The Witcher Review
Spend your Halloween engrossed in this gritty fantasy PC RPG from CD Projekt.
- Fixes for sex scene with nurses in Act 5.
- Dialogue with cow - moooing is louder.
- Bounty Hunter is Agent Smith no more (he doesn't replicate). Mr. Geralt, we missed you...
Most patch notes read like brief technical manuals, but not The Witcher's. As you can tell from those excerpts from the recent 1.1 patch, these notes are hand-crafted beauties--unnecessary to the extreme, and all the more entertaining for it. Clearly the developers at CD Projekt take their time to flesh out even the most minor of details, and as a direct result of this policy, the company's long-awaited title The Witcher has turned out to be a rich, engrossing RPG, the likes of which only come along once in a good while.
It just needs a few more of those patches to reach perfection.
As you may have gathered from my recent preview--which I recommend to those looking for a general overview of the game--I was quite surprised by The Witcher, due to both its shock value and its polish. This is a European RPG that actually lives up to its own hype, delivering on its promises of mature content, massive amounts of dialogue, and impressive presentation. No one element of the game stands out more than the other, which is a testament to how well-rounded an experience it is. As you trod through the Gothic, rain-soaked landscapes, you don't find graphical eyesores that pull you out of the scenery, but instead a coherent, logical portrait. There is no overblown musical score that draws your attention, but rather an atmospheric soundtrack which slowly lulls you into the world. The dialogue may be hammy at times, but it almost adds to the charm in a quirky sort of way. Everything just fits, allowing your mind to concentrate on the quests at hand and become embroiled in the day-to-day concerns of the witching.
In The Witcher, you fittingly play as the witcher Geralt, a brooding man's man who is actually anything but. He's an immortal, some kind of super monster-killer, on a quest to both kick and get some ass. He enjoys a nice night out on the town, a good stiff drink, and a few decapitations before his rough romantic encounters. And although Geralt struck me as a fairly bland character at first, after a little more time spent getting to know him, I found myself enjoying the experience of inhabiting his preternatural skin. He doesn't take shit from anybody, he has a sick sense of humor, he always gets the girl--and on top of that, he usually avoids paying for her. In the realm of fantasy, he strikes a nice balance between the Bogart and the Jack Bauer hiding in all of us.
Perhaps the major reason why The Witcher is so successful in providing an interesting world to prowl through is the huge population inhabiting it. We're talking close to Oblivion-levels of computer-programmed villagers at times, and though you can't lop off their limbs and steal their grog-money, you can talk to most of them. In terms of dialogue and interactivity, it easily eclipses most RPGs, in the quantity and quality of their company.
Because of this attention to detail, the throngs of poverty-stricken youths, fat-bellied merchants, and named characters all seem equally relevant. You take notice of every human, rather than passing by anyone who isn't wearing a flashy suit of armor or donning a colored name. These characters also exhibit plenty of little touches that breathe life into the world. As Geralt walks through a group of little boys taking refuge from a storm by hiding under the awnings of houses, pushing past them with his arms or stopping to court their sisters with offers of cash, you can't help but get caught up in it all.
While there is an enormous amount of dialogue-driven quests to uncover, these chats don't come in the form of branching trees. Instead, when one option is picked, the conversation will carry on between Geralt and the subject in an automated, back-and-forth exchange. You won't be choosing everything that comes out of the witcher's mouth, and though these encounters usually consist of exhausting every possible phrase until all of the information has been spilled, it never feels oppressive in its somewhat-scripted nature. Though this cinematic system is not as engaging as it could be, it's made up for by the creative ways in which the sequences play out. Like a European reality TV show set in a fantasy world, you can't wait to see the next heartwarming, vulgar, or outrageous thing that happens in the life of the witcher.
You will have some control over your destiny, of course. Occasionally you will come across a choice to be made, and one that might impact the story 12 hours down the line. The far-reaching implications of these choices effectively cuts out the usual "save and reload" method of moral experimentation, forcing you to think about the decisions you're making ahead of time. Some of these decisions will be obvious tests of moral fiber, while others are firmly rooted in the grayest of areas, ambiguous questions of loyalty or mood. Who lives and who dies may well depend on which guy rubs you the wrong way.
The game itself is built on a heavily-overhauled Neverwinter Nights engine, and feels restricted by it in some ways. The landscapes sometimes feel flat, with obvious barricades of bushes or cliffs keeping you from wandering into uncharted territory--although you do hit some wide-open areas from time to time. Control of Geralt, particularly in the over-the-shoulder view, comes off as a little stiff overall. However, the engine redeems itself by exceeding its limitations and showing off some real graphical ability. The Witcher could almost pass as a big-budget production from a major first-party studio, with gritty, grimy art direction, realistic weather effects, and a well-executed day/night cycle that often produces some picturesque vistas.
Performance is smooth for the most part, on a high-end system at least. CD Projekt recommends a minimum PC including an Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 1 GB RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9800, but you'll definitely want something beefier to run it without any worries. The recommended specs are closer to the bill: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz, 2 GB RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX.
Estimates clock the average completion-time of The Witcher at around 60-80 hours, and though this may sound long, it's not as daunting a task as it seems. The game is based on a series of novels, and it's no less of a page-turner. It will probably take fewer than 60 hours for the average PC gamer to blow through, but rest assured, there are a numerous amount of optional quests on hand to keep devoted witchers busy, in addition to the three major story paths. The main thrust of the tale may not be the most inventive or captivating scenario ever conceived, but each sub-thread is competently designed and paced accordingly. You won't go through long stretches of the game without finding something that piques your interest.
As for the hack-and-slash core of the game, I will echo my past comments--you won't be playing The Witcher for the thrill of the combat. Sure, the timed-click system--an audio/visual indicator that allows you to chain combos together based on an audio/visual cue--is an admirable effort to mix up the standard Diablo gameplay, but I'm not convinced it's any more interesting than plain mouse-mashing. Because enemies will often interrupt your combos, you'll have to deal with clunky half-swings in between your satisfyingly gory finishing moves.
Geralt also has the ability to craft potions using his alchemy skills, and you'll gain a few magical abilities in your travels, but all in all, the combat is merely a means to an ending. The Witcher is not a game you play in order to level up your ice bolt or grab a new set of platemail. It's a true roleplaying game, rather than the increasingly popular sub-genre of action-RPG. The focus isn't on individual mechanics, but on the experience as a whole.
Speaking of experiences, maybe the most buzz surrounding The Witcher is due to the "censoring" of nudity in the North American release. However, before we talk sex, let's clear something up: these changes are not the result of some ominous board of old men out to ruin your hedonistic pursuits--at least not directly. CD Projekt's decision to remove bare breasts from the game is no more an act of censorship than when I "censor" McDonalds from my diet to avoid a burning gut. This is a voluntarily removal of a few naughty bits--almost entirely relegated to the portraits shown during the game's many sex scenes--that the ESRB would most likely take issue with. To get an idea of what we're talking about, have a look at this screenshot--the censored version of course being on the left. That's it. Personally I can't imagine bothering to import the game based on this minor redaction, but others may feel more strongly about being denied a single milky minutiae.
While these exceedingly minor content alterations may not hold you back from playing the game to its fullest potential, its technical issues may present more of a problem. For starters, the game's loading screens linger for far too long. A simple matter of entering a small hut may set you back a dozen seconds of your life as the game busies itself with caching fireplaces and table legs. Compounding this issue are random crashes and seeming memory leaks, which come at unpredictable rates and can strike at the most inopportune times. A quick scan of gaming forums shows that I'm not the only one with these issues, although some appear to be luckier than others. Thankfully the game is pretty good about auto-saving, but the fear of losing your progress remains. CD Projekt is off to a good start with its first patch, so one would hope these issues will be ironed out relatively soon.
Regardless of crashes and clunky combat, I still highly recommend The Witcher, especially if you are a fan of deeply layered RPGs--and you know who you are. Give Geralt a spin for a few hours, and you might be surprised, as I was, to find yourself saying, "This is the first PC RPG I've really enjoyed since..."
