Today’s cow of the week is the cow from The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. The player can find cows throughout the game, often as herds in pastures. While cows are passive to the player, the player can kill cows and receive items like milk and hides for doing so. Similar to last week's post on Tauros I’m going to highlight something interesting about the cows in The Witcher 3, the Bovine Defense Force.
There’s a series of factors that eventually necessitated the implementation of the Bovine Defense Force in The Witcher 3. These factors are as follows:
-Cows are passive to the player, and are thus easily dispatched.
-Cow hides can be harvested from killed cows and sold by the player for significant amounts of currency.
-Large herds of cows can be found in fixed locations like pastures. These cows respawn each day they are killed.
-The player can “meditate” in Witcher 3 to quickly skip to the next day.
As you might have guessed, players soon discovered they could quickly make large amounts of currency by killing all the cows in White Orchard, meditating to the next day, and repeating the process. The developers responded to this in an update via the inclusion of the Bovine Defense Force. Now if the player killed 6 cows in White Orchard a powerful monster, known as a chort, would appear nearby and attack the player. Even if the player defeated the chort a new one would just appear to take its place. Funnily enough however this just allowed for the same exploit as the cows. If a character is a high enough level the chort might as well be a cow, as the player could fight either indefinitely. In fact the chort dropped much better materials, since it was a powerful monster. Lastly the chort would automatically respawn after the previous one was killed, therefore the player was no longer required to meditate to skip to the next day. This meant that depending on the character's level the Bovine Defense Force ended up being a better method for farming currency than the original cows.
