A Lot of Problems, but the Most Important Part is Done Right
In my quest to complete all the greatest RPG's ever made, I came across a game called the Witcher. I bought the original version of the game back in 2008 after purchasing a new PC. I started the game out several times shortly after I bought it, but as often happened to me at the time (and admittedly still happens), I became distracted and never really made it much further than the prologue. The original game sported some fairly humorous dialog, with characters referencing Triss, one of the game's main non player characters, as "babe" and dropping curse words that felt completely unnatural given the game's medieval fantasy setting. It did, however, set the tone early on that this would be a game for adults. That year, CD Projekt, the developer for the Witcher, released an enhanced edition that would fix numerous bugs, improve dialog, and add new content. This was released in a new package and also as a free downloadable update for those that owned the vanilla version of the game.
Fast forward to 2012, I decided to purchase the game again (along with the Witcher 2) when the two games became available on Gog. I decided it was high time that I give this game a shot, considering the acclaim it garners in some of the hardcore RPG circles as one of the greatest RPG's of all time. That, and I noticed that the Witcher 2 had a save game import feature that I knew I would just have to make use of to have the best overall experience.
So, what was my impression of the game after finishing it? I must say, I am not sure of a game that has caused so many mixed thoughts before. The Witcher has an awful lot of problems and short-comings, but it also had one of the most satisfying endings to a game that I have ever experienced.
In the Witcher, you take control of Geralt of Rivia, a witcher in the world of Temeria. In Temeria, witchers are mutated humans that spend their time doing chores for humans by slaying monsters. Witchers behave much like mercenaries, taking jobs and receiving pay from any citizen with coin to spare in exchange for slaying various creatures that plague the world of Temeria. Geralt makes it clear that witchers are not hitmen, their role is to kill monsters and solve human problems. Don't expect to be able to have unlimited character customization in the Witcher. You definitely are role-playing in the game, but you are role-playing as a character. You will be able to customize some of his skills, but not how he looks. You will decide who he helps, which side of the upcoming war he will side with, and who he beds, but whatever you choose, at the end of the day your character will still be Geralt, not you. In fact, I think the game would have been improved if the developers had spent more time instilling some preconceptions about the world of Temeria and the role of witchers into the player before dumping the most important decisions on you (which start around chapter 3 – though there are some earlier). There's little doubt that the game will be more interesting from the beginning for people familiar with Andrzej Sapkowski's (author of the novels) stories beforehand. By providing the player with more information on what witchers stand for, the decisions I made may have felt a little more weighty. As someone unfamiliar with the stories, sometimes I didn't exactly understand why I should care about any of the choices I had available.
From a technical standpoint, the game's stability can widely vary depending on your setup. I experienced an awful lot of crashing on my Windows 7 system with a SLI configuration, and often didn't have the energy to fire the game back up (more on this later). I was able to solve the problem, but I had to do three separate things to get the game to run without crashing: Disable SLI, turn shadows to medium (took me a while to figure this part out), and defragment the game's root folder. The defragging may not have been necessary, but SLI had to be disabled and shadows had to be at medium at a minimum for me to prevent crashing that would occur anywhere from 15-60 minutes after starting the game. From a graphics standpoint, the game looks pretty good. Textures are fairly detailed, and with high resolution set the game looks sharp (save some moments during cutscenes where character would momentarily appear somewhat jaggedy). Voice acting of the characters was not always in sync and I think the game would have benefited from a darker color palette ala the original Diablo to fit the setting a little better, but otherwise, the visuals were pretty well done.
The combat of the game is fairly straight forward. You primarily carry two swords, one meant for battling humans and one meant for battling monsters. In battle, you must select the most appropriate battle stance (power, fast, group) and battle your opponents. Combat is rhythm based, and if you continue to click at the right time, Geralt were perform combinations. It wasn't exactly intensely tactical, but it worked plenty well for me. Plus, the game has some pretty awesome gore effects as you slice through your opponents, sometimes lopping off heads which you can watch role down hills if in the proper setting. You also have magic which can come in handy to stun your enemies or deal some damage while keeping a slight distance. The game provides you with a good amount of skills which can be upgraded, ranging from the power of your attacks, the intensity and effects of your magic, and Geralt's defenses. The game also sports an alchemy system, which I really neglected to appropriately utilize. With the way the game is set up, not being prepared can get you into trouble. There were a couple times where I initiated a portion of the game that would involve a lot of combat and I did not go into the situation with proper preparation. Without having the right potions, I found myself doing a lot of waiting around for my life to slowly replenish after battles and reloading in the really tough situations because I didn't have a potion that would boost my resistance to being knocked down. For the really tough battles (of which there are only a couple really), I had to rely on some lucky hits by reloading to get through.
I would have appreciated if the Witcher had felt a little more open and allowed me to go back and explore territories and finish side quests as I progressed through the game, but unfortunately that is just not possible in a game structured like the Witcher is. The game is broken into 5 different chapters, and in each of these chapters, you are placed in a new surrounding. You will revisit some areas that you were in previously in later chapters, but the setting is completely different as the ravages of war are moving through the land of Temeria. This means if you finish enough components of the main quest before completing all the side quests you will be transported to the setting of the next chapter and will not have the opportunity to finish whatever else you may have wanted to do. For me, this wasn't such a horrible thing, because I found most of the quests in the game to be incredibly boring anyway. I consider myself to have a very high tolerance for things like fetch quests, but the Witcher tested my patience like no other game before. To be blunt, most of the quests bored me to tears and I had to take frequent, and sometimes quite lengthy breaks to make it through the game. Whereas games that lasted me approximately the same amount of in-game time as I spent with the Witcher, such as Fallout: New Vegas and Dragon Age: Orgins, have taken me 1-2 weeks to beat once completely sucked in, the Witcher took me a couple months to get through. Each of the chapters provides around 3 or 4 areas to explore. You will find yourself going back and forth between these areas collecting herbs or simply finding some character to talk to to advance many of the game's quests. The boredom is intensified as you watch the same cutscene of your character Geralt crossing a lake in a boat and initiate the same string of dialog time and time again to access other territories. In one particular instance, I had to go find two characters inhabiting different sections of the map and acquire a "gift" from each for another character (the Lady in the Lake) in a third area of the game. The Lady did not tell me what gifts she would find suitable, I was expected to figure that out on my own. With each of the other two characters, I had the option of selecting from three items. If I didn't chose the right item, the Lady in the Lake simply told me it wasn't good enough, without telling me what would work. So I ended up traveling back and forth between these areas quite a few times in order to get the right combination of gifts, and of course every time I went back to the Lady in the Lake to see if I had gotten the right items, the game would be interrupted by a boring cutscene of me sailing to her island in a boat.
There are other problems with the Witcher as well. The story was at times convoluted and I found myself not knowing why I was doing certain things. The journal doesn't help an awful lot either. It will update you as your progress through quests, but it doesn't provide you with a whole lot of details. Sometimes I was left to figure out that I had to visit certain characters at certain times on my own. The game allows you to track certain quests on the map while others you have to figure out on your own. However, the quest markers don't always direct you exactly where you need to go and sometimes the characters you need to speak with are not there because they maintain their own schedules. I can applaud the developers for making players actually use some abstract thinking to solve quests – this is a relic of RPG's from a decade ago - but having some more information would have been useful so I would have spent less time running around the red marker trying to figure out where it was pointing me to.
Adding to some of the general confusion of the story, character models are endlessly recycled throughout the game. CD Projekt didn't have an endless budget for this title so it's hard to hold this against them too much, but at times I spent time pondering whether or not the character I met in the swamps was also the undertaker I met a couple chapters early. This is not a huge issue since most of the major characters are unique, but it is a slight distraction nonetheless. Another strange element of the game is how the main characters seem to magically end up where Geralt goes in the game. You will repeatedly run into the same main characters despite being in completely different locations throughout the game. Obviously, these characters play a major role in the story and how you interact with them determines how deep your relationships become, but most of their reappearances felt extremely contrived. Here is an idea of some of these contrivances: Shani, a potential love interest, decides to move in to the city from the countryside at the same time as you move from the countryside in chapter 1 to the city in chapter 2. Alvin, who originally is made to live with a witch in chapter 1, somehow is captured and brought to the city in chapter 2, and is magically transported to your location again in chapter 4 - comfortably living with a completely different family. Dandelion is also magically transported from the city to your location. You get the idea. These contrivances are continual and at times it is asking for the player to suspend too much disbelief. Coinciding with these contrivances, there were other moments in the game where I caught plot points that seemed out of order or that really just came out of left field, leaving me feeling a little stupefied as to what just happened.
The game's bread and butter comes in the form of choices and consequences. As I mentioned, the Witcher would have benefited by instilling some preconceptions about your world a little more before dropping some of these on you, though at the same time, I didn't really feel like the game got very interesting until I was regularly forced to choose certain options. This causes a problem - the game needs more of an exposition so the player will care more about his decisions, but the game is pretty boring until the player has to start making choices. The problem I had is that I found that a lot of the options I had to choose from did not represent how I felt about the situation or I simply did not care about them. Without trying to give too much away, one of these encounters dealt with a decision to kill a Werewolf or let it live. The dilemma was that the Werewolf was not some mindless beast, he used his monster form to fight criminals. If the game would have made it more clear to me that a witcher's duty is to slay every monster he encounters, the decision might have had more impact on me. Should I do away with old conventions and bring forth a new approach to my duties as a witcher or should I follow the code I was raised upon?
I didn't feel much impact of these choices until reaching the final chapter. It certainly didn't seem to have as branching of a story as a game like Alpha Protocol, which was hammered much harder than the Witcher for its weaknesses. Half way through the final chapter I was certain that the game could not result in anything other than disappointment overall, but being so close to the end, I thought I needed to finish it out. And, all of the sudden, that's when it happened! The game suddenly became incredibly interesting. I started to see all the choices I made have impact on things that would happen and even on single lines of dialog in the game. I was forced to make difficult decisions and was left to ponder interesting possibilities and philosophical questions. The final two hours led to what was, without a doubt, one of the most satisfying conclusions to a game that I have ever experienced.
So, with all of that information, what kind of recommendation can I make for the game? Well, it's certainly not a game for everyone. Some people will love the entire experience. Others, like me, will be bored to death by the quests and find plenty of problems to point out. It's not a short game by any means. My play time probably lasted around 50 hours, and I had plenty of unfinished side quests – which means if you don't have much tolerance for the game's problems, it probably won't be worth you time. The best part of the game for me definitely took place in the final 5% of the time I spent with it. The ending alone made it worth the experience for me, but as much as I really would love to understand more about the world of Temeria and explore some of the questions I was left with deeper, I probably will not be playing through the game again anytime soon. So, in conclusion, I will simply say approach with caution! If you're at all like me, you will need to muster up a lot of patience before you will be rewarded, and that makes it difficult for me to give the game a whole-hearted recommendation. For those of you that don't mind these issues and are looking for a lengthy game with some depth and a pretty rewarding finale (probably enough to make a 6.5 become a 8.0 by itself), the Witcher will treat you right. As for me, I'm going to move on to the Witcher 2, import my character, and hope that CD Projekt has kept the strongest elements of the first game and improved everything else.