Sometimes the question comes into the geek mind: What may you expect from your favorite genre on the actual level of technology? Then a game comes and by overdoing the expectations it pushes this “actual level of technology” into your face. My favorite genre is CRPG, and in their times I considered these games amazing (not going back to the ancient times of gaming): Baldur’s Gate (1998), Arcanum (2001), Morrowind (2002), Arx Fatalis (2003), Fable (2004), a Gothic 3 (2006), Fallout 3 (2008), and now The Witcher 2.
In the end of the 90s, Baldur’s Gate showed us what quality means in the CRPG genre. It has predecessors and successors alike, bot for its complex story and excellent playability made it one of the most popular, and later, one of the most remembered games. The second one on the list, Arcanum was not just only freeing the term of “walkable area”, but it offered a flexible development system and can be proud of the most complex dialog system to date. Unfortunately, it was full of bugs.
With its huge world Morrowind too was ranked among the free roam role-playing games (like all The Elder Scrolls series). Its graphics (in its time), its system and story served high quality game experience. In spite of this the unlit world of Arx Fatalis brought the style of dungeon crawling back, but in the same time it showed such a movement-based spellcasting system that didn’t just made us forget the narrowness of caves and tunnels, but it seems as if the experimenter mood behind the idea would be missing from newer games.
Fable. We can say Fable contained everything that a CRPG must have regarding social opportunities, and that made it the most stylish game on the world. The next one, Gothic 3 showed an exceptional combat system. For example, I was unable to melee effectively, while my kick boxer friend could easily kill even three foes in the same fight, irrespectively of their level. It was because with arches and range estimation in archery, and quick dodges, step-ins and precise strikes the combat system of Gothic 3 stood relatively close to simulating reality. Of course, if you need a reality simulator combat system, now you can have Mount&Blade (2008), but Gothic 3 was counted as a unique game.
Fallout 3was following the great ancestors more or less, and it tried to combine their best characteristics in itself. Besides its time tested and flexible development system it offered an enormous area to roam about. It ensured great freedom in both completing tasks and making social decisions. Of course, it didn’t miss style, what’s more, its brooding dark atmosphere and morbid humor made it one of the most stylish CRPGs of all the time. Oh, yes, it failed in the area of simulating real combat, but who the hell cares if it was able to enchant even those players who didn’t find enough craft in any CRPG to take a liking of the genre.
Although predecessors raised the bar high, The Witcher 2 jumped over it easily. It’s not a free roam game, but you can walk distances big enough, so you don’t really feel the lack of free roaming. I really hate to glorify this, but graphically the game is really a beautiful dream, even with the lowest settings. Besides, for three years (since Fallout 3) it is the first game that makes me read almost every piece of text in it, and this shows how elaborated its world is, how interesting the stories are, and the curiosity of “What will happen next?”, which should be raised in the player’s soul by every good game.
And your every decision influences what happens next. I’ve read it among the comments of a video that someone saw a character dead only, so he couldn’t talk to him. In the beginning of Chapter 2 I was already curious about what would happen if I chose Roche over Iorveth. I guess it is a game I will replay — and this a big thing considering it is only third in the row.
The combat system… well, it should be enough that its realism partly depends on the difficulty settings of the game. On normal difficulty you already have to pay extra attention to enemies with shield or falchion, because they can make bad surprises — I didn’t set this higher, thanks, the light bladeswings of easy difficulty are more than enough for me. Even on easy difficulty you can experience some tight situations, and at least the story goes on. I must remark here that the dear developers drew the long bow with that “escape from the dragon” scene in the Prelude. It took me twenty-eight reload on normal to get nothing, then eleven reload on easy to get one good run. In cases like this (e.g.: arm wrestling) xbox controller gets an advantage over mouse+keyboard, and it shows that some fine tuning is already needed. Fortunately, everything else is for compensating this fault.
Regarding social discourses don’t forget the first part of the series. I think about the sterility feature of the main hero, which doesn’t mean impotency, so he plough everyone, everywhere, anytime, as long as we talk about fine cut women bodies and beautiful faces. Don’t be ashamed to tell this, because even if this line was put into the shade a little, there are enough opportunities for some uncensored soft porn — because cards were gone and there are cutscenes instead. Its not children friendly, but if you expect less, than you doesn’t knoe the world of The Witcher.
And if you don’t know it, I summarize it shortly: The world created by Andrzej Sapkowski differs from most of the fantasy settings of games, because it is just so dirty, smelly and obscene as the Middle Ages on Earth might be. In the first episode people swore even on the street, you could be on the booze as hardly as you wanted, and racism was a fashion. Well, these didn’t change too much in the second episode — being the same world —, but as I observed, there is no booze and dwarves has the most loosened tongue. For example a favorite battle cry is “A troll fuck you up the arse!” (sic!). I cannot leave it out: Prince Stennis is mostly mentioned webwide as “Prince Penis”, a nickname of dwarven origin. To all who is whining about this: swearing is not for the sake of swearing itself. Most of the time it is stylish, and it’s a characteristic of the dwarven race.
So, monsters are ugly, dwarves are swearing, elves are rebelling, sorceresses are pretty and dangerous, alchemy offers stunning possibilities, the land is beautiful, and Geralt de Rivia has a good chance of being the coolest game character in the world.
The game gets no maximum only because of the above mentioned controller-related troubles and some rare bugs (it happened that the next scene of a battle never came, but thanks to frequent autosave it caused no problem) — and I have to mention another thing: It is too short. Lots of players are criticizing the endgame that seems unfinished, but the main story (Assassins of Kings) ended, so only the background story of the main character starts to look like a soap opera.
—Garcius—
Title: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Developer: CD Project RED
Publisher: gog.com, Namco Bandai, Atari, stb.
Homepage: http://en.thewitcher.com/
Style: CRPG
What I liked:
everything
What I didn’t like:
controller related success in some tasks
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