Completed: The Witcher

With Skyrim on the way I realized that I should spend this weekend making an effort to finish the RPG I was currently part way through playing, The Witcher. I knew I was past the half-way point and my weekend workload was low, so I set to it.

The world of The Witcher is a bit of a strange one. On the surface it seems like a pretty typical fantasy setting but as you get deeper in to it you find the are a lot more differences and complications. Also there are the higher levels of sex and violence which further differentiates it from the Tolkien-esque stuff. I had never really heard about this game until after The Witcher 2 was released earlier this year. After that got good reviews I decided I'd look in to the series. Turns out it is based on a series of polish books. I'm reminded of a time when I was discussing games made from books which weren't a film in between. At the time I couldn't think of an example, but this is one.

Original out in 2007 and then polished/patched and re-released in 2008 the game looks great as it's not too old and with a modern machine it can be run with full settings. I normally don't like RPGs with fixed player characters as much as ones with a free character creation system. It takes longer to become attached to the creation of someone else and the different limits that puts on the storytelling makes the games feel slightly different. In The Witcher though, I started to enjoy playing as Geralt of Rivia pretty quickly. It had all the elements, interesting story & characters, good graphics & voice acting and some great music as well.

There were a couple of wonky interface issues but nothing you couldn't get used to. The one major problem I had was with the quests and related information. I didn't feel like they were organized as they could have been. I often felt like I had far too many quest lines open at once and was often unsure what to do next. At times you are wondering what you should do next in a quest, only find you actually needed to do something in an unrelated quest to trigger an advance in the other plot. I had to look up a couple of quests in the walkthroughs in order to figure out what I was missing.

Those issues aside the rest of the game is really good and it forces you to make some very interesting decisions, with consequences. It's also one of the better examples I've seen of using AI to create enough random townsfolk that the places felt like they were alive.