THE WITCHER REVIEW Posted by with_teeth26 on Dec 29, 2009 19:53 (247 days ago) |
The RPG genre is one that has seen an incredible amount of change over the past ten or so years. The pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons games that started the decade have been long since replaced with action heavy button mashers like Oblivion and shooters with a few Role Playing elements thrown in like Mass Effect. While good games in their own right, these genre hybrids have nearly done away with traditional RPG’s because of their accessibility to those in search of a more casual experience. The Witcher is a hybrid of an Action/RPG hybrid and a more traditional RPG. It doesn’t have turn based combat or point and click party-based gameplay, but it isn’t a button masher. It fits somewhere in the middle, and is more of an RPG than most games with the RPG title released today.
At a glance, The Witcher seems like a very generic, albeit poorly translated fantasy game. The further into the game you get the more you realize this is not true in the least; the world you explore in The Witcher is more of a allegorical Medieval fantasy world which has the exact same problems as our modern day society; racism, crime, poverty and substance abuse are just a few of the rather serious topics dealt with in this game. While the story in The Witcher is complex, the world it takes place is even more so and just wandering around observing the everyday lives of the inhabitants of the game gives you the feeling that this is a very difficult world to live in.
 This world would be almost perfectly crafted if it weren’t for the lack of different character models. There is a single character model for every character type in the game; one for old ladies, one for old men, one for peasant women, one for peasant men, etc. In the more densely populated areas of the game it is not uncommon to see 3 or 4 of the same character models wandering around at the same time. While this doesn’t really do much to detract from the overall excellent quality of the game, the repetitious use of these NPC models is a bit jarring at times, and does serve to lessen the immersion.
Gameplay in The Witcher is broken down into a few parts; dialogue/conversations, combat and exploration/looting/experimentation. Unfortunately the dialogue is another area in which the Original version of The Witcher suffers; while the voice acting and variety of choices is generally pretty good, the writing suffers severely from translational issues, grammatical and logical errors occur often, and the dialogue is often incredibly blunt and crude, sometimes even using modern language which certainly wasn’t around at the time the Witcher takes place in. Once you get used to the dialogue in The Witcher it is fine, and often enjoyable, although much of the dialogue seems rather out of place.
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Jan 8, 2010 12:34:22 (238 days ago)
