I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: The Witcher

I have lost three save games in the time that I have owned The Witcher. The first, because I grew angry at the Steam version of the game and switched over to the GoG.com version. Surprise! The saves from my Steam game didn’t work with the GoG version because of reasons, I guess? I don’t actually know what was going on there. The second set of saves… I’m not actually sure what happened with them. I just know that when I booted up the game in March ’14, I didn’t have a save game anymore, so I started again.

Not surprisingly, I stopped playing around the end of March and didn’t pick up the game again until this week, largely because I was looking for a game to write about. “Hey, Witcher 3 is coming out at some point,” I thought, “maybe I should beat the first two before it does!” So off I went, to load up the game and then curse silently to myself when I realized how much time I lost.

Seriously, I have to talk to the Revered again. The Reverend. That guy is tiresome as hell.

Actually, if I’m being honest with myself and with you, most of the townsfolk in that starting town are tiresome as hell. The drunk merchant – Odo, I believe – he’s a barrel of fun, but everyone else can get fucked (and at least two of the townswomen do, if Geralt plays his cards right, and that is a whole different conversation, especially given what I already wrote in my Killer is Dead entry). I think that I sort of just have to face the fact that a lot of that starting stuff in The Witcher is just super boring. There are some monsters to kill, and that’s fun. There’s a Choice that you can make, which should be interesting but I don’t know why I would ever choose to side with the townsfolk because they are all wretchedly boring people. The game doesn’t get interesting until you go to town, and it’s a bit of a slog to get there.

But I sure remember liking this game! Honestly, I still do; the combat is at least engaging, even if it can be a bit frustrating. There’s something about running around town with the head of a cockatrice hanging off of Geralt’s belt that is just a satisfying state of affairs. Even now, the game world looks pretty good for an oldie, even though there’s only about 3 different faces for the generic townsfolk. I’m definitely gonna play this one again. Hopefully, I won’t have lost my save!

What I really want to do is play The Witcher II, but I can’t bring myself to play that game before I beat the first one, especially since there’s an option to import my Witcher save into the sequel. Even if there is demonstrably very little difference between the stock experience and the experience I would have with an imported save, I just cannot help myself. It is my geas.

Side note

This entry is super short, because what with one thing and another I only had one night to play The Witcher because I spent pretty much every other night playing Diablo III, both on PC and on the Xbox One. I cannot seem to escape its loving embrace. So much loot, so many particle effects. I can’t help myself! I’ll try to make up for it next week.