In honour of The Witcher 3’s release this week, Steam was frankly giving away the first two titles in the The Witcher series, and to have refused their kind offer would have been worse than slapping them in the face with my used codpiece. Excited by the prospect of a new fantasy world to explore as a new character and ultimately revert to my completely law-abiding self in, I quickly discovered one of impractical bodices, hilariously racist accents and job titles that have no reference to what the job actually entails, i.e. having nothing to do with witches at all.
The Witcher 2’s world is that of the stock fantasy setting; you could change its name to The Seven Kingdoms, Amalur, or Narnia and you would not be able to tell the difference. The story told is similarly generic: you are Geralt of Rivia, trusted protector of King Foltest, who is murdered while Geralt is looking the other way and basically not doing his job properly. The King’s murderer escapes through a window by the power of cliché, and Geralt must clear his name by hunting down and killing the king’s murderer. It is the revenge plot, plain and simple, firm friend of writers from Shakespeare to Tarantino, but it is not the clichéd nature of the story or setting with which I have an issue – to a certain extent I like to know exactly what I am getting with fantasy RPGs. The issue that I have is that The Witcher 2’s plot and setting walks the line between ‘homage’ and ‘plagiarism’ to the point of parody. The Witcher 2 is a story of kings, wizards, sorceresses, elves, dwarves, humans and the undead, and so draws heavily upon, and in some cases straight up steals, the template from The Lord of the Rings, complete with the curiously inexplicable animosity between dwarves and elves. There is a Lord of the Rings joke at one point, written by the developers perhaps as a knowing acknowledgement of The Witcher 2’s fantasy inspiration, but the resulting implication is that The Witcher 2’s world is one in which The Lord of the Rings exists and is thus set in our future. The effect is to kick the player out of their immersion in the game, and the game’s ‘knowing’ wink toward the audience is so jarring in the context of the conversation the characters are having that if anything it draws more attention to the clichéd nature of the game’s story and setting.
The Witcher 2’s gender politics, like it’s setting, are positively mediaeval. The female characters in the game are either sorceresses with dangerous mystical power that is mistrusted by every character in the game, or are prostitutes. Triss, the principal female character and Geralt’s love/boner interest, spends her time being either kidnapped, fainting because despite her powers of sorcery, she cannot balance the skills of magic and consciousness simultaneously, or stripping off to titillate Geralt. The only exception to the sorceress/prostitute model is a strong leader of a band of rebellious dwarves and humans, a potentially interesting and complicated character, who is swiftly poisoned within minutes of her introduction and is then hypnotised by a – you guessed it – evil magic sorceress. The Witcher 2 claims to be depicting a complex world, and while it largely succeeds in this with regard the choice system and the development of the various political and racial tensions in the world, the way that it presents it’s female characters as both objects and objectives largely undoes this good work.
The depth and complexity that The Witcher 2 strives towards with it’s so-called ‘mature’ story manifests itself with frequent and frankly unnecessary sex scenes between Geralt and whatever random strumpet happens to be to hand when Geralt gets his rand on. The sex itself in The Witcher 2 is endemic of a larger trend in modern entertainment that posits the equation sex=maturity. Game of Thrones does this as well, though it itself is merely contributing to a trend that can trace its roots to the buxom wenches and ribaldry of dramas such as Rome and The Tudors. The Witcher 2 misses the opportunity to comment on it’ genre in in the way it does, albeit clunkily, with the Lord of the Rings joke, and simply leaps into the fray crying ‘me too!’, flinging aside its codpiece and absurdly impractical bodices for scenes of thrusting and moaning that are at once cynical and just plain jarring. In one fine example, Geralt and Triss are just getting done mercilessly slaughtering some bandits before Geralt gets a look in his eye, Triss’s cloths literally disappear (because the ability to magically dispel clothes is page one in every sorceresses textbook in The Witcher 2’s world) and they do it right there. It’s as if the developers had a quota for the amount of boning required in the game, and had to fit one last sesh in somewhere.
The Witcher 2’s story, for what it is, is told through a combination of expository conversations with NPS, non-interactive sequences narrated by Dandelion, a poet friend of Geralt’s, and flashback sequences, narrated by Geralt himself as he regains his memory (yes, the main character has amnesia, as if this game needed more tick-marks in the cliché column.) The dialogue, while admirably well-acted, and genuinely excellent in some respects, is almost deliberately obtuse when it comes to story-telling. At several points characters reel off names of places, treaties, kingdoms and people at Geralt, to the extent that it feels as if the writers had bets with each other about how many ridiculous names they could fit into the game. You don’t even visit or meet a quarter of the places or people mentioned, so either there was a bet running while the story was being written or CD Projekt RED genuinely think that you create atmosphere and story in game worlds by listing names and saying that they exist, oh, somewhere. The expository dialogue is so terrible that at times it seems that there were two teams of writers, one writing the story, and one dealing with the characters and environments, the discrepancy between the quality of the dialogue is that bad. The character dialogue is really good, both in conversation and in incidental comments NPCs make as you explore the game’s towns and forests, and goes along way to establishing the world of The Witcher 2 as one that lives and breathes, despite the stock nature of it’s setting.
Non-interactive sequences narrated by Dandelion and Geralt himself round out the story-telling, but unfortunately the combination of three different ways in which the story is told combine to create a startlingly disjointed experience. The differing art styles of the Dandelion and Geralt sequences suggest that the developers either couldn’t decide who they wanted to ‘narrate’ the story and how they wanted to tell it, or that they wanted to have two people telling the same story but from differing perspectives. The combination of both has the effect of muddling the narrative and ruining the aesthetic of the story. The overarching narrative of The Witcher 2 eventually became so distractingly haphazard that I eventually ignored these sequences: Geralt has been framed for murder, and he is out for revenge, and the game is enjoyable even if you only understand it on these terms.
The story is divided into five chapters, with each chapter representing a enclosed area for the player to explore. These ‘hub’ areas are beautifully detailed and have their own story and cast of characters that lend the impression of a living world that reacts to your presence within it. You explore each area, interact with NPCs, learn about quests and trade items in shops. When you are given a new quest, an entry appears in your journal, and your immediate objective appears in the corner of the screen. Tracking quests is made easy and you can easily switch from one to the other, though tracking multiple quests is not possible, which makes for a clean interface, but also occasionally some backtracking to and from places you have already explored. Being assigned new quests also overrides the quest you were tracking previously, meaning that you have to go back in to the journal to continue the quest. These are by no means big problems in the game, and are in fact issues that I barely noticed, but they nevertheless break the laws of videogame interfaces: the fewer clicks the better.
Each quest you are offered has multiple ways of completing it: in one storyline, you can choose to kill a pesky troll who has become derelict in his duty of maintaining a bridge, or you can choose to talk to the other characters in the world and discover the reason for his behaviour. Choosing to go one way or the other has consequences for the world and the way characters react toward you, and this encourages the player to taking time in considering the choices offered with almost every conversation in the game.
It’s really the immersive quality of The Witcher 2 that is the standout achievement of the game, both in terms of its rewarding combat system, and the detailed and organic environments that you are encouraged to explore and participate in. Combat is satisfying, though relatively simple. You block using one button, perform a quick slash with the left mouse button and a slower, but more powerful, attack with the right button. You also have at your disposal five magical attacks called ‘signs’ as well as a ranged attack using knives or poisoned harpy claws. Combining all three of these different combat techniques is key to progressing through the game, especially during boss fights. The game’s prologue doesn’t introduce you to each combat style separately; it sort of gives you access to everything right from the beginning and leaves it up to you to learn what to use when, and how to effectively switch between combat styles. Having to learn the inventory, crafting, and character upgrade system at the same time is a little bit overwhelming, but the game expects you to keep up, which is a nice change from the hand-holding tutorials employed by other similar games, and makes the combat even more satisfying when you do finally master it.
The character-upgrade system is similarly simple to use and deceptively deep. You can choose to upgrade attributes divided among four skills trees: the training tree, magic tree, alchemy tree and swordsmanship tree. Each skill upgrades your character in some way, whether that means yielding 20% more ingredients when you pick flowers for potions, or decreasing the amount of time taken for health to regenerate in combat. Some skills have the possibility to mutate into more advanced forms using mutagens that you discover as you explore the world. Each mutagen applies different effects thereby increasing the number of ways in which you can develop your character, to the point that it is very possible that the character you end up with will be significantly different with each play-through of the game.
Whatever information you take from this review, let it be that The Witcher 2 is a great game that is absolutely worth a large portion of your time. The world and has a great depth that enhances the pleasure of the experience. You are presented with choice at every turn in this game, and a great deal of the pleasure of playing The Witcher 2 is seeing the decisions that you make impacting the world as you adventure through it. Couple this with a simple though rewarding combat system and deep character customisation options, and each play-through of the game has the potential to be radically different. The issues I have with the presentation of the story do not ruin the experience, but are issues nonetheless in a game that prides itself in its mature content and story.