The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? - Science Fiction Fantasy Chronicles: forums

zedlav · 2nd November 2007, 12:07 AM

I just came off a gaming binge, so excuse me if I sound too euphoric.

Somebody forgot to inform a previously unknown Polish developer that PC gaming is dead and has been for better half of the past decade. So they went ahead and created a game, a role-playing game at that, of a caliber arguably unmatched since Planescape: Torment or Vampire: Bloodlines, especially since it actually contains a story the player's actions can and will influence.

It came out last week, almost out of nowhere. The few videos that floated around before that suggested that it would be ambitious but rubbish, but, thankfully, that didn't happen. Quite the contrary.

You play as Geralt of Rivia, a renowned, but previously thought dead witcher (a monster hunter for hire), who awakes with from an unexplained 5 year absence and has amnesia. Cliched, I know, but don't let that dissuade you. It is based on a Polish fantasy series by a guy named Andrzej Sapkowski, but apparently, hasn't been published in English, except for one story.

Shortly afterwards, the fortress ruins used as a base by the remaining few witchers are assaulted by an unknown force and the witchers, after repelling the assault, head out to investigate who's behind that. That is where the tutorial ends and the story begins.

I beat the game yesterday and immediately started a second playthrough, that is how impressive it was. It isn't perfect, but it is pretty damn good, especially in the story and character interaction departments.

As I already said, the game's strengths are the player's impact on the world, the presentation of the world and the story and the interaction with the characters.

Unlike most RPGs, your options aren't limited to being a sword-wielding Mother Theresa or a puppy frying cannibal, usually, you have to decide on what seems to be the lesser of two evils and your choices matter. For example, choosing a certain solution for a dialog in Chapter 1 will fail a quest you haven't even got yet and wouldn't have been able to solve until Chapter 2. The world feeling alive is an often abused marketing catchphrase, but the world really feels alive this time. Although there still are no toilets anywhere. The characters you interact with talk like real people and most of the time, your responses make a lot of sense in the context.

Its main drawbacks are that it requires capable hardware to run (on 1280x1024 and high settings, my E6300 Core Duo with 2Gb of RAM and a 7600GT was practically unplayable), has way too frequent and lengthy loading times and allegedly doesn't work very well with Windows Vista. On the other hand, I did not encounter any broken quests, game stopping bugs or other issues common with games just after release. In fact, a patch was released on it's release date, fixing the bugs that were present. It's been polished very well. No pun intended or even present. The gambling mini game AI does still suck, though and even supposedly professional opponents will occasionally throw a winning hand away.

Character building is another issue that may not appeal to everyone. The way talent points are distributed, you get very little control over what skills Geralt will have at the end of the game. You can choose to prioritize some skills first and some later, but in the end, you will still have to use the same weapons (two handed swords) and fighting styles.

I should also mention that there's a kind of a series of mini-quests that deals with Geralt seducing or being seduced by various women he encounters. Some of them are important quest NPCs, others are kind of generic townsfolk. There's no sexually explicit content, though, as each conquest basically reveals reasonably tasteful pin-up style card with the woman in question. Those cards basically cover the difference between the censored and the uncensored versions. In the uncensored, EU version, the women are topless on the cards, while they've been covered up in the US version. There's also profanity in dialogs and townsfolk comments, which may be censored, I don't know.

Go out and buy the game now. I do not work for CDPROJEKT, but this game really struck me as something that needs all the support it can gets.

Edit: I should also mention it is sometimes difficult to find sidequests or even hand them in, as many of them are based on NPCs being in certain locations at certain times. I spent an ingame week trying to meet a NPC to hand in quest, because I forgot when he was hanging around. There's also little monster variety, character models are reused frequently and their animation in cutscenes and dialogs is annoying, although that's a very minor flaw.

Lenny · 2nd November 2007, 01:01 AM

Awww. You've got to feel slightly sorry for our poor American cousins.

I've got a couple of friends who got the game on release date, and I'm waiting for one of them to finish so I can borrow it and install it. I've watched quite a few of the trailers and dev diaries online, and I liked what I saw. I'm just itching to try out the customisation options.

Hopefully I'll be able to run it well. What are the recommended specs?

zedlav · 2nd November 2007, 01:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lenny

Hopefully I'll be able to run it well. What are the recommended specs?

Quite demanding.

From Wikipedia:

Minimum: WinXP SP2 / Vista, Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz or AMD Athlon 64 +2800, 1 GB RAM (WinXP) / 1536 MB (Vista), 128 MB Video RAM w/ DX9 Vertex Shader/ Pixel Shader 2.0 support (NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or ATI Radeon 9800 or better), 8.5 GB hard drive space.

Recommended:WinXP SP2 / Vista, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz or AMD X2 5600+, 2 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX or ATI Radeon X1950 PRO, 8.5 GB hard drive space.

j. d. worthington · 2nd November 2007, 05:23 AM

On the subject of games with moral (or ethical) choices -- I recall the game version of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" had to have such built in by Ellison's insistence; doesn't mean you'd necessarily win the game, but in order to have even a ghost of a chance, you had to make ethical choices (and not easy ones) in a particularly horrendous set of circumstances....

Rahl Windsong · 2nd November 2007, 04:17 PM

yes I really want to get this game but I can't find it for sale in Canada yet. A search on amazon.ca reveals that they must be slowly going out of business because they don't even list the title.

Rahl Windsong · 15th November 2007, 03:50 PM

All I can really say about The Witcher is go get it, if you are a fan of the CRPG you do not want to be missing this game. The only thing I don't like about it is for some reason they have an autosave feature that saves pretty much every time you zone to a new area making it take way longer then it should. Added to that is the ridiculously long load times, which they have promised will all be taken care of in the next patch.

Hiro Protagonist · 19th November 2007, 02:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zedlav

Quite demanding.

From Wikipedia:

Minimum: WinXP SP2 / Vista, Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz or AMD Athlon 64 +2800, 1 GB RAM (WinXP) / 1536 MB (Vista), 128 MB Video RAM w/ DX9 Vertex Shader/ Pixel Shader 2.0 support (NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or ATI Radeon 9800 or better), 8.5 GB hard drive space.

Recommended:WinXP SP2 / Vista, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz or AMD X2 5600+, 2 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX or ATI Radeon X1950 PRO, 8.5 GB hard drive space.

Wow that looks like a really demanding game.

Cayal · 19th November 2007, 10:59 AM

what is a cRPG?

Aleksei · 19th November 2007, 11:39 AM

It stands for Computer Role Playing Game. It's hardly ever used though, I think it's a pretty unnecessary to add the c. Perhaps it is because some people confused it with Rocket Propelled Granade?

zedlav · 20th November 2007, 09:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aleksei

It stands for Computer Role Playing Game. It's hardly ever used though, I think it's a pretty unnecessary to add the c. Perhaps it is because some people confused it with Rocket Propelled Granade?

Nah, because games like Final Fantasy and whatnot are called RPGs too for some reason and I think the difference is significant enough to warrant the use of one little letter.

Aleksei · 20th November 2007, 11:30 AM

That acronym doesn't make any sense at all in the context you are referring it to then, since you can play final fantasy on your computer as well. Perhaps you should just invent a new one that fits the Witcher better. :P

Lenny · 20th November 2007, 04:29 PM

PRPG!

Polish Role Playing Game.

There are JRPGs, so why not PRPGs?

Commonmind · 20th November 2007, 06:07 PM

lol

I'm still stuck in Khaer (spelling?), which is only about an hour into the game, if that. I'm definitely enjoying it, but I've got so many games on my plate at the moment that I had to put it on the bottom of the list. Just finished Assassin's Creed and Crysis, got Mass Effect on right now and I'm still trying to work my way through a few other PC titles.

And good thing I got my hands on a UK copy of "The Witcher."

Aleksei · 20th November 2007, 08:09 PM

Yeah, must suck to have all that censoring.

Commonmind · 20th November 2007, 09:02 PM

Yeah, the good ol' United States, Land of the Free, Home of Inconsistent Censoring.

Killing cops in GTA? That's fine and dandy.

Chopping off a man's genitalia BME Pain Olympics Style in Manhunt? Yep, call it a good time.

Playing a duo of maniacal criminals in Kane and Lynch? Sure, as long as it's incessantly brutal and mindless.

Putting a hole the size of a grapefruit in a man's skull in Soldier of Fortune II, you say? Yep, that's entertainment.

...wait, this game has boobs? No way, no how!

2nd November 2007, 12:07 AM	#1 (permalink)
zedlav Weighted Companion Cube Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Vatican City Posts: 38	The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? I just came off a gaming binge, so excuse me if I sound too euphoric. Somebody forgot to inform a previously unknown Polish developer that PC gaming is dead and has been for better half of the past decade. So they went ahead and created a game, a role-playing game at that, of a caliber arguably unmatched since Planescape: Torment or Vampire: Bloodlines, especially since it actually contains a story the player's actions can and will influence. It came out last week, almost out of nowhere. The few videos that floated around before that suggested that it would be ambitious but rubbish, but, thankfully, that didn't happen. Quite the contrary. You play as Geralt of Rivia, a renowned, but previously thought dead witcher (a monster hunter for hire), who awakes with from an unexplained 5 year absence and has amnesia. Cliched, I know, but don't let that dissuade you. It is based on a Polish fantasy series by a guy named Andrzej Sapkowski, but apparently, hasn't been published in English, except for one story. Shortly afterwards, the fortress ruins used as a base by the remaining few witchers are assaulted by an unknown force and the witchers, after repelling the assault, head out to investigate who's behind that. That is where the tutorial ends and the story begins. I beat the game yesterday and immediately started a second playthrough, that is how impressive it was. It isn't perfect, but it is pretty damn good, especially in the story and character interaction departments. As I already said, the game's strengths are the player's impact on the world, the presentation of the world and the story and the interaction with the characters. Unlike most RPGs, your options aren't limited to being a sword-wielding Mother Theresa or a puppy frying cannibal, usually, you have to decide on what seems to be the lesser of two evils and your choices matter. For example, choosing a certain solution for a dialog in Chapter 1 will fail a quest you haven't even got yet and wouldn't have been able to solve until Chapter 2. The world feeling alive is an often abused marketing catchphrase, but the world really feels alive this time. Although there still are no toilets anywhere. The characters you interact with talk like real people and most of the time, your responses make a lot of sense in the context. Its main drawbacks are that it requires capable hardware to run (on 1280x1024 and high settings, my E6300 Core Duo with 2Gb of RAM and a 7600GT was practically unplayable), has way too frequent and lengthy loading times and allegedly doesn't work very well with Windows Vista. On the other hand, I did not encounter any broken quests, game stopping bugs or other issues common with games just after release. In fact, a patch was released on it's release date, fixing the bugs that were present. It's been polished very well. No pun intended or even present. The gambling mini game AI does still suck, though and even supposedly professional opponents will occasionally throw a winning hand away. Character building is another issue that may not appeal to everyone. The way talent points are distributed, you get very little control over what skills Geralt will have at the end of the game. You can choose to prioritize some skills first and some later, but in the end, you will still have to use the same weapons (two handed swords) and fighting styles. I should also mention that there's a kind of a series of mini-quests that deals with Geralt seducing or being seduced by various women he encounters. Some of them are important quest NPCs, others are kind of generic townsfolk. There's no sexually explicit content, though, as each conquest basically reveals reasonably tasteful pin-up style card with the woman in question. Those cards basically cover the difference between the censored and the uncensored versions. In the uncensored, EU version, the women are topless on the cards, while they've been covered up in the US version. There's also profanity in dialogs and townsfolk comments, which may be censored, I don't know. Go out and buy the game now. I do not work for CDPROJEKT, but this game really struck me as something that needs all the support it can gets. Edit: I should also mention it is sometimes difficult to find sidequests or even hand them in, as many of them are based on NPCs being in certain locations at certain times. I spent an ingame week trying to meet a NPC to hand in quest, because I forgot when he was hanging around. There's also little monster variety, character models are reused frequently and their animation in cutscenes and dialogs is annoying, although that's a very minor flaw.

2nd November 2007, 01:01 AM	#2 (permalink)
Lenny Resident Untanned Guy Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Vatican City Posts: 1,921	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? Awww. You've got to feel slightly sorry for our poor American cousins. I've got a couple of friends who got the game on release date, and I'm waiting for one of them to finish so I can borrow it and install it. I've watched quite a few of the trailers and dev diaries online, and I liked what I saw. I'm just itching to try out the customisation options. Hopefully I'll be able to run it well. What are the recommended specs?

2nd November 2007, 05:23 AM	#4 (permalink)
j. d. worthington Moderator Join Date: May 2006 Location: Texas Posts: 8,378	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? On the subject of games with moral (or ethical) choices -- I recall the game version of Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" had to have such built in by Ellison's insistence; doesn't mean you'd necessarily win the game, but in order to have even a ghost of a chance, you had to make ethical choices (and not easy ones) in a particularly horrendous set of circumstances....

2nd November 2007, 04:17 PM	#5 (permalink)
Rahl Windsong Last of the Windsong Clan Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Canada Posts: 508	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? yes I really want to get this game but I can't find it for sale in Canada yet. A search on amazon.ca reveals that they must be slowly going out of business because they don't even list the title.

15th November 2007, 03:50 PM	#6 (permalink)
Rahl Windsong Last of the Windsong Clan Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Canada Posts: 508	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? All I can really say about The Witcher is go get it, if you are a fan of the CRPG you do not want to be missing this game. The only thing I don't like about it is for some reason they have an autosave feature that saves pretty much every time you zone to a new area making it take way longer then it should. Added to that is the ridiculously long load times, which they have promised will all be taken care of in the next patch.

19th November 2007, 10:59 AM	#8 (permalink)
Cayal The Immortal Prince Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Australia, Victoria Posts: 575	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? what is a cRPG?

19th November 2007, 11:39 AM	#9 (permalink)
Aleksei Magister Mundi sum Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Sweden Posts: 219	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? It stands for Computer Role Playing Game. It's hardly ever used though, I think it's a pretty unnecessary to add the c. Perhaps it is because some people confused it with Rocket Propelled Granade?

20th November 2007, 11:30 AM	#11 (permalink)
Aleksei Magister Mundi sum Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Sweden Posts: 219	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? That acronym doesn't make any sense at all in the context you are referring it to then, since you can play final fantasy on your computer as well. Perhaps you should just invent a new one that fits the Witcher better. :P

20th November 2007, 04:29 PM	#12 (permalink)
Lenny Resident Untanned Guy Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Vatican City Posts: 1,921	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? PRPG! Polish Role Playing Game. There are JRPGs, so why not PRPGs?

20th November 2007, 06:07 PM	#13 (permalink)
Commonmind Registered Lurker Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Florida Posts: 1,214	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? lol I'm still stuck in Khaer (spelling?), which is only about an hour into the game, if that. I'm definitely enjoying it, but I've got so many games on my plate at the moment that I had to put it on the bottom of the list. Just finished Assassin's Creed and Crysis, got Mass Effect on right now and I'm still trying to work my way through a few other PC titles. And good thing I got my hands on a UK copy of "The Witcher."

20th November 2007, 08:09 PM	#14 (permalink)
Aleksei Magister Mundi sum Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Sweden Posts: 219	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? Yeah, must suck to have all that censoring.

20th November 2007, 09:02 PM	#15 (permalink)
Commonmind Registered Lurker Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Florida Posts: 1,214	Re: The Witcher - a brand new (released 26/10) cRPG with actual moral choices? Yeah, the good ol' United States, Land of the Free, Home of Inconsistent Censoring. Killing cops in GTA? That's fine and dandy. Chopping off a man's genitalia BME Pain Olympics Style in Manhunt? Yep, call it a good time. Playing a duo of maniacal criminals in Kane and Lynch? Sure, as long as it's incessantly brutal and mindless. Putting a hole the size of a grapefruit in a man's skull in Soldier of Fortune II, you say? Yep, that's entertainment. ...wait, this game has boobs? No way, no how!

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