The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

Time to check if it's just me. I played the first Witcher game recently after hearing in many places I should give it a go. So after sinking an hour or two into the basic campaign here's my findings. The graphics and controls are clearly ported from a console version. As an old school gamer I can live with old graphics and super flash ones aren't something I automatically seek out. I thought the graphics were pretty good certainly for its age. The controls are slightly tricky to get used to but I was running around and looting things quickly enough. Then we come to combat, by all the Dark Gods that was something else. I tried mindless button bashing to see if that worked and mostly missed the target. Then I tried being all strategic and waited for the sword icon to flash before striking. It felt very random as to when this appeared and I did hit the enemy more often with this tactic I just never hit very hard. For a supposed hero to be finding it hard to kill poorly equipped bandits doesn't say much for my chances against a real foe. After getting to the point where I opened a portcullis to let the rest of the team deal with a mage and his nasty beastie I gave up. I didn't feel like my actions had much effect either in terms of moving the plot or that if a fight broke out I had any real sense of how to defeat an opponent. So in the end after battling with my sense of frustration and boredom, I removed it and vowed not bother with the later episodes as it wasn't a style of enjoy playing.

I picked up this game recently at 5 euros just cause i was curious after the uber campaign made by GOG for the witcher 2 release. I can tell surely the game worth more and its a good game, but i can also tell i dont see some of the "features" presented with the game, as its opinable the "rpg" classification, in my opinion this is more an action adventure, expecially the last part of the game its heavily hack'n'slash, also its quite linear as gameplay, i dont see any free roaming. The game is divided in chapters, every chapter is played into a sandbox area with 3-4 accessibble zones and you cant move on until you complete the zone-related main quests. Probably the fact is, modern rpgs should have a brand new category, as they miss most of the common traits of older rpgs resulting more or less all in fast peaced action based games. Actually the game comes with an intersting and well presented story, even if predictable, its better then many rpgs or adventures ive played so far. There is a large use of cinematics, many scripted events and encounters, the game is designed with tons of invisible walls/blocked paths, so you dont have the freedom of classic rpgs, exploration is quite out of this game, but on the other hand you never feel lost and you can play from start to the end without the need of any help or guide. The feeling is a bit to be the protagonist of a movie, and i think its the target of most of the action rpg/adventures nowadays. Multiple choices in many occasions add some depth and ofc they are welecome, anyway always your choice will lead to the same consequence, so choosing answer A or B will anyway move the story to situation C as idea. The game is based on a 3d engine from bioware not very suitable for fast peaced games, anyway pushed to the limit by CDProjekt it provides great visuals effects and a nice and detailed world, even if overall there is always a bit of latency on the controls and some situations will kill the framerate badly. The combat system needs a bit to be mastered, but is good as idea, sadly there is quite a lot of lag in many situations due to the engine so the result is not exceptional. There are some mini games, as poker-dice and fighting which are so-so, i dont get the meaning at the end. There is also a collection of sexy cards as mini game, which adds nothing to the game, and in many situations sounds a bit trash tbh, duno exactly if the target was to be hylarious towards the common macho-hero of every movie or what.. not sure about that. The witcher is a sort of half rogue, half mage, and can progress through a classic leveling system, the talent tree page could seem impressive at start, as number of choices, but later on you will realize that the customization doesnt affect much the combat system, expecially cause near the end you will have more or less every talent. The music and the sound effects are great. Some drawbacks are the inventory system, which looks and act very prehistoric, ive seen worse only in oblivion so far. Beside the normal inventory, there is a sort of "deposit" at the inn, where you can store all the stuff you cant/dont want to carry around, anyway its a system more suitable for an MMO then for a game like this one tbh. The loot system is not very good too, later on you will start to leave the loot on the ground in many occasions as its hard to collect, and usually completely useless. A strange aspect of the game is the fact you will very rarely change your gear, so you will play all the game changing once or 2 times the armor and the swords. 99% of the weapons in game are completely useless and you will not even consider them after the first 30 minutes of gameplay. There is a quite deep and interesting alchemy system as idea, but the mechanic is tedious and could have been a lot better so at the end i must say it doesnt fit so much the game, as the game wants to be fast peaced when the alch system asks you to manually choose every element for any single potion, as the pc can pick elements for you but the choice is always not the best one. Also there are too many potions, bombs(if you will use them) and flasks of various types compared to the room you have to store them, you will end to use 4-5 potions and forget all the others. So well, regardless the game exact "genre" at the end i personally found this game very good under many aspects, even if not perfect and lacking some freedom and customization, i liked the story, the setting and the attention to many details.

The Witcher is basically an intereactive novel, not an RPG. The game unfolds in "chapters" which require that you complete one chapter before moving onward. Unfortunately you aren't told in advance what you need to do to move on, and in the meantime you're saddled with an inordinate number of fetch-and-kill quests and spend all your time running back and forth across a small area of unattractive countryside. Options that would be logical don't exist in the game. The much-vaunted "attack combos" are really just an animation loop that you continue by left-clicking at the appropriate moment. Some weapons are rated for damage or conditions, but the focus is on "Witcher swords" which don't have stats and so can't be compared to other weapons. There is no indication whether you should even bother with other weapons. In games like this, it's usually a useful tactic to gather weapons and armor from your fallen opponents to make some quick money, but that's not possible here. Nothing seems to wear armor, other weapons can't be added to your inventory. Items gatherable from fallen monsters are restricted until you own a series of very expensive books. Some of the quests require that you obtain items that allegedly grow like plants but can't actually be found anywhere and so have to be purchased with large amounts of currency that there is no way to obtain. Innumerable game-breaking bugs will stop you dead (literally trapping you, unable to continue the story) while you google a possible solution. In its day, the graphics were probably bleeding-edge attractive, but today resemble the gothic-inspired mannikins of Blood from a decade earlier. Too many NPCs are identical in appearance and name, which makes completing the boring quests even more tedious. After hearing glowing praise about this game for years, I can't only describe it as an utter disappointment.

Unplayable. First off, all cut scenes show up as a frozen image with the voices playing in the background. Secondly, the combat is a miserable experience. It looks like my actual sword strike is some kind of Quick Time Event. So, I hit my LMB once, the teeny-tiny, near-invisible cursor changes to a sword with a slash through it (indicating that I'm not supposed to hit that button again - as if I'm paying attention to the cursor shape instead of the guy attacking me with a sword), the character runs through its sword strike animation, and the cursor gets reset to a flaming sword (indicating that the LMB is OK to use again). This is slow. If I do the natural thing and just repeatedly hit the LMB because nothing seems to be happening, all that happens is the character waves his sword around over his head because the animation is getting interrupted and reset.

I have to admit, I struggled a bit to really get into this game at first, but after the first 25 hours or so, I was hooked. If you haven't played this game yet, pick this one up during this upcoming sale for 4.99. That's frickin steal.