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Not that the rewards Gaunter offer are that much better...
Or... wait, are you saying that the Caparison of Lament is a purely cosmetic item, and not an effective upgrade for, say, the Ofieri Saddle?
As for the morality of the matter... yeah, Olgierd's been plowed six ways 'till sunday by his 'deal', but that's generally what happens when you make an extremely literal Deal with the Devil. TVTropes has a whole page about it! And unlike Geralt, he knew exactly what he was getting into - sought him out, even. His unfortunate situation is the result of his own folly - and what's more, everything you can discover about the von Everec family indicates that being a thoroughly nasty piece of work more or less is a family tradition - they're basically just particularly arrogant and well-equipped bandits. A tradition he seems to have devoted himself to maintaining!
Of course, G.O.D. is on a whole 'nother level of badness, needless to say. Which is the only reason why I really want to save Olgiert - just for the chance of putting one over him, and for the pleasure of denying him his prey. But, y'know... if the reward is good enough... I mean, when it gets right down to it, the whole 'Gaunter is pure Evil' thing is pure hearsay. All we KNOW is that he's eager to screw over Olgierd, which is fair seeing as Olgierd has been doing everything he can to break their agreement and avoid paying the price. Meanwhile, he plays completely straigtht with YOU. He helps you out of a dangerous situation, and once you've repaid the favor, he cheerfully lets you go, even giving you a gift for your trouble. That puts him ahead of several normal human beings in terms of fair dealing...
If you ask me the only way you could end this dlc perfectly would be to defeat gaunter on his own terms and to grant Olgierd the chance to redeem himself as he's no longer bound to the contract.
(I did add in Gaunter's rewards by the use of the command line though as I just can't bring myself to ever choose Gaunter's side...)
recall cutscene where he froze time and tell us how you can stand helping that s.o.b. :P
Nothing about his deals are honest? Really? As far as I can tell, he plays Geralt COMPLETELY straight. He helps him out of a bad situation, requests a few fetch-quests in return, and then pays you for your time to boot, so long as you don't try to screw him over. As for him granting Olgierd's wish in a twisted way... well, YEAH. That's how it ALWAYS works with those kinds of deals, and only a complete idiot would expect otherwise. Olgierd clearly didn't - he basically went into it armed with an arrogant belief that he could outwit the devil by setting impossible conditions. So even if O'Dimm fulfilled his wish in a twisted way, well, hey - maybe he wouldn't have, if Olgierd hadn't tried to screw him from the start!
Also, let's not forget... that situation O'Dimm saves Geralt from? Olgierd PUT you there, by siccing you on a cursed prince (that HE HIMSELF cursed) and neglecting to mention a few details about the job. An innocent man died by your hand because Olgierd no longer felt it was funny to watch him suffer in a hideous, cursed form - and you nearly wound up tortured and hanged for it. Getting bailed out by O'Dimm and helping him bring down Olgierd in return is, in a sense, justice...
(As for the time-stop scene... yeah, okay, maybe that was a bit meanspirited, but c'mon - who amongst us WOULDN'T stab annoying drunks who refused to leave us alone in the eye with a wooden spoon if we had that ability?
Got the Iris-sword as promised... it's pretty damn badass! Might actually use it for a while, at least until I get the Grandmaster schematics for the Witcher-gear. But... I didn't see anything ELSE...
So... where does the Venomous VIper and the 'load of gold looted in a cave' come in, exactly?
Killing a drunk guy that wants to invite Geralt for a drink, just because he interrupted him (he was drunk, duh) is pretty extreme too. And no, I really dont wanna kill drunk people with wooden spoon, just because they interrupt me while they are drunk (wtf).
And dont forget that poor professor, that was basically forced to live his life in a f*cking pentagram, just because he took a job from Olgierd and was looking for information.
I mean from this, its pretty clear, that O'Dimm is a massive d1ck (well, evil itself) and even though Olgierd did some bad things he is NOWHERE close to him.
Also Im pretty sure that the only reason why O'Dimm is fair to you with his rewards and sh*t is because you have proven yourself useful and he might need you in the future (he even mentions it himself).
And some things are still unclear (or atleast I didnt catch them) like who exactly was responsible for turning that prince to a frog. Olgierd told us that he said some words in rage, but I think that again O'Dimm was the one, who actually fulfill him this wish. Either O'Dimm or Olgierd mentions that when these two met, Olgierd was a poor, hungry, dirty looking thrash. Im pretty sure he didnt have his black magic powers right away, but it was again something he gained from O'Dimm.
So yea #teamOlgierd all the way. Although its a shame that you cant arange Olgierd to meet and live with Iris in her painted world. Now you basically choose between Bad and Worse ending. On the other hand, happy endings are never that memorable and emotional as bad endings.
As for the continued moral debate... Olgierd is cagey about it, but he TOTALLY was the one who transformed the prince into a frog! If you keep pressing him about it after O'Dimm first tells you, he eventually admits it. Maybe it was an 'accident', but he clearly don't regret it - he wanted the guy out of the way, after all, and he could've put up a notice for a witcher reading "So, I accidentally cursed this guy into a toad the other day, care to help? I have gold!" at any point - but nope, he lets the guy suffer for MONTHS in the sewers, preying on soldiers and lost maidens. How many people died there because of him? And then he sends you, without mentioning the curse, tricking you into killing the guy. And putting you in hot water as a result. The whole thing is on Olgierd's feet, no matter how he spins it.
Torturing Vlodomir? The guy was a horny, hedonistic ghost, and at that point already WELL past the point where he'd promised to return to his tomb, and forcibly possessing Geralt. Maybe O'Dimm used excessive force, but it hardly came out of nowhere - and O'Dimm clearly has a particular dislike for people who violate agreements...
And O'Dimm didn't turn Olgierd's life to ♥♥♥♥ - OLGIERD turned Olgierd's life to ♥♥♥♥, when he decided to traffic with dark forces and SACRIFICE HIS BROTHER'S LIFE in return for wealth, power and immortality. It honestly seems strange to blame O'Dimm for briefly torturing Vlodomir's ghost when Vlodomir only IS a ghost because his dear brother friggin' signed his life over to the devil in the first place...
Frankly, the only really evil thing O'Dimm does is the whole... stab-the-drunk-with-a-spoon. Which, okay, yeah, not very nice. But no matter how you cut it, there's a LOT more corpses at Olgierd's feet.
Honestly, if there was an 'A pox on both your houses' option, I would take it. But nope - if you decide to fight O'Dimm, who's played you entirely straight from the start and is only trying to collect on a deal but, yes, is The Devil Himself, you automatically let Olgierd - the man who traded his brother's life to the devil for wealth, power and immortality, cursed an innocent prince into the form of a hideous monster and then had him murdered, previously slew his own father-in-law and imprisoned his wife, and was a raping, pillaging, murderous bandit even BEFORE dealing with the devil - go free with a pat on the back.
O'Dimm straight? Do we even play the same game? He plays Geralt like a fiddle, just like everybody else.
Do you even recall meeting him in the prologue? He sits in the inn where Geralt talks to him, getting the very obvious hint to talk to the local commandant for news on Yennefer.
O'Dimm doesn't fail to mention this on the Ofieri ship, and later, at the crossroads use that as "I've helped you twice already" leverage to coerce Geralt into volunteering as his proxy in Olgierd's final wishes. O'Dimm flat out calls it having fulfilled Geralt's wishes plural. That is manipulative as h*ll!
Olgierd did not plan for the Ofieri entourage to arrive in the sewers at the same time as Geralt. If anyone ingame is to be blamed, it is O'Dimm as to set up Geralt. If not, it is a storywriter's coincidence.
Olgierd only bargained his own soul, not Vlodimir's as well, that is not how the Faust myth works. This is bad writing for the sake of a good idea: the wedding party in Dead Man's Party is apparantly a copy of a famous polish play shoehorned into the game for the sake of an amusingly cringy quest. I adore that quest, but on the point of Vlodimir's death, it makes no sense in the story arc.
Olgierd's life was already misserable when he turned to O'Dimm. The Borsodies had forclosed the von Everec Estate leaving Olgierd poor. Iris' family then broke their engagement and, for lack of a better word, sold her to Ofier and the later cursed Dauphin (Crownprince for the people not in the know of french history), DESPITE Olgierd and Iris' declarations of true love.
We are told two versions of how Olgierd and O'Dimm met, both by Olgierd. The first is he asked wise men and women for help, and was in the end pointed to a man who would help him for a price. The second is Olgierd trying to drown his sorrows and blethering his sad tale "to the wrong bloke" at an undefined inn (not unlike how Geralt met O'Dimm, but that is rather the point).
Is Olgierd a blameless angel? No, but noone in the Witcher Universe is.
This is all about lesser evils, so it falls to you, the gamer, to decide who is the worst: a highborn pr*ck playing brigand with the life expectancy of such, or an unknown entity met throughout history in different shapes, always sowing trouble and discomfort whereever he travels? A small spoiler, BlackDragon, you'll bump into O'Dimm's playthings in B&W too...
If you save Olgierd, he at least has the chance to redeem himself, right some of all the wrongs he has commited through his life. If you just hand him over to O'Dimm, he is just plain doomed. The difference between the two choices and their Catholic/Protestant connections I'm just too tired to lay out now...
And sure, his life sucked by the time he contracted with O'Dimm, but he could've tried to fix things WITHOUT bargaining with the forces of darkness, and sacrificing innocents to same. Eloping with Iris, starting a new life somewhere else, maybe doing some honest work instead of living off the family fortune and raiding innocent villages on the other side of some random border? Iris didn't want to break her family bonds, though... in which case she clearly didn't hate the Ofieri prince all THAT much. I mean, if she was willing to marry the prince instead of Olgierd, rather than leave her family behind, it clearly wasn't that elusive, ever-so-romantic 'True Love' after all. Maybe he'd been better off moving on...
Yes, O'Dimm manipulated Geralt, but bloody near EVERYBODY does that, including both of his main love-interests - and O'Dimm was at least upfront about it. The services he rendered were beyond reproach - from the information about Yennefer to the storm that got you out of the clink, and indeed to the rewards you receive for completing the tasks he hands you, it's all solid. None of the 'get what you wish for, not what you ask' stuff, even - which, again, he might solely have poured on Olgierd because he tried to weasel out of their deal once he had what he wanted.
Now, ONE point I have to argue, however...
That's just plain wrong. The professor - forgot his name - tells you that he heard straight from Olgierd himself. When he signed the contract with O'Dimm, the agreement was that it would cost him the life of someone he loved. That was how his brother died. Faust, polish plays? Utterly irrelevant. It's not Faust or Goethe who are on trial here. It's Olgierd von Everec - and HE used his brother's life as a bargaining-chip. Heck, he even knew it'd be him - as the professor put it, there were only two people he loved in the world, his brother and Iris, and he knew it couldn't be Iris since one of his wishes specifically were that they should be together...
Oh, and something else occured to me. The professor, stuck living in a pentagram because of O'Dimm... or maybe not? I mean, sure, the professor believes that O'Dimm basically drew that pentagram to imprison and torment him, but he also plainly states that O'Dimm didn't actually phrase it that way - rather, he provided the pentagram as protection for him, even as a reward for the impressive feat of scholarship that led him to discover so much about O'Dimm's true nature. And at that point, he'd already GONE BLIND, just from reading certain unwholesome scriptures. That's some Necronomicon-level nastiness right there. Who's to say that his literary case of 'dug too greedily, and too deep' hadn't cursed him to an unfortunate death already, with O'Dimm's pentagram providing genuine protection and enabling him to survive for additional months? Heck, the terrible dreams that plagued him might be from the same source. There's no indication of O'Dimm manipulating dreams anywhere else.
No, that interpretation isn't terribly LIKELY, but it's POSSIBLE - we don't have all the facts. I guess you could say I'm just playing the devil's advocate here...
...all that being said, though... I only started into the B&W content recently. If I run into some victims of his there, well, maybe that'll change my mind.
No, not Poe. In his universe people go mad rather than blind when they read something they shouldn't.
It is a plain and simple Elder Scrolls reference, we're even treated with an "arrow to the knee" reference just mere moments before the Professor tells his tale.
And I'd call the pentagram a punishment rather than a reward. The Professor, like everybody else, was going to die some day anyway, only it would happen immediately if and when he left the pentagram. As it did: he broke his neck because he stumbled on a bottle he couldn't see because he was blind.
Stuck inside the pentagram under the threat of death, he could not travel the world warning everybody of O'Dimm...
And as I said, the Witcher Universe is all about lesser evil and moral grey choices, leaving it to us gamers (and readers) to decide which is the worst.
W3 has been released for two years now, and still, forum threads like this pops up regularly and the discussion is as heated as on the release day. I'd call that a mark of quality from the devs...
As to B&W: read everything and listen carefully to the music in certain places.
Oh, and do look up where and what "the devil's advocate" comes from and do. Most people use that frase the wrong way around...