I finished The Witcher a few days ago.
I tried to fire up some of the bonus content… The extra adventures and stuff… And they just didn’t do it for me. Most of them didn’t have voices, which was just plain weird. I’d gotten so used to hearing people talk, just looking at text seemed wrong. There were two that did have text… But after battling against Salamandra for so long they just didn’t seem epic enough. Didn’t hold my attention for long.
I’m not going to un-install The Witcher just yet… I’m sure I’ll get around to playing all that bonus content eventually. But, for now, I need a bit of a break.
I complained about the controls initially, and they really were weird. Not bad, necessarily, but weird. It took a lot of getting used to… But I did get used to them. I hit my stride partway through Chapter II, and it was smooth sailing from there out. Quickly drawing the right sword, switching between combat styles mid-swing, chopping down enemies left and right. Combat was really a lot of fun. Especially some of the bigger fights. Having different weapons and combat styles to switch between added a more cerebral aspect to combat. There was more to killing something than just mashing a button over and over again.
I will say, though, that all the other weapons were completely useless. I basically just used my steel sword and my silver sword throughout the game. I got the occasional upgrade to each… But all those extra weapons – axes, daggers, maces, weird swords – were useless. I swung them once or twice, but never got any satisfaction out of them. Anything that didn’t use a witcher combat style was a waste of time. And most of the weird swords had penalties to damage, with no bonuses to offset it. I’d haul those weapons back to a blacksmith and sell them for a few orens, which was nice… But as far as actually equipping and using them? No way.
Alchemy turned out to be a lot of fun. Wandering the countryside, looking for plants, ripping bits out of defeated monsters… Then brewing up something to help you kill more monsters… Very satisfying.
I didn’t go anywhere without a full stack of swallow and blizzard potions, and both cat and white raffard’s decoction were insanely useful. But I didn’t experiment with too many of the other potions. I never once built a bomb, and I only got around to using an oil in the epilogue. I feel like I probably missed out on some depth and complexity there… But I still had fun.
Armor was kind of useless, too. I mean, it did offer some protection, and it looked cool… But there’s only three suits of armor in the entire game. And you only actually purchase one of them. It doesn’t seem like that really merits an armor slot in your inventory. Seems to me that could’ve just been handled as a quest event or reward.
It doesn’t really matter how the game mechanics handle it… But seeing an armor slot there sort of implies that you’ll be able to buy different suits of armor and equip them. Which you can’t really do in any meaningful way. And I didn’t realize this until I went out and read the wiki, because I was wondering where to go to buy armor.
Inventory management was kind of a miss all-together, really. You had enough room for alchemical components that it didn’t generally matter. You never really ran out of space. And there wasn’t really much in the line of junk loot to deal with. Most weapons were just useless. There wasn’t any armor to speak of.
And I guess that’s not really a bad thing… Lots of folks don’t like messing with an inventory, and more RPG titles are doing away with it entirely. But I still kind of like the treasure hunting aspect of older RPG titles. Looting interesting bits from slain enemies… Comparing statistics between what you’ve got equipped, and what you just looted… Debating over which items are valuable enough to haul back to town, and which should be left behind… Debating over whether you need the stats more than you need the money… And that just wasn’t a part of the gameplay in The Witcher.
The game world itself was wonderful. Very rich. Very interesting. Lots going on. The people and the locations felt genuinely alive. Folks had things to talk about that werren’t necessarily related to some quest objective. There were little problems and complaints that you couldn’t actually fix. There were bits of interesting geography that didn’t really feature into the storyline at all. It had the feel of a real, continuous world that you were just passing through.
The storyline was genuinely interesting. Some great little twists and turns that I really didn’t expect. It seemed to develop organically. It all made sense, all tied together well.
I really liked that there were no clearly “right” or “wrong” answers to the dilemmas posed in the game. You had choices, and some of them sounded nicer than others… But it wasn’t like a normal game where you can clearly tell which is the “good guy” answer, and which is the “bad guy” answer. They were all just answers. And they had consequences. Often consequences that really didn’t turn out the way you’d intended.
My only real complaint about the storyline or setting is that it all felt vaguely sexist…
I’m not talking about that misogynistic preacher back in Chapter I – he was obviously a villain and got his just desserts fairly quickly. And there were plenty of strong women throughout the game. I didn’t spend the entire game rescuing damsels in distress or anything like that. The women had some real depth of character, they weren’t just window-dressing.
But Geralt is a bit of a womanizer. You have the option of having sex with a couple dozen women in the game. Some of them require courtship, some of them just about leap into your bed as soon as you say hello. And then you collect a racy calling-card from each of your conquests. All of which feels just plain weird.
That’s not to say that there’s no romance in the game… You do have the option of pursuing a more substantial relationship with either Shani or Triss.
And it doesn’t seem like the women are being used or anything like that – they all seem quite satisfied with the encounter.
But it just seems weird to play a character like that. Weird, and vaguely wrong.
Beyond that, Geralt was a genuinely interesting protagonist. And they really did pull off the amnesia angle pretty well. I liked running into past acquaintances that I’d forgotten, and hearing about my old exploits. It really gave a feel for who Geralt was. Or, at least, what he’d been like before I got my hands on him. Because you have the opportunity to very literally define your identity in the game. One of the quests is to come to grips with who you are and how you fit into the world.
All things considered, an absolutely wonderful game.
I’m eager to play the sequel, and I’m dying to get my hands on some of the original books.