The Witcher Revisited

[Meshugger]

All my friends hated The Wicther, even the ones who really like fantasy CRPG's. What's the forgiving factor?

 

Stop hanging out with iMac-people.

 

But seriously, one can irk or even dislike the less-than-stellar production values, load times and twitchy combat might not be their thing. But all that is forgiven with the roleplaying, adult theme (you know, people behaving as silly as real adults would, not general fantasy-esque), story and general atmosphere.

Edited December 19, 2007 by Meshugger

[Morgoth]

Patch 1.2 is out!

[Meshugger]

Patch 1.2 is out!

 

YES!

[Musopticon?]

The patch complains about the language that was selected not matching the installed game. I assume that this has something to do with the modded dialogue. I tried changing the text to the default(Original English) and the patch worked perfectly.

 

Just a heads-up.

[Musopticon?]

In the lumberjack camp:

 

"I like wild flow'rs"

"I like cross-dressing"

"And hanging around in bars"

 

Not that I wasn't expecting it. Bloody well laughed still.

[SteveThaiBinh]

I'm about to start The Witcher. So I'm reading the manual before I start and ... What? What are you looking at me like that for? Of course I read the manual before playing. Doesn't everyone? Anyway, I apparently have to choose a difficulty level. Can I change the difficulty level once I've started playing the game, or is it fixed forever? If I can't change it, how challenging would you say 'medium' difficulty is? This is for someone who found the combat in Oblivion and Jade Empire quite difficult and is a little frightened by talk of 'attack sequences'. :ninja10:

[samm]

You can't change difficulty during the game, only the one time at the beginning. I'm playing it on medium and rarely had any problems surviving battles so far, unless certain monsters shot my character from a distance or from behind him where I couldn't see them... Attack sequences are only a matter of timing your mouseclicks, nothing wild really

Edited December 20, 2007 by samm

[Slowtrain]

I'm enjoying the heck out of this game. My only complaint so far would be that the combat isn't more twitch-based; I would prefer a more active role in loping off barghast heads with my claymore beyond timing mouse clicks. OTOH, combat is far superior to say Dungeon Siege. More than any thing I am just enjoying the complexity of the game: all the things to read and learn.

[Tigranes]

Steve, if you can run the Witcher without significant lag, I would say intermediate is fine. If you take the time to explore places, fight everything you come across (instead of doing some Indiana Jones running), and understand the uses of alchemy, you should generally be fine. But then, I found Jade Empire (on normal diff.) ridiculously easy, and didn't struggle much with Oblivion's either. I would say the Witcher requires less 'twitchy' things as a whole though, basically all you are doing is clicking the left button again and again at certain times.

 

Just have no lag, and smell the flowers (and pick alchemy ingredients!) as you go along, etc, and you shouldn't end up beleaguered. I think it would be a pity if you picked Easy and it turned out too easy, it would hurt your experience for Witcher.

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

Just watched the intro.

 

That is some seriously awesome CGI.

[SteveThaiBinh]

Cheers, Tigranes. I've started the game and made it through what I suppose is the first proper battle

with the mage in the ring of blue flame

without too much difficulty on medium, so I think I should be okay? I really wanted to avoid Easy as you say, even though I don't particularly enjoy combat, but I don't particularly enjoy playing as an obviously ridiculously over-powered character either.

 

And I'm having a Titanic moment:

Leo!

:sad:

[theslug]

Arg I h8 u guys. Just 4 more days until I can start playing. >

 

maybe I'll persuade my mom to let me get it Christmas eve morning.

[Meshugger]

Newcomers to The Witcher! Make sure that you download the 1.2 patch. Loading and saving times have been reduced considerably.

 

Oh, and i am at chapter IV and i have encountered my second Monty Python reference: "Do you seek the HOLY GRAAAAAIL?!"

[Tigranes]

Aw snap, I'm just getting into chapter 4!

 

I had taken a couple days' break, but the promise of reduced loading times is getting me going again.

 

Also, best patch note in the history of gaming:

 

- Fixes for sex scene with nurses in Act 5.

[Musopticon?]

The load times are seriously shorter now. It takes about 3 seconds to load when you enter a building and even the city sections take only about 20 seconds on my ancient rig.

 

CDProjekt delivers!

[theslug]

Any word on a dialogue patch yet?

[Tale]

The load times are seriously shorter now. It takes about 3 seconds to load when you enter a building and even the city sections take only about 20 seconds on my ancient rig.

 

CDProjekt delivers!

That's right, release it two days after I beat the game. GOOD JOB! ***** sons of **** ***in mother ****ers

[mkreku]

Woo! This might make me actually finish the game! I mean, I bought the COLLECTOR'S ****ING EDITION after all.

 

I don't know what it is with me nowadays, but I just can't stand excessive loading times whenever I enter a building or other. I want ALL games to be like my precious Gothic's!

[Slowtrain]

It's reaching the point now where I almost expect any game that comes out of eastern Europe or Russia to be good and any game that comes out of the US to be crap. Sad.

[Tigranes]

Played a bit of Ch4, the loading times are really better, at least two or three times better, its amazing.

[SteveThaiBinh]

I enjoyed Chapter 1, though I didn't find the atmosphere as gripping as NWN2. Still, it picked up a lot towards the end. I was partly put off by all the crashing - it quite often crashed when I saved or transitioned between areas. Happily, I found a solution on the Tech forums - I turned off my hard drive's write caching and it seems to have improved a lot.

 

Write caching's not important, right?

[jaguars4ever]

Write caching's not important, right?

Not in the grand scheme of things as I see you've opted to slaughter and entire town Mr. Nice-place-to-visit-but-I-wouldn't-want-to-live-here.

[SteveThaiBinh]

Write caching's not important, right?

Not in the grand scheme of things as I see you've opted to slaughter and entire town Mr. Nice-place-to-visit-but-I-wouldn't-want-to-live-here.

Who, me?

 

I only killed the bad people,

the ones who were trying to burn the nice witch. I don't know what happened to the others. They were dead when I got there. Honest.

[newc0253]

When I first heard about the Witcher a few years ago, I thought it might be on par with a premium mod set in some weird eastern european mythos. Pretty much everything I'd seen since (admittedly not much) seemed to confirm this impression. Safe to say I went in with entirely modest expectations.

 

Having played the game, the best term I would use to describe it is a revelation. Playing Stalker earlier in the year, i was pleasantly surprised to find that the Russkies could produce an atmospheric FPS to rival Half Life but still I had no idea that the region was capable of producing a CRPG of this calibre. Seriously, who knew Poles could write a game this good?

 

In truth, the Witcher is the best CRPG i've played in recent memory. Indeed, it's the closest i've come to an experience approaching the classics of PS:T and BG2. Truly impressive. For a time of the year when so many 'best of' lists are being made, it's a little sad that the Witcher isn't on more of them. Yeah, singleplayer CRPGs have always been a minority pursuit compared to other games, but given the story-driven direction of games like Bioshock and Portal, you'd think that the gaming press (such as it is) would pay more attention to games that are actually driven by story.

 

It was particularly instructive to play Witcher straight off the back of MOTB. Between them, Bioware and Obsidian have released 2 versions of NWN and 4 expansions and - impressive as NWN2 now looks - Witcher blows them all out of the water using the selfsame engine. I'm sure the comparison is at least a little unfair: NWN and NWN2 after all offer far more flexibility for character development, plus the toolkit, etc. Also, The Witcher also takes advantage of all the mistakes of NWN and NWN2 and learns from them.

 

I wouldn't describe Witcher as groundbreaking because, with the possible expection of combat, it's not really an innovative game in the sense that all the elements it uses have been introduced elsewhere (not to mention cough*amnesia*cough). Instead, what's striking is how well-integrated these elements are, how they've been fashioned into something rich and strange and transporting.

 

It's also useful to compare Witcher with Oblivion as games that, while superficially appear similar, are polar opposites. As good as NWN2 now looks, only Oblivion and Witcher communicate the sense of a world that's wide open (even when, in many cases, Witcher uses the same area tricks as KOTOR or Jade Empire to stop the PC from wandering too far). The difference is that Oblivion is all scenery and fights and loot with no substance, while the Witcher is an actual story.

 

In some ways, we've been spoiled by a reasonably high standard of story-driven CRPGs in recent years: games like KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Vampire: Bloodlines, etc. In this sense, it's hard to complain about generally well-written games like MOTB even when, at their core, you find them vaguely disappointing in some way. The Witcher certainly isn't perfect but it raises the bar. At best, I hope it prompts Bio and Obsidian and others to outdo them. At the very least, I look forward to the sequel.

[theslug]

I just started playing earlier today. My thoughts so far is that its just subpar. I don't like how I HAVE to use strong attacks vs big guys and fast attacks vs agile characters. For me it's still a little frenzied trying to remember which key is strong/fast/multiple enemies and the story so far has been a little less than stellar. I am only at the make a potion for Triss but still its like I just want to get the hell out of this depressing and dark castle and murder some things.