RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Too often in western RPGs is ‘choice’ touted as a feature, either through customization of the main character or through the impact your decisions have on the game’s story.  Almost as often that latter choice turns out to be hollow, picking between saving the village or burning it down and dancing a jig on peasant corpses.  But sometimes you have a game that wields this correctly.  Enter The Witcher, in which your decisions, and the consequences thereof, are one of the game’s strongest aspects.  The rest, sadly, is just decent enough to stay out of the plot’s way.

Based on a series of novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher tells the story of one Geralt of Rivia, a legendary and easy-to-recognize witcher (chemically-enhanced monster hunters, in short) that’s done pretty much everything a guy like him can do.  After saving the princess of Temeria from a rather cruel curse, he is killed by a mob of peasants and buried.  Without explanation, he is found and picked up by his comrades from Kaer Morhen, an old witcher’s guild, and surprise surprise, he’s suffering from amnesia.  Before he has time to recover, a mob of bandits attack the school in search of the witchers’ gene manipulation formulas.

Not a very unique beginning, but it’s directed well and comes off as less cliche than one would think, with Geralt joining his fellow witchers in defending the fortress.  What follows is a calculated pursuit of the bandit organization, Salamandra, and Geralt is inexorably pulled into a looming powder keg of racial tensions, political machinations and confrontations with all his old friends and foes.  Although the plot stumbles badly in the first chapter – Geralt is whisked from Kaer Morhen to the outskirts of Temeria’s capital with little preamble – it picks up in a big way as the game gets its sea legs, with Geralt being drawn to one side or another between various factions.  It’s a strangely plausible and admirably mature take on the usual pulp fantasy rigamarole, at least in terms of the core plot.

What helps the choices work is that the repercussions of your choices aren’t immediately apparent.  Defeated in a war with humans years ago, elves and dwarves have formed a commando unit of sorts in the Scoia’tael, and Geralt encounters a squad of theirs early on.  Helping them results in an emboldened and freshly-armed Scoia’tael unit killing an important character much later, while killing them changes the results of an investigation you have to perform in the capital.  Geralt’s very identity is defined by the responses he gives, as he’s forced to explain (or not explain) why he sides with so-and-so or why he’s really after Salamandra.  The choices get better, and more complicated, as you go; characters will help, ignore or attack you based on your past actions, your reputation, and who you decided to trust.

With this in The Witcher‘s favor, I mentioned earlier that the rest of the package, on average, is just good enough not to harm the story.  Permanently, anyway.  To start with controls, the game plays in either a floating or over-the-shoulder third person perspective, with slightly different handling in each mode.  In either mode WASD and mouselook handle movement, though in the floating POV you can simply point and click to move, ala Baldur’s Gate.  Most important actions are done through point-and-click, be it talking to people, picking up items, using doors or entrances, and attacking enemies.  Geralt can only draw his weapon or use magic in dangerous locations, a condition indicated by an on-screen clock, and clicking on a hostile target will cause Geralt to draw the weapon he was last using.

It’s not entirely intuitive, but the game helpfully uses Kaer Morhen as a tutorial where a nearly-invincible Geralt gradually re-learns the basics of movement and combat.  Combat plays out sort of like a rock-paper-scissors Diablo, requiring the player to switch weapons, fighting styles and spells to deal with various foes; more agile opponents require quicker, less damaging strikes, while stronger ones require slower, weightier swings, and groups of weaker enemies are best dealt with in the group style.  A single click initiates an attack, and clicking at the right time – indicated by a flaming sword icon and orange trails in your swings – results in a combo attack.  Do it right and you can fell packs of enemies in seconds, do it wrong and you leave yourself open to counterattack.  Geralt will automatically dodge if he can, but double-tapping in a direction will cause him to pirouette, spin or flip away from a crowd of enemies to a more advantageous position.  Spacebar pauses, allowing you to switch weapons or adjust tactics as necessary.

Deepening the combat are talent and alchemy systems.  Talents are points Geralt acquires upon leveling up, which can be spent upgrading basic stats, individual sword styles, and witcher signs (magical spells, used by right-clicking in combat).  As there aren’t really opportunities or even a need to ‘grind’, one usually won’t get enough talents to boost everything, and thus there are a few variations to be experimented with on replays.  Geralt also can learn to extract alchemical ingredits from monsters and plants, using them in potions which give temporary but potent abilities; nightvision, boosted regeneration, improved reflexes, more damage for specific weapons, protection from toxins and other negative statuses, and so on.  The catch is that each potion is toxic to a varying degree, and drinking too many without either sleeping out the toxin or taking a potion to counteract it will result in injury, visual distortion, and even death.

Combat winds up looking really cool once you get into it, chaining combos and dispatching various creatures with apparent ease, but it’s not without a few persistent hang-ups.  Geralt doesn’t immediately attack unless he’s within range of the target, which can cause the player to click again, accidentally interrupting the strike before it begins.  Battle difficulty also spikes and plummets with little warning, as creatures like the plant-like echinops can easily smack Geralt around before he can get in range, while supposedly dangerous packs of assassins and undead beasties are simple to dispatch – and they respawn absurdly quick in certain areas.  The alchemy system isn’t quite so important on Easy and Normal difficulties, but it behooves a player to spend some time practicing with it, as the tutorial for it isn’t very helpful.  Furthermore, certain ingredients won’t be useable unless you’ve read a book describing the monster or plant in question, and books can be annoyingly pricey.

Hampering the non-combat gameplay are a wide variety of lesser issues, starting with the least annoying.  There is noticeable repetition in NPC idle dialog and behavior.  You’ll hear the same conversations about who’s sleeping with who, the same lines about how witchers should know their place, and hear the same city guards shout “HONOOOOOOOOOOR!” a few too many times.  In conversation, you’ll witness a lot of people make inexplicable movements and gestures; hardened detectives and scarred witchers hop in place, nobility and merchants make the exact same dismissive gestures and sudden, jerky swings of the arm, and so on.  The game’s oft-discussed ‘sex cards’, lewd but relatively tame depictions of women Geralt can sleep with over the course of the game, have no real purpose other than harmless, if confusing and often ill-timed, cheesecake – witness a witch offer herself to Geralt for no real reason, while a torch-and-pitchfork crowd of villagers waits outside.

Weakening the case for the game are spotty vocal work and confusing dialog, which seems to switch between typical fantasy vaguely-Medieval-English and modern slang without warning.  You’ll go from hearing a bitter, war-weary elf speak of his homeland in very flowery language and a slimy assassin barking “You dare challenge the Salamandra!” to main characters dropping f-bombs for no reason and bar patrons claiming “Your mama sucks dwarf c*ck.”  The transition is often jarring.  Worse is the overuse of certain canned responses, and this is most noticeable with Geralt himself.  It’s bad enough that he sounds like he’s trying too hard to be an emotionally distant badass – a lot like JC Denton from Deus Ex (which reminds me, go buy that if you haven’t already.  Like, right now) though he has rare moments of decent acting, largely when he’s allowed to loosen up with his friends – but it’s too obvious at times that the actor is saying lines completely out of context, and at different recording pitches.  Certain response phrases are also overused, for different characters and different purposes.

More egregious are some rather glaring scripting errors and quest loopholes, most apparent in the game’s second act (of seven, counting a prologue and epilogue).  In some cases you’ll have the option of asking characters questions you couldn’t possibly know to ask, especially if you deviate from certain primary objectives and speak to important people before you’re supposed to.  It’s possible to botch a questline entirely before you even start it; in one case this can lead to a false accusation of guilt without even really meaning to.  And it is only by the grace of certain friendly NPCs being unkillable that some ‘protect so-and-so’ missions are at all possible, though there are exceptions, both in terms of mortal NPCs and friendlies who are competent in battle.

And yet, despite all this, there is quality here; there are things you’re not going to find anywhere else.  Despite non-humans generally being stuck-up, elitist bastards and humans generally being racist scum, the groundwork for this mutual racism is believably set up.  Most of the cast is at least interesting, and sometimes genuinely compelling; the apparently sleazy fence Thaler or the jaded guard officer Vincent have their share of intrigue, and aren’t quite as cookie-cutter as they initially appear.  Geralt’s friends Zoltan the dwarf and Dandelion the bard are remarkably well acted and even likeable, as they goad Geralt into acting more like a person, and less a genetically-mutated killing machine.  Minigames such as boxing and drinking contests generally just get in the way, but an oddly addicting dice-based poker game more than makes up for it.

The visuals and music are easy to gloss over, but deserve praise nonetheless.  Although The Witcher requires a Crysis-grade rig to run with all the trimmings, it scales pretty well to more midrange machines, though there have been reports of choppiness during cutscenes.  With all the bells and whistles turned on, the game stops short of being truly gorgeous, but makes a good first impression and stays consistent in its quality throughout the game.  There are a bevy of nice little touches like flocks of animals milling about, folks seeking shelter under tents and overhangs during a storm, and street performers playing music, juggling, and doing acrobatics for a randomly-generated crowd.  The music isn’t quite as epic as the subject matter may require, but it boasts a variety of memorable, sometimes haunting tracks that repeat often, but never seem to overstay their welcome.

Although The Witcher does the things that RPGs in general usually get wrong – choices that matter, and a mature story that doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard to be mature – its biggest selling point may be the promise of future quality.  Computer games often get rushed out and require, but don’t receive, extensive patching to iron out their various issues.  Developer CD Projekt Red is undertaking a dramatic and unprecedented overhaul of The Witcher, to be released in May that reportedly fixes most, if not all, of the above issues.  In this light, The Witcher may yet be one of the best modern RPGs to date, and would easily be worth the price of entry.  As is, The Witcher eventually kicks its story into high gear, but it stumbles too many times on the way to recommend without a few serious warnings beforehand.