The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

*The Good* I used a texture mod which makes the game look quite decent, especially for its age. The world it is set in is a bit generic but still interesting because of the factions and various details. The strongest part are probably the handful of moral choices you have to make, especially because they're not 'easy' choices between an overly good and overly bad side. *The Bad* So yeah, everything else is bad. - No fast travel. At least half of the game is just walking to places. Locations are absolutely riddled with invisible borders so travelling is a total pain. - Ferry travel is the worst. Click the ferryman. Dialogue. Select 1. Dialogue. Confirm payment. Dialogue. Select 1. Cinematic. Loading screen. Cinematic. - Constant backtracking. Even for this type of game it has an excessive amount of sending you back and forth. - Boring combat. You can either spam an AOE fire spell or use swords. The latter require you to time subsequent clicks to built combos. Both are completely uninteresting. Igni is the better option since it's 10 times faster and requires no tedious weapon/stance switching. - Dreadful inventory system. You get far too many items for the space available and your stash is often in an inconvenient location. - Looting is really bad. It requires precise clicks on bodies that obscure each other. Worse still is that you always have to wait a few seconds for combat to end before you can loot. And this happens 100+ times... - The game practically forces you to have sex with half the women you meet, even if you don't want to or think you're just having a conversation. And you get "rewarded" with cartoon porn. Ugh. - Drowners. The swamps are filled to the brim with these worthless things. Their loot is irrelevant, they only give 1 XP and they lock you in combat mode. *Conclusion* The Witcher is a bad game that is not worth your time. Not even with mods. You're better off downloading someone else's savegame and importing that into The Witcher 2.

Sadly I can't chime in with all these positive reviews as my impression of The Witcher has been a different one. It was praised by critics and fans alike, and a lot of my gaming friends recommended it. I got it off Steam during a sale and was eager on trying it out, only to realize that it couldn't hold my attention for more than 30 minutes at a time. The quests are boring and tedious for the most part, being about as creative as the average "Kill 30 X and bring me Y's head" MMO quest. And there are too many of them, without the interface helping you to organize everything properly. The "intuitive" combat system gets bland quickly, as does the constant moving around the world without getting too much done. The game's story is alright, as is the character interaction. There's a lot to explore without too much to do with everything, though. The interaction with women is a nice approach, but a bit too sexist for my taste. I took a break from the game after about 10 hours of playing and realized how little I had accomplished game-wise while absolutely not having enjoyed myself. I've always enjoyed RPGs, playing RL tabletop and classics like Planescape and Baldur's Gate 1/2 on the PC - and The Witcher certainly is not "arguably one of the best RPGs ever made". It's a decent game for those more into flashy graphics than a deep RPG experience.

I get that this is a game from 2007... but most of my favorite games are even older. Tried to give it a try back in 2017(?) when it was given away for free - hated it. Tried to give it another look with a fresh mind in 2024... *sigh* Maybe I'm just not the target audience and therefore can't overlook it's shortcomings, but it amazes me in how many ways this game is not good at all. It's buggy, janky, occasionally crashes, the combat system is a joke, the inventory system is pretty bad, navigating in the game world is tedious... The story has some intriguing aspects and the graphics look pretty decent, but that's all. Oh, the dice poker minigame is okay as well.

This is a great game, but let's be adults. $10 + printing out the instruction manual + 8,400 Mb worth of download... yes, some of you are students or whatever, and don't have to worry about bandwidth, because the rest of us pay by the gig on your behalf... If you get 10Gb per month with your data plan, and pay through the nose for every additional gig, Witcher represents three weeks of checking your mail and nothing else. It's tempting to go to wonderwoman.com and pay $20 for a box, a couple discs, a manual, and exactly the same delivery time, unless you're a student or something. Maybe GoG can concentrate on games that don't take three weeks' allotment and six days' uninterrupted download time to "get cheap." Or maybe not. Either way, thanks for alerting me to this long-awaited, patched, fixed, ready-for-prime-time game. Thank goodness the USPS doesn't charge by the gigabyte, and that DRM is negotiable by anyone's standards.

No linux version found, no purchase !