of flooding — standing water near the banks, eroded soil; there is a section that is clearly swollen above normal.
Gradually, the mystery began to unravel when the understanding came: the map shown in The Witcher 3 is only a piece of a large world, in fact, the Pontar River goes far to the right, starts in the mountains on the eastern edge of the world; players saw only a small part of this river.
River mouths, depending on the conditions, can take various forms, including swamps and estuaries (a mouth that expands towards the sea).
Perhaps the original riverbed went through Oxenfurt to the ocean near Novigrad, but then the Pontar overflowed and new channels formed in the lowlands, and the change in ocean level led to flooding and the current stopped.
Various details indicate this version:
- there is a coastline of a strange shape ("jagged" edges on the southwestern part of the coast);
- there are traces of flooding;
- there is salt water (from the ocean) — in Crookback Bog you can see both dead and still living trees. The blogger believes that when creating the location, the developers selectively replaced tree models with "dead" ones.
Also, Any Austin played The Witcher 2 with cheats for the purpose of investigation. In this game, you can also see the Pontar. The local swamp looked more alive than in the third part — the difference is in the salt water. Hydrologically, the second part is consistent with The Witcher 3.
Using the collected information, the blogger traced the path of the Pontar River: it goes from the mountains in the east through a waterfall, then past a fishing village and a large lake through a normal channel —> expansion with tributaries from the hills —> flooding across the plain with the formation of a swamp —> narrowing into a channel near La Valette Castle —> falling into the ocean.
