The Witcher exudes rare ambition and confidence for a RPG and delivers a memorable experience despite several flaws
Based on a series of novels and short stories from popular Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher tells the tale of a legendary monster hunter-a Witcher named Geralt of Rivia situated in a dark mature fantasy universe. It isn't dark only in the sense of it's atmosphere. It's dark in nearly EVERY sense –right from the major themes the game tackles to the smallest details of the universe. Sexism,corruption,racism,rape and prostitution and nearly every major evil runs deeply ingrained within every character you'll come across in this game. It is highly refreshing to see a fantasy universe that is built purely for adults and doesn't treat you like a kid even for the slightest moments.
Developed on BioWare's Aurora engine, the Witcher is naturally going to be a turn-based affair but CD Projekt, the developer modified it cleverly to make Witcher's combat appear like a highly clever twist between turn-based and action. It can be quick and hectic but it also utilizes the basic turn-based elements from the engine as well. Like most European RPGs, the Witcher's combat is not your everyday clickfest. It requires thought, precision and more importantly timing. Clicking on an enemy initiates an attack. Combos can be built on this attack by timing further clicks at proper time as indicated by a flaming cursor. To add the strategic component to the basic combat, Witcher introduces different stances. There are three different stances – Strong, Fast and Group. Strong does major damage but at very slow speed, Fast does medium damage but unleashes a good flurry of attacks and Group is for delivering minimal damage but to everyone around you.
All the stances won't work on all enemies. Like faster enemies will easily dodge your Strong attacks, so the combat does require a great deal of planning and thought even when you're right in the middle of the action. To add another twist to the combat, Geralt uses two swords – Steel and Silver Sword. Steel Sword is effective only on humans whereas Silver is effective only on monsters. This means that in addition to the action combat and the stances, there is thought and planning to be done even when it comes to equipping the proper sword. For instance, before going into a cave full of undead I wouldn't bother applying oils that upgrade my Steel sword since that wouldn't be effective. The Witcher rewards planning and strategy-making in advance and I can hardly recall any RPG in recent times that puts so much emphasis on that and rewards players accordingly.
Acting as the two support systems to the melee combat are magic and alchemy –both of which are as unique and unconventional as the rest of the game. Geralt's magic is limited to only 5 spells and these aren't your usual "pure offensive" magic either. These Spells (or Signs as they are called in the game) can be switched in between combat by simple pre-defined hotkeys. Instead of mana, they use up endurance. They are spells that generally aid your melee combat more than anything. These spells knock down, slow down enemies and blocks their attacks for a couple of seconds. As you can see, these aren't offensive spells by any stretch of imagination. The only offensive spell is Igni. Spells and parrying/blocking attacks use up Endurance. To prevent the players from spamming spells to defeat foes like in many of BioWare's games, CD Projekt kept the Endurance bar very limited. Even at an advanced level, using 2-3 Igni spells at once is more than enough to deplete your entire Endurance and it regenerates at a very slow rate.
This brings me to Alchemy one of the central components of The Witcher. The lore of the Witchers suggest they are expert alchemists and hence this part of the game gains importance. Alchemy is the chief support system to the game. On normal to higher difficulties it is absolutely necessary to have proper knowledge of alchemical ingredients. Thankfully the game does an excellent job of storing information regarding any potions, its formula, the ingredients required in a rather user-friendly format in the Journal. The Enhanced Edition also introduces a separate section of the Inventory for the alchemical components alone. Geralt can learn the formulae of potions by reading various books available across the Witcher's world. He also needs to learn about how to extract ingredients from a herb or a monster before he extracts it. Potions also can only be prepared by meditating. So if you need a certain potion before a fight, you will need to meditate and mix the potion before it's ready. Potions can last for several hours to a day so preparing in advance is once AGAIN rewarded in this game.
Since the Witcher uses a dynamic day/night cycle, meditating can often become useful to skip time until a required point. Meditation can only be done at certain designated fireplaces when there's no monsters around. Meditation also serves as a portal for leveling up your stats. Leveling up in Witcher is rather unique. Instead of traditionally increasing stats, Geralt learns new abilities and in doing so he unlocks higher levels of expertise. The same applies for the Sign/Spells upgrades too. The Witcher's character customization is relatively complex enough to please most RPG fans.
Questing is another aspect where the Witcher truly shines. There are often two or more ways to finish a general storyline related quest each leading to a potentially different outcome. Even basic bounty-hunting quests have an added layer of uniqueness surrounding it. If you're tasked to kill three vampires and bring their hearts as a proof just killing three vampires won't do the trick. You'll need to look up in books before hand with the town's booksellers to see if they've got any information regarding how to extract vampire's hearts. The game only hints you in this and there's always little to no hand-holding involved in most of the quests. The game respects its gamers' intelligence and doesn't treat them like a low-IQ idiot.
As if it weren't enough already to further demonstrate the talent that these newbie Polish developers have within them, the Witcher has some absolutely fantastic storyline quests that with the added role-playing component strike pure gold. There's a detective quest that runs central through the second chapter and with the game's heavy/moody atmosphere it often resembles a fantasy film-noir of sorts. There is another quest that involves an autopsy of a dead body which can lead to wildly different conclusions all depending upon how smart and observant the player is and how much he has researched regarding the biological abnormalities. There are a couple of more brilliant quests that one doesn't generally come across in RPGs and it's refreshing to see them in one. The game rewards you with a rare degree of satisfaction found in RPGs when you complete such smartly designed quests successfully.
The Witcher's story is broken across 5 chapters excluding a Prologue and an Epilogue. It tells the tale of Geralt of Rivia as he travels in search of a mysterious mage who has stolen the Witchers' secrets. A relatively simple premise breaks into something more devious and soon Geralt finds himself caught up to the neck in political skullduggery. Corruption, lies, betrayal are the mere beginning of this rich enjoyable tale. The game doesn't hesitate from presenting player with an array of moral dilemmas none of which fall into the good/evil category of the Fables and Mass Effects. In fact, Witchers' moral dilemmas often don't fall into even Dragon Age's "relatively good and relatively bad" system. Rather in the Witcher, everyone is evil and selfish and it's upto you to judge whose evil is apparently greater. It's often hard to judge none so greater than the end of the Chapter 1 which poses one of the most complex moral dilemmas I've come across in a game. The narration also takes a couple of risks half-way through which pays off in rather surprising ways. Witcher's narration can be hectic when it wants to but it can also slow it down to a calming stroll when it wants to.Breath-taking in both scope and execution, the Witcher's story is one of its key strengths.
The world is also highly believable and dynamic. Besides a dynamic day/night and weather cycle, the NPC behavior is something that deserves a mention. When it rains, the NPCs take cover under a roofed passageway or run for shelter. They just don't walk around pretending everything's normal. They also go about their daily chores (not to the same level of sophistication as in Elder Scrolls games) and slowly retire to home or to tavern when night falls. Since this is made on a pre-console BioWare era engine, the player has freedom to kill any NPCs that don't directly break a quest. This can be occasionally useful for getting into areas that you usually aren't allowed into. In that sense, the Witcher is certainly quite open-ended compared to the newer BioWare games.
All of this may lead one to believe that Witcher is a perfect RPG in nearly every sense. Unfortunately that is not the case. The Witcher is plagued with problems that it inherits from it's own Euro-RPG genre--namely clunky controls, broken quests and glitches galore. The fact that the Witcher is made on an engine that is almost crumbling under Witcher's modifications doesn't help it's case. Crashes, graphical glitches still exist even in the Enhanced Edition. You'll occasionally run into broken quests just because you didn't reach some point at the proper point in the story. Witchers' multi-act narration kinda escalates the questing issues. Some quests get carried forward to other acts but there's almost no way to finish them since you can't access that particular area you were in the previous chapter. This leads to making your journal look a lot messier and crowded than it should be.
Add to this the controls. The Witcher was modified to a massive extent to make it seem like an action game. SEEM like one. Unfortunately Witcher's dodging is clunky and animations often don't match the damage you sustain. All of this is quite simply because Witcher is still a turn-based affair given an action-RPG polish over it. The illusion works for most of the time but when it does break one's frustration is justified.
One of the major overhauls in Enhanced Edition is the vast improvement in the Polish to English translation. The original's dialogues sometimes made little to no sense and this lead to a decline in the quality of it's rich storyline. It was a disappointing aspect of the original. However CD Projekt decided to do something about that and retranslated and re-recorded over 5000 lines for the Enhanced Edition. Many of these lines are meant for Geralt and one can immediately sense a much clearer sarcasm in the retranslated dialogues. Some of the story and quests also make greater sense than they did in the original.
The Witcher is a rare beast in nearly every sense. Exuding a rare degree of confidence and ambition that few of it's fellow Euro-RPGs have shown over the years, it exhibits the developer, CD Projekt's pedigree and understanding of what works in RPGs and what doesn't. Their emphasis on the often-ignored aspects of planning and strategy as well as in introducing a rare form of moral complexity is commendable. Their balancing of magic as a support system rather than a complete destroyer of enemies is another plus point in their favour. They also don't miss the key aspects of RPGs-the storytelling and decision-making and come out with some highly memorable quests. The game stumbles at a lot of places and it does require a bit of patience to overcome it's Euro-RPG inherited rough edges and clunkiness.
The Witcher ultimately could have been a lot more if it knew how to iron out it's irregularities and address its shortcomings. It certainly doesn't lack the ambition nor does it lack confidence and for a large part of the game it successfully executes its unique elements into a memorable role-playing game of a high caliber.