The Witcher Comments by Dan Whitehead

Hm, weird. I found Stalker pretty much bug-free (and it is my game of 2007 so far), at least after the first patch, while Gothic 3 is still quite a mess. Hohum. :)

Anyway, it does feel a bit more like an action-adventure sometimes. It doesn't have Gothic's non-linearity, and while the skill tree is quite huge, you don't need to specialise (at least so far). There are enough skill points to distribute that you can raise almost everything. On the other hand, it doesn't quite force you along the main story as rigidly as NWN2 did, nor is it nearly as fiddly to use, and it does have the "big" decisions which definitely feels very RPG-ish. The alchemy system is also fairly complex.

Not really noticed bugs yet after the first patch.

Personally, I am having the most fun with the game I had in this genre pretty much since Gothic 2. While it's not exactly the same kind of game, I am very often reminded of the Gothic series.

@darc

It's far more RPG than I was expecting to be honest. There are skill trees like Diablo 2 etc, and the combat is not quite as deep as something like KOTOR, but then again isn't Diablo. It's very fun, IMO.

Bugs - I've only played the patched version (113Mb release-day patch), and in about 10 hours of play I've seen 2 bugs - one animation glitch that worked itself out, and one hang. I've played a lot, lot worse, in terms of stability.

I rarely give much of a s**t about the review scores, and 99% of the time I think EG are right on the money, but this one I think is a little unfair and felt the need to say so purely because if you like western RPGs you'd be nuts to miss this. I'll be very interested to see how the game scores elsewhere.

Cool, thanks for the responses, UncleLou and Crea. I'll definitely check this one out.

Re: Gothic 3, it really is very strange. I know G3 gave a lot of people fits, but I played it nearly to completion, and for me the experience was downright polished. Problems must have been configuration-specific in the extreme. I believe my system handled it well on account of a very fast disk subsystem (RAID 0 Raptors.)

(Also, we may not have played quite the same code, as I purchased here in the US. Wasn't there a European-specific patch at one point?)

As for STALKER, I often rant about its being unplayable, but it's not quite accurate to call it "buggy", I guess. It's mainly that the UI design is (IMO) non-intuitive, and the translation efforts were just terrible, resulting in a cool game that too frequently made no sense whatsoever. I loved everything *about* STALKER, but everytime I got invested in it, it would punish me randomly and send me "stalking" away from my PC. (I also hated the load breaks at random points in the map, which completely fouled my sense of spaciality within the game.) I finally just abandoned it. And talk of a sequel just leaves me feeling torn - might be the best game ever, might be a second serving of frustration. I definitely don't feel like I should have to pay for it again. ;)

(I also hated the load breaks at random points in the map, which completely fouled my sense of spaciality within the game.)

I realise this might have game-specific for you, but be warned anyhow that The Witcher has loading breaks very, very often - everytime you leave or enter a building. This can be a bit annoying, esepcially as you're often required to walk to and for quite a lot.

Nonetheless, anyone with a love for RPGs should try The Witcher. :)

As for Stalker, I can kind of see where you're coming from. I found the game so incredibly engrossing though that it never really bothered me. It sucked me into is world like hardly a game has in the last 7 or 8 years.

"I realise this might have game-specific for you, but be warned anyhow that The Witcher has loading breaks very, very often - everytime you leave or enter a building."

Probably not a deal breaker. Obviously a continuous world a la Gothic 3 is preferable, but it was only glaring in STALKER because it would occur in wide open places without warning, and in a few instances load you back up in a slightly different position than you were previously in, such that you didn't feel any continuity. I can remember once or twice walking toward a clear horizon, and then having the game load me directly into a fire fight, then jockeying for position, only to be reloaded back out. Between that and the forced indirect routes via contamination... too much weirdness for me.

But you know, I'm just rambling. I don't begrudge anyone for enjoying STALKER, there was a great deal to like about it.

Loading when I enter and exit a building or other clearly delineated spaces (as in Oblivion) isn't a problem. So long as those spaces aren't as small as in, say, Deus Ex: Invisible War. (That game was *all* loading.)

Either way, I've still got that RAID array to minimize the problem. :)

In regards to what constitutes a role playing game, I'd like to put forward this definition:

A Role Playing game is a game where you play a role. Hence, most games are *technically* role playing games. However, since that definition is far too broad we have to paint an arbitrary line somewhere and say "You need to be able to play a role, and you must have 'X' amount of freedom in acting out that role". Therefore, the greater your ability to play a role, the better the role playing elements in a game are. As such, choices, consequences, dialog, and believability (read: not necessarily realism, but the ability sympathize with the avatar) are the most important properties of an RPG. Character creation and character advancement (some form of 'leveling up') aren't important (to the definition at least) unless they impact the former factors.

" but they had experience translating such classic role-players as Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment for Eastern Europe."

That would be Central Europe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Eur...

Cold War ended some time ago....

In my opinion, this game do not deserve a 7 what so ever.

"In my opinion, this game do not deserve a 7 what so ever."

??? In your opinion, higher or lower?

It's in his games collection, he gave it a 10.

On an unrelated note, how many typos did I make in that post above? I wasn't drunk, just tired, honestly! ;)

Bought it tonight, have played for about 4 hours now. Please tell me it gets better than this? The game is a serious looker, I'll give it that, but I can't remember the last time I was this bored. Will post again with more specific observations later, in case anyone is still reading this thread.

I thoroughly recommend you don't play this game if you want to think of anything else. It's the most horribly addictive game I've played this year, it's flawed in many ways but is a work of genius.

I prefer this over Stalker, and traditionally I prefer FPS over sort of RPG.

An really amazing game, deserves 9/10. I can see that the reviewer lacks attention to details and knowledge about the witcher. But whatever hyped games like Bioshock, Halo 3 and Oblivion get better score because of hype.

Don't know what I'm missing, I just can't get into this game. Maybe it just gets off to a slow start? And by "start", I mean the first 6 or 8 hours? I'm seriously bored out of my mind, and at this point in my life, I'm not willing to invest this sort of time waiting for a game to "spin up". If it ever does, that is.

Looks beautiful though.

Depends where you've got to. I enjoyed the first bit okay, but it only really picks up once you get to Vizima proper. I'm now in the third act, thoroughly confused (in a good way!), and I don't know I trust _anyone_ at the moment.

Great fun.

Just spent my third (lengthy) session on this, and at this point I'm convinced I'm playing a different game than the rest of you. This game is just awful IMO. If I had to rate it so far I'd call it the prettiest 2 ever. Granted, I'm not even into Vizima yet, but the boredom factor is simply beyond belief. I'll be posting a review soon in case anyone wants a different viewpoint. Reading all of the uesr reviews here and on Amazon, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

I might get flamed for this (if anyone is still reading) but I have to offer the counterpoint to the "Witcher is awesome" comments. From my Amazon review titled "It was a Dark and Boring Night":


I start this review with a confession: I haven't finished the game yet. In fact, I've only played through most of the quests outside Vizima; I'm not yet into the city proper. Alledgedly the game "picks up", but I'm seriously running out of patience after investing many hours, bored out of my skull. Here are a list of observations:

The graphics engine is really lovely (excepting a lot of random aliasing at night, which I try to tell myself are fireflies) and so are the sounds. The voice acting is above average, but the conversations are often structured poorly and are therefore not believable. People offer the same dialog choices over and over even though previous conversations should have made them obsolete, resulting in conversations that make no sense. (Especially annoying, the conversation trees frequently dump you out when you intend to continue speaking, so you have to click on a character again, to hear his/her oddly identical opening phrases once more.)

This game ships with a hefty manual, but it is amazing how little information is actually provided. Like most recent game manuals, it's just installation instructions, a pile of spoilers for those interested, and not much else. This comes to your attention as you level up and find yourself navigating the most senseless skill tree of all time. Pre-requisites are unclear, skill distinctions are unclear, so what the heck, why not just select them all at random? That will be really fun.

So character customization is out the window. 8 hours into the game, inventory has proven mostly useless, so trading is equally uninteresting. Gameplay is reduced to repetetive combat, and walking from place to place waiting for the odd conversations to spawn new quests and/ or cutscenes. Oh, had I forgotten to mention the walking? The outdoor environments are relatively large, and walking from point A to B happens essentially in realtime which, again, is insanely boring. Never have I seen a game so desperately in need of a fast travel solution. (Top it all off with long fences, your inability to jump over a fence, or even step off a ledge without a staircase, and the whole world becomes a big, dull maze.)

When you do finally get to where your going, the boredom theme reaches it's apex: eternal load screens. Everytime you enter or leave an indoor location, you'll see as many as four delays. The current screen will pause for a few seconds, followed by a saving screen, followed by a generic loading screen, followed by (I couldn't make this up) a location-specific loading screen. And *each* of these are longer than any loading screen I've seen in any video game ever. If you suffer through this only to find your destination less interesting than you hoped (quite likely) you'll have to turn around and wait for it all over again, just to go back outside. Enjoy.

Other niggles: if you expect the map to aid in your travels, note that there are no notations on it. You'll need to mouse over every location waiting for text to pop-up over its mysteriously identical dot markers. After you've waited a couple of seconds for it to - you guessed it - load.

I could go on and on with the little niggles, but in many ways the game is very polished. The real issues are pacing, and the nearly meaningless skill tree. As for pacing, how many hours are we expected to invest before a game begins to entertain, or even make a point? I started to think about this during one of the "minigames", essentially rolling dice with the locals. I guess this is somewhat appropriate for a simulation of a boring rainy night in a medievel 'burb, but you know, I've got a Playstation in the next room, and could probably find something more fun to do. Failing that, maybe I could get some chores done.

Unless something miraculous happens in the next 15 minutes of gameplay, I'm giving up on The Witcher. Even worse, this is the sort of game that makes me wonder whether I still like RPG's, after 20+ years of considering them "my genre".

8/10 easily...

Man. this review alone is enough for me to never take this website seriously. Ever.

For me, this was one of the best games that I have played in years. And I have played a lot. Pretty much every rpg released from nintendo to current day(Yup, hardcore gamer nerd, and proud)

Immersive, great storyline. Exciting sword fighting styles that evolve over time, and become more spectacular, as you level the skills. Pretty good spells - though one mainly only uses air and fire in normal mode. The shield is good in extreme.

About the only down sides that I saw was that the english npc texts, in some portions of the game were massacred by atari in translation(probably to save on game size/voice acting budget), and were not nearly as good as the original polish text. Little buggy on lower end systems. And the end of the game was abrupt. One wanted to keep on playing ala oblivion or morrowind, after defeating the last boss - but it just ended. Oh, and the loading times, before you apply the patch. but the patch fixes that nicely.

Did you even play past the first/second chapter?

The quality of most games these days, I can barely manage to stomache finishing them. I have to physically force myself to. With this game well, it kept me up till 5am, on the weekends, like the good old days. Glazed eyes, and the sun coming over the horizon lol. Loved it.

Suppose everyone is entitled to their opinions.

Agree.

-The firsts paragraphs of the article ("THIS is a RPG, THAT isn't a RPG") are pointless and childish AT BEST.
-The later rant against the combat system is out of place, especially given that it blows Oblivion's combat system out of the water, easily (tthe combat system made me thing of a RPGed version of a a beat them all like the LOTR ones a few years ago.. in the game it makes sense and is very enjoyable.)

That was for the whole first page of the article. Save one positive sentence "That the game world is deep and convincingly fleshed-out shouldn't really come as a surprise. ", the rest feels more like a teenager ranting than a proper game review. Hopefully we are not on a game reviewing site, or it would suck.

Second page of the article:

-Alchemy is pretty much like everything we've seen before (oops, again the reviewer is biased and wrong, the alchemy is a really nice touch in this game, unlike anything we've seen before).
-The dialog sucks (oh my, did he even play the game.)
-The graphics are consistent and almost nice (they are, in fact, excellent).
-The game isn't a hog (sadly, IT IS, but not only on the graphic side).

Nothing about the interface (good or bad), nothing about the fact that it works differently than other RPGs such as Troika games, in that there is for example no free roaming but rather wide zones that can be likened to those of "Vampire:Bloodlines", or that the items have not the usual balance of RPGs (there are not many armors and weapons for example, while there are tons of alchemical ingredients, which will make sense when you'll play it.)

There are interesting and insightful reviews for this game, but not the Eurogamer one.

what's with all this "witcher is half a role-laying game". does the reviewer know anything about rpgs. yes you are confined to play as geralt. but that's just a starting point, to give your character a background. it adds someflavor and makes you feel like your character is part of the world. this has been done before, the best example being planescape:torment. you were the nameless one, but YOU decided how he would develop. in baldur's gate 2 you were the son of bhaal. hell in fallout 2, you were the chosen one. are these not rpgs then. the point of an rpg not really creating a character from scratch, but developing one. your choices will determine who you are. and the witcher accomplishes that. it is an rpg.

oh just thought of another one. in kotor you're revan, no choice.