Game Watch: The Witcher
I bought The Witcher: Enhanced Edition about two days ago:
So far, the complaints I have heard about this game on a technical level seem largely repaired. The controls are fine, the graphics are good, the dialogue is working properly. But if there is one word I can say that sums up this game it is this: counter-intuitive. Holy shit, everything about this game has to be more complicated than necessary. Want to spend your points from levelling up? Instead of opening a character menu and assigning points, you have to find or make a campfire, meditate for a certain amount of hours, and select from three tiers of skill trees: new characters can select bronze level talents that can only be levelled up with bronze points, mid-level chars get silver talents, and high level chars get gold talents. Quests can award gold or award talent coins. Want to heal in fight? You can either eat food (no you can't, way too slow) or you can mix healing potions. What does this require? Learning to pick herbs of certain kinds and then mix them in a very specific fashion to create the desired potion, which again has to be done by a campfire only. Some bosses drop regeants that you can only see if you have certain skills, and those reagents are the entire reward for fighting them, and you have no idea whether you got the valuable piece or not. Want to fight in sword play? Well, you carry five weapons, two of which have three styles each which are only effective in certain situations. Strong style works only on slower guys or guys who are heavily armored or strong, quick style only works on fast guys and group style only works if there is actually a group. Quests are layered with an unnecessary amount of back and forth (I had to for one quest go across one of the maps, back and forth, about 9 or 10 times.) This gets really frustrating quickly, especially when enemies randomly spawn and you have to fight them or have your ankles bitten off.
The enhanced edition has the notable quality I guess of restoring the "SUPER HAWT NAUGHTY ADULT CONTENT" which basically means there are girls in the game you can romance and have sex with. And when I say romance, what I mean is if you do their quests, they will randomly offer themselves up to you. It's actually hilarious at how almost sociopathic the disconnect is, one minute you will be talking about why this town is haunted by evil fire dogs and the next second you are suddenly having sex with absolutely no real warning (the chick will stop talking about the quest and just say something sexual and you just say yes unless you are gay or are late for an appointment or something). Then you get a collectible "I banged you" card of them in a provocative pose which you can then refer back to when I guess you feel like remembering the barmaid you walked home. By the way, they only have one body type for basically every female in this game, and that is the "hot chick body type." So in gelling with the emotional detachment of sex in this game, you will enter a new area and just say to yourself, "hrm, which one do I try to bang by doing quests for first?"
The voice acting is all over the place. The dwarves in general are good and exactly what you'd expect of a dwarf. Most of the main characters are pretty good for what their personalities are. The main character, Geralt, is....I dunno. He really goes back and forth. He speaks really flatly, which works for some dialogue, but when he's trying to pick up a chick or make a joke or do anything involving emotional display he sounds like a serial killer faking it. Which is alternatively amusing and annoying/limiting depending on the conversation. Everything about it is reminiscent of Fable, but they say shit and cunt and fuck a lot. Some of the ancillary character sound just retarded, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the VA in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, which I also played through again recently.
Despite the annoyances of the system (and trust me, I have only scratched the surface, I haven't even mentioned the Bestiary and how you need to research creatures to do any quests which means buying books but wait, books cost 200 gold and I have 18 gold etc. etc.) I am enjoying this game. It's pretty, the combat looks cool, and the writing is occasionally surprisingly not bad. And the VO of the narrator is Lodz from Carnivale which helps. That said, this game has absolutely no replay value whatsoever. I cannot imagine redoing some of this shit again, and God forbid there is a power outage or I die a long time after saving, because I will probably shelf this, and this is not a game you can come back to in 6 months, I have to stop playing other games just to remember how to do everything in this one properly.
Oh, and the inventory system and weapon management sucks a bag of dicks.
Oh, and Braid was on sale this weekend for $5, so I bought that too, but haven't started.
EDIT:
This pretty much sums it up, but it's not quite this bad.
So far, the complaints I have heard about this game on a technical level seem largely repaired. The controls are fine, the graphics are good, the dialogue is working properly. But if there is one word I can say that sums up this game it is this: counter-intuitive. Holy shit, everything about this game has to be more complicated than necessary. Want to spend your points from levelling up? Instead of opening a character menu and assigning points, you have to find or make a campfire, meditate for a certain amount of hours, and select from three tiers of skill trees: new characters can select bronze level talents that can only be levelled up with bronze points, mid-level chars get silver talents, and high level chars get gold talents. Quests can award gold or award talent coins. Want to heal in fight? You can either eat food (no you can't, way too slow) or you can mix healing potions. What does this require? Learning to pick herbs of certain kinds and then mix them in a very specific fashion to create the desired potion, which again has to be done by a campfire only. Some bosses drop regeants that you can only see if you have certain skills, and those reagents are the entire reward for fighting them, and you have no idea whether you got the valuable piece or not. Want to fight in sword play? Well, you carry five weapons, two of which have three styles each which are only effective in certain situations. Strong style works only on slower guys or guys who are heavily armored or strong, quick style only works on fast guys and group style only works if there is actually a group. Quests are layered with an unnecessary amount of back and forth (I had to for one quest go across one of the maps, back and forth, about 9 or 10 times.) This gets really frustrating quickly, especially when enemies randomly spawn and you have to fight them or have your ankles bitten off.
The enhanced edition has the notable quality I guess of restoring the "SUPER HAWT NAUGHTY ADULT CONTENT" which basically means there are girls in the game you can romance and have sex with. And when I say romance, what I mean is if you do their quests, they will randomly offer themselves up to you. It's actually hilarious at how almost sociopathic the disconnect is, one minute you will be talking about why this town is haunted by evil fire dogs and the next second you are suddenly having sex with absolutely no real warning (the chick will stop talking about the quest and just say something sexual and you just say yes unless you are gay or are late for an appointment or something). Then you get a collectible "I banged you" card of them in a provocative pose which you can then refer back to when I guess you feel like remembering the barmaid you walked home. By the way, they only have one body type for basically every female in this game, and that is the "hot chick body type." So in gelling with the emotional detachment of sex in this game, you will enter a new area and just say to yourself, "hrm, which one do I try to bang by doing quests for first?"
The voice acting is all over the place. The dwarves in general are good and exactly what you'd expect of a dwarf. Most of the main characters are pretty good for what their personalities are. The main character, Geralt, is....I dunno. He really goes back and forth. He speaks really flatly, which works for some dialogue, but when he's trying to pick up a chick or make a joke or do anything involving emotional display he sounds like a serial killer faking it. Which is alternatively amusing and annoying/limiting depending on the conversation. Everything about it is reminiscent of Fable, but they say shit and cunt and fuck a lot. Some of the ancillary character sound just retarded, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the VA in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, which I also played through again recently.
Despite the annoyances of the system (and trust me, I have only scratched the surface, I haven't even mentioned the Bestiary and how you need to research creatures to do any quests which means buying books but wait, books cost 200 gold and I have 18 gold etc. etc.) I am enjoying this game. It's pretty, the combat looks cool, and the writing is occasionally surprisingly not bad. And the VO of the narrator is Lodz from Carnivale which helps. That said, this game has absolutely no replay value whatsoever. I cannot imagine redoing some of this shit again, and God forbid there is a power outage or I die a long time after saving, because I will probably shelf this, and this is not a game you can come back to in 6 months, I have to stop playing other games just to remember how to do everything in this one properly.
Oh, and the inventory system and weapon management sucks a bag of dicks.
Oh, and Braid was on sale this weekend for $5, so I bought that too, but haven't started.
EDIT:
This pretty much sums it up, but it's not quite this bad.
Comments
Not that this game is another KOTOR 2. But it's not bad.