The Witcher is an adult RPG (Role Playing Game) sets in medieval era. Witches, Knights, Vampires, Elves, Dwarves, you name it. "Wait… Adult RPG? What do you mean?" The Witcher contains nudity (if you grab the uncensored European version), a few mild sex scenes, and "violent" languages in its dialogues. It has a good story and after some hours of game play, you’ll feel an attachment to Geralt (your character), the Witcher. If you decide to buy a new RPG for your PC, get this one! I’ll explain why.
Graphics
The Witcher is beautiful. The scenery is amazing and feels…medieval. You’ll need a powerful card though if you want to ramp up the graphics settings. My GeForce 7600GT is struggling to keep everything at high especially during night time with lots of lightings around. The character models are quite good but can be horrible sometimes. You’ll notice as well that the models are quite repetitive too in the game. You’ll find many Mr. John Smith everywhere in the game, only to find out that he is actually Mr. John Doe after talking to him.
The effects are pretty good; blurry screen when you get too drunk, fire and burning flame effects, the fighting animations, etc.
The Witcher is simply.. beautiful..
Storyline and Quests
Witchers are basically demon/monster hunters. They rely on their swords a lot (Steel swords for fighting humans and Silver swords for fighting monsters), a bit of magic, and also on potions to buff their abilities. At the beginning of the game, you are simply seeking revenge from a group of "bandits" that called themselves "The Salamander" which is lead by a powerful mage. The story, of course, as simple as it may sound, will go deeper and deeper as you play through the game.
There are lots of side quests in The Witcher which are there to boost your experience for leveling, orens (cash in a nutshell), and *ahem* to have a good time with the female quest givers. In this game, you are so hot, handsome, masculine that almost every lady that you get in touch with, is attracted to you and *ahem again* "opened" up to you. After a short blurry animation scene with them, you will get a collectible card (different for every woman). The cards have nothing to do with the story. They are there to fulfill your satisfaction of relationship accomplishment or your manly ego (especially if you are having trouble with women in your real life). How the ladies can get attracted by a male who is sterile (A Witcher is a mutant, sterile but immune to diseases) and have so many scars in his face, amazes me.
The quests are interesting and most of them have reasons behind it. As traditional RPGS do, most of the quests involve killing X amount of monster A, or at least involved in some killings. However, the quests never feel dull and repetitive, mainly because the quest giver usually has a storyline attached to it. A grandmother who acts differently because of a monster controlling her mind in her house basement, monsters that have disturbed a merchant’s trade route, and so on.
NPCs
The quest tracking system is very good. It gives a summary of where you are at on every quest and also points the active quest’s location on the map. You can never ever lose track of quests.
Some quests also have a twist of themselves and you must decide on how to continue on. Some quests and decisions that you make are no black and white, such as:
- Helping a soldier whose girlfriend had been murdered, only to find out that he actually raped the girl
- Should I kill the witch that is responsible to make a poison or should I kill the person who asked the witch to prepare the poison?
- Should you persuade a hooker who runs away from her bad husband (who is the quest giver) back to her home?
- Do you let a cannibal live so that you can get a potion formula or save mankind by giving him the killing blow he deserves?
- and many more
There are times when you feel like loading a save point, only to find out what will happen if you choose A instead of B. Of course, the slow loading time is there to stop you in doing this.
| Slow Loading Time
When I say slow loading time, I mean it. It IS SLOWWW. I have a dual core Intel, 7600 GT, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM and SATA2 hard drive. The loading time is daunting especially when the game is trying to load a city or a big area. It’s fairly quick if you enter a cave or a house, but the game will reload everything back again once you get out of the house. UPDATE 21st December 2007 : The Witcher patch 1.2 is finally out! Read about it here |
Continue to Next Page: Gameplay, Alchemy, Other Features, and Conclusion
Pages: 1 2
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
To all,
One big issue I have with the game is, once again, game developers decided that altering the game playing level of difficulty should ONLY be allowed at the very begining of a game. So if you start at one level of difficulty, there you are stuck unless you start the entire game over from the beginning. Not fun, not nice, and very poor marketing choice in my opinion.
Wow BMD! You are so right! What a way to almost ruin a really great game. No way to reset the difficulty level after having started the game. Lazy programing!
I actually like the idea that we can’t alter the difficulty of the game once it’s set. It keeps me challenged throughout the game (Maybe it’s just me)
Which difficulty level did you choose? I chose err was it Medium? And my Geralt was slicing through the enemies like there’s no tomorrow even till the end of the game (I rarely drank potions)
Actually Michael, you make my point for me! The issue is not the temptation to reduce the difficulty level after getting hours into the game, the issue is not being able to INCREASE the difficulty after being hours into the game. Specifically because slicing through all the enemies gets to be TOO easy. But no, yer forced to play five hours all over again to increase the level of difficulty.
By the way Michael. The lack of player input in naming “Saved” positions and the saved positions NOT indicating the level of difficulty selected at at that save point in time… all completely sucks rotten eggs. So does not being able to find a “Saved Game” folder in order to save and move prior saved games while a person works through what difficulty level is best for them.
I have just bought this game and can’t get it to work. We get to the screen where you assign points to attributes, signs, steel swords and silver swords and then can’t get out of it. It even looks like they are saying we have played the game…which we haven’t. Can anyone help us to get started?
Thank-you
There’s an enhancement patch to the Witcher, which may or may not fix your problems.
played through the game.great game!! with exception to the load time and more importantly the ability to save a game and not be able to indicate on it that is “your” game and not someone elses game. this is messed up!! they should of made it possible to have multiple players open a menu and be able to go their set of game saves under a name of their chooseing this would have made a much improved game!!
Have you installed the Enhanced edition of the Witcher? It should reduce the load times significantly, among with other great updates: http://www.cravingtech.com/blog/the-witcher-enhanced-edition.html