There's something amazing here... somewhere.
You know what this game needs? A sequel.
The Witcher is, at times, pretty darn awesome. The seemingly unrelated plot threads click and snap together and seemingly innocuous decisions you made hours ago suddenly reveal themselves as huge, far-reaching choices with ample consequences.
The Witcher is surprisingly innovative in regards to how it handles this key element that everyone seems to make a really big deal about in WRPGs (because they should). You won't know if the choice you made will have the outcome you expect, because decisions are layered with so much ambiguity and moral greys that it's tough to make the choice that seems right to you. I've yet to play another game that presents such ethical dilemmas where no choice seems all that great.
The rest of the game. Mmm. There's a lot of running back and forth at times, lots of quests that just seem to take you places without much of a purpose, making you endure those pesky but ENHANCED (shorter) load screens as you get to a place to be told to go to another place. The design for most quests range from fine to absolutely horrid, but more towards the former. It seems like CD Projekt was banking on the narrative strength of a quest to carry you, but gambled and lost.
There seems to be a strong underlying script, but a lot got lost in translation, even with the ENHANCED DIALOGUES trying to make sense of some of the conversations. They rarely ever flow, with one statement followed up with a character that might quite possibly be responding to the previous one. This happens a lot and with the ENHANCED DIALOGUES being slotted in-between all the UNHANCED DIALOGUES, it's even more jarring. The story itself is good, and lame amnesia plot device aside, Poland didn't polish its English script enough.
The gamePLAY plays well at first, but like a lot of WRPGs and well, RPGs in general, its mechanics start to wear out. Witcher's combat is novel at first; time-based clicks leads to another chain of combos that do look quite violent with three different fighting styles depending on the situation.
Problems! Time-based clicking is kind of boring if you're doing it for 40 to 50 hours. This isn't like timing a parry or finding an opening in someone's guard; once your little sword icon flashes a color, you click and Geralt continues the chain. It's like Simon Says, except Simon Says is better. (That's right, you can take that out of context and tell people that I said that Simon Says is better than The Witcher.) The three different fighting styles are highly contextual, making each style just as important as the other. It makes it so that you spread your talents evenly over all three fighting styles, making your Geralt of Rivia similar to another guy's Geralt of Rivia.
The Witcher gets mad props for having an alchemy system that is crucial to your survival. You're not going to be stocking all your potions for That One Fight That Will Never Come; you'll be using them often and with toxicity side effects for chugging too many at one time, what advantages you want to take with you into battle is strategic.
The Witcher still looks pretty good in this day and age. The art holds up well and there's just this really good sense of verisimilitude to the game world that makes it so convincing. Vizima's streets are full of kids running down the streets, vendors selling their goods in the market corner and some old guy coughing his lungs out in a corner. The swamps are swampy, with foliage chewing up the shallow lakes.
The Witcher still sounds pretty good in this day and age. Voice acting is uneven. Geralt sounds great, while some of the cockney fellows just seem to try to be too cocky. I mean that seriously, because a lot of the vocal delivery just has an air of superiority that just seems to be everywhere in the game. Great, great music, though.
I like this game. Sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much, but for what it's worth, I came back to the game after 2 years. That's like jumping into the deepend of a swimming pool right after you got wooden stilts for your amputated legs.
Its apparent problems, which I apparently was able to gloss over because I was head over heels with just the fact that such a huge, single-player RPG still could exist all those years ago, are pretty apparent now, but The Witcher is good, if not great. Sometimes.
I think a sequel that had an English translator on the team from Day One would be so cool. I think a sequel that overhauled the combat system and got rid of combat styles would be so cool. I think a diverse skill tree would be cool.I think if CD Projekt kept its knack for its ambiguous scenarios with delayed consequences would be cool. A complete engine overall to fulfill CD Projekt's vision would also be cool. All these things would be great if they ever made a sequel.
They are? And they are doing all those things? Great! ^___^, but this game is still just good and sometimes great.
