Post mortem: The Witcher (Enhanced Edition Director’s Cut)

A month and a half ago I asked for assistance in choosing my next game, and The Witcher came away with thee most votes.  Forty-five hours of game play later I’m happy to report that you guys were dead right to select it.  I also feel a bit guilty that all I paid was $5 – gotta love Steam sales.

I go into a fair amount of detail in this article, and although it is spoiler free, I have included a synopsis in case you only want an overview of my impressions without a more detailed description of the important facets of the title.

Synopsis

The Witcher is by no means a technically perfect game, however through the strength of its storytelling it has propelled itself to a spot amongst my favourite role playing games of all time, surpassing similar titles like Bioware’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect and longtime favourites such as Final Fantasy VII.  The game, at least on a 32-bit machine, is prone to crashes and periodic graphical glitches, and as a result a great deal of diligence is required to prevent loss of progress.  The combat system, while unique, is extremely easy to break and there are unexpected and harsh difficulty spikes peppered throughout the experience.  The game’s pacing is more akin to a work of fiction than an action RPG, and yet once you embrace that fact is is utterly majestic.  In all, The Witcher is a flawed game that overcomes its weaknesses by immersing the player deep into a complex world that contains an expertly crafted story filled with tough decisions and uncertain outcomes.  This is an RPG for mature adults.

Technical issues

I’ll start with the bad news first.  Allegedly a buggy mess before the Enhanced Edition came along, The Witcher still contains numerous serious technical problems three years after its initial release.

While I didn’t see any crashes until Chapter Three, I experienced at least one per night from that point forward, with the sole exception of my final push through to the end of the game.  After an hour or two of play, the game just seems to give up the ghost, crashing to the desktop and losing any unsaved progress.  If the crash occurs while saving (which is more common than a random crash) then the file that you were trying to save over top of is destroyed.  Once I realized the severity of these crashes I started a rotation of three saves, and backed up my progress frequently.  (Turning off autosaves helps a bit.)

The other prevalent issue is that from time to time the graphics engine seems to just melt down, and starts smudging the textures on new NPCs as they enter the screen.  This (and an annoying fuzzing of the cut scenes) can be mitigated by turning one of the lighting settings to its lowest value, but it still occurs from time to time.

Presentation

Graphically, The Witcher is a gorgeous game.  On my mid-range PC I was able to crank all of the settings to their maximum values and play without any sort of stuttering or lag, and boy was it worth it.

The landscapes in particular are phenomenal, and it is obvious that a lot of attention has gone into making the environs as believable and natural as possible.  The city of Vizima is unrelentingly gloomy, a medieval hellhole filled with peasants, soldiers, merchants, thugs, and beggars.  Murky Waters, on the other hand, is a quaint little fishing village nestled in the hills between a grassy meadow and a lakeside forest.

The populace in all of the centres feel like they belong, and each person seemingly has their own set of actions that they take during a given day/night cycle which means that the game world feels more realistic than most.  I was particularly bemused the first time the rain started to fall:  the NPCs started moaning about the weather and moved to take shelter from the rain; it was a great touch.

One thing that the Director’s Cut version of The Witcher brings to the table is full frontal nudity – all of which is female, as far as I can tell.  Apparently the European versions of the title always had this content, but North American audiences were deemed too prudish for it.  Naked bodies do not feel like they were thrown in arbitrarily, and aside from a pair of overly-bouncy breasts on a dryad and a few panty-filled cut scenes it all seems artfully done.  Interestingly, a few types of monsters are naked, and they are all the more terrifying for it.

Backing up the lavish artwork is a quality soundtrack worthy of any pure fantasy title.  The music changes as you transition through different environments, and again whenever you enter battle.  I’m not a huge orchestral critic, but The Witcher certainly sounds good to my untrained ears.

Combat

Combat in The Witcher is more akin to a rhythm action game than a typical RPG or even an action RPG.  You have two modes of damaging enemies at your disposal:  hand to hand with swords, or by utilizing five different magic spells.  Your swords will be used in almost every fight, while spells are more optional.

When you encounter an enemy you have to select between your regular sword (used to hurt human targets) and your silver sword (used to damage monsters) and then pick a stance: strong, fast, or group.  If you pick the wrong blade then you will inflict sub-optimal damage, while if you select the wrong stance you will often be unable to hit your opponent unless you first stagger it.  You click the left mouse button to initiate a series of attacks, and then wait for the mouse pointer to light up, at which point you must click again to continue the combo and deal more damage.  Click too soon and you’re left exposed, click too late and the combo chain has to be restarted.  The more skill points that you have invested in a particular sword skill, the longer its associated chain can be.

When you’re not chaining together combos, you can click the right mouse button to unleash your active magic spell.  While there are technically five available, I only ever cast two:  a knock down effect and a ring of fire.  The fire spell (Igni) is extremely broken at high levels, at fact that I found out when my decision to specialize as a magic user paid off in unexpected ways.  Through the last two chapters of the game my main source of damage was Igni, and during the final sprint to the end I was able to spam the spell to kill enemies without having to fear suffering damage myself.

Although a little strange to get the hang of and ultimately prone to abuse, The Witcher’s combat system flows well through the middle of the game.  It is neither too technical nor too twitch-based – it strikes a great balance and allows a player to focus on the true strength of the game:  the plot.

Storytelling

Thw Witcher is based on a series of books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, and it shows.  The game thrusts you into the world with almost no back story, and seems to expect you to know instinctively what is going on and how to react.

Counter-intuitively, the main character is an amnesic but he is also extremely well defined in terms of what his possible reactions are to given situations.  You play as Geralt of Rivia, a witcher (monster hunter), and the game starts when you arrive at an enclave with your brethren, freshly back from the dead.  Expecting to be able to fully define exactly who my amnesic hero was I was initially frustrated with how the game pigeon-holed him down certain paths.  For example, while you could chose to help townspeople by slaying a monster, you could not chose to do the deed for free – you always were forced to demand money for the act.   Thankfully, once you learn a bit more about the world that Geralt inhabits, it all starts to make sense and everything flows together naturally.

The story itself starts off a little rough, with some of the dialogue (especially Geralt’s) feeling recycled and dry, however it finds its legs near the middle of Chapter Two and becomes extremely engrossing.  Although discussions between characters are sometimes less authentic than they should be, the over-arching plot is strong enough to pull the game through its rough patches.   This is a story of bold strokes:  political intrigue, betrayal, the fight for justice, and grand schemes.  It is also a story filled with uniquely human vignettes focused on themes like despair, love, hope, and hardship.

One thing that is important to understand when approaching The Witcher is that it is written more like a book than an action game.  When you start a chapter you are presented with an almost overwhelming number of plot points to follow, and each thread can take quite a bit of effort to unravel.  While you are able to pursue each lead at your own pace, there are advantages to figuring out a logical ordering of the quests.  As a chapter winds down the story will reach a peak before flowing into the following chapter, and starting the cycle anew.

The Witcher’s plot does not feel derivative in any way, and that’s saying something for a fantasy tale, because most stories in this genre – video game or novel – feel unoriginal.  If you can tough out the dense periods of the plot, the end result will be all the reward that you need.

Player choice

Layered over top of the fantastic story is an incredible system of player autonomy that allows an individual gamer to chart a unique course through The Witcher without feeling herded along a predetermined course.  Dragon Age, despite doing an excellent job at bestowing an illusion of choice, seems ham-fisted by comparison.

The Witcher does a couple of things to set itself apart from other choice-based RPGs:  it completely forgoes the high-minded concepts of good and evil, and it plays out the repercussions of a choice hours after the decision is made, not immediately.

Most games that offer the ability to choose a path do so by using a binary moral compass system.  Player decisions are assigned a weight which is applied to a numeric scale, and a character’s position on a scale determines how NPCs in the environment react to him.  These systems strke me as nonsensical:  why should an NPC that my character has never met treat him differently because he punched someone in the face a few towns back?

The Witcher focuses on player-NPC and player-faction interactions, and the decisions that you make have meaningful results that are directly attributable to those actions.  For example, one of the chapters consists of a murder investigation and the player must interrogate various suspects.  How you choose to treat the individuals only impacts your relationship with those individuals, however it does so in a much more dramatic fashion than gaining +10 evil points.

The other major design decision that lends weight to The Witcher’s player choice system is the pacing of the consequences.  Bioware games are particularly bad at showing you how a choice unfolds right away, leading to multitudes of players trying out all of the possible options before choosing the result that they like best.  The Witcher is different:  when you choose a dialogue path (or choose to take on a quest, or choose to kill an NPC) it is almost never immediately apparent what the long term implications of your decision will be.  Some of my early choices in my play through only bore fruit dozens of hours later.

This delayed reward (or punishment) is extremely powerful, and made the game feel more like a world, and less like a toy.

Conclusion

The Witcher is an outstanding role playing game that I wish I had picked up sooner.  Despite technical flaws that were never fully patched away, the game’s story puts you through an incredible journey and will leave you dying for more. The Witcher is a staggeringly good game; one of the best I have ever played.

The Witcher 2, due out next year, is suddenly one of my most anticipated titles of 2011.