I'm super excited about this Friday. And it's not because of the glorious reprieve from classes, or another amazing  Bombing Run is almost here.
No, this Friday, September 19th, marks the release of The Witcher: Enhanced Edition!
In a year full of totally solid JRPG's(Eternal Sonata!) and fun WRPG's(Mass Effect), who would think that an obscure game from an unknown(in these American parts) developer with a bizarre license on a platform notorious for piracy would have sold over 800000 copies? That's the case with Cd Projekt's The Witcher, a fantastic RPG that isn't quite like anything else on the PC.
In the Witcher, players take on the role of Geralt of Rivia(yes, you can call him Gerald. I like to sometimes.) Through potions received from a secret order of monster hunters, Geralt becomes a Witcher, a monster hunter who will be permanently ostracized from society because of his bizarre complexion. The plot takes a little while to get going in the game, but it's a surprisingly mature tale, filled with fantacy racism, political intrigue, and hella monsters.
Everything about the game is a bit surprising. The Witcher runs on Bioware's Aurora engine, which you might remember as the game engine that powered Neverwinter Nights 1.....over 6 years ago! Not that you'd know it from looking at the Witcher, a stunning game thanks to a firm grounding in medieval architecture and European design. In a world populated with clean high fantasy and less clean but still pretty clean fantasy, The Witcher is rough, muddy and handmade in a way that virtually know other fantasy game can match. Game is grimmy(in a good way!), and the look stays with you throughout the whole of the game.
The combat is probably the highlight of The Witcher, combining smart timing with a wealth of gameplay decisions. Battles don't keep the players on the sidelines, watching the action and occasionally clicking a hotbar. Instead, players must click enemies during specific windows to create powerful combos, and the more hits you can line up in a combo, the greater damage per hit you'll be able to dish out(and the less damage you'll be taking during the process). It's got a real Assassin's Creed approach to combat, rewarding the skillful timing of players in a way that we probably wouldn't have seen before the rhythm game became so damn huge(you tell me the success of Guitar Hero brought rhythm based gameplay and timing back to video games, and I'll tell you that....well...that I think you're right!)
On top of that, you've got multiple stances to switch between for facing different enemies, and a variety of potions to aid you in combat, a variety of poisons to let you bring the pain- it's got a good amount of depth, it looks great in motion(the game's combat animates well) and it helps to draw the player into a genre that too often has them sitting on the sidelines while the game plays itself.

The game's got some issues, no doubt: if you're no fan of micromanagement, stay back: The Witcher's got an awkward inventory system that can make it difficult to find specific items(which you will be doing often, considering the game's focus on Geralt's alchemy skills). The game has a really excellent story and decent voice acting, but it's held back by an awkward translation of all things. In a way that will totally remind you of playing SNES or even Playstation RPG's, The Witcher will sometimes give you the impression that it can't find the exact words to say what it really means. It's almost befuddling, considering how far translation has come even fron 10 years ago(though this is Cd Projekt's first game, I think they've been a European publisher of ol Interplay games for a while, as I  know they're credited in the Polish version of Planescape:Torrment....Don't ask.) Perhaps silliest of all, Geralt can sleep with virtually every female NPC in the game, which results in a mildly suggestive animation, some slightly risque dialog, and a totally unnecessary "card" of the women you courted in a various stage on undress. It's not titillating in a world where everyone has assess to the internet, and awkward in the context of a game that tries to deal, quite seriously, with racism.

But the game, in spite of it all,  is still great ,and long to boot( I sunk between 50-70 hours in the original version of the game) and with the enhanced version coming, I'm anxious to see if the game plays even better with this additional development time.

And I'll be able to see it for free! In a move that moves CD Projekt to the realm of the cool PC developers that reward game loyalty(like Stardock) , The Witcher: Enhanced Addition is being released as a Patch for free to anyone who already purchased the game! How awesome is that? Fans are getting all the enhanced graphics, the 5000 new lines of rewritten and rerecorded dialog, the enhanced inventory management(hopefully that fixes the micormanagement issues!), the improved loading, improved alchemy systems...all for under 50 bucks!  In a world where Pirates are ruining Spore's sales because of EA's copy protection, it's crazy to see any company try to go the other way and reward players like that. I have no idea why every PC developer outside of Blizzard and Valve isn't embittered and cold towards their fellow man.(Maybe they still are.)

This blog is basically an advertisement for a game, but the Witcher is a game that shows there are still ways CRPG's can grow. I'll probably have a full review of the Enhanced Edition in the next week or so. I just wanted to put the call out proper, and encourage people to check out the Enhanced Version of the game, already on shelves as of Tuesday, September 16th.