Email: Witcher 1 and 2

Master Malstrom,

You asked about the two Witcher games. I’ve played both extensively, and coming from a background of growing up with PC games, I feel that I could give you a decent opinion. The first Witcher is a fairly good action roleplaying game. The thing I like about it is there’s always plenty of stuff to explore and plenty of battles to dive into. Another thing that makes it fun is that it can be difficult, requiring you to either level up or search for ways to get the edge in battle. For instance, there are a lot of hunting missions where a certain potion or poison will really help in killing the monsters. However, the game never forces you to go out and find these things. It doesn’t say it in the “quest description” to go get a poison or whatever. Heck, most of the quests are like that, and simply plowing through a quest nets worse results than if you searched around and took your time. That’s something I really like, because it reminds me of RPGs I grew up with (I was playing Ultima and Fallout while my friends played Final Fantasy and Mario RPG). People who pay attention to details and take notes are going to excel at Witcher. There’s a ton of stuff you can miss if you don’t pay attention and explore the world. And no, I don’t just mean you’ll miss storyline tidbits. I’m talking about a ton of various items and weapons. The story doesn’t take itself too seriously but it is meant to be an “adult” game. I guess what I mean is that you don’t have to slog through much “storytelling” to get to the meat of the action. Witcher also has a great feeling of progression. In many of your posts, you’ve talked about how good games will make you feel weak at the beginning and then gradually allow you to turn into a badass and stomp enemies that scared you before. Witcher is like that. By the halfway point you feel a bit badass but by the end you have such an extensive list of potions, weapons, and skills that when you visit previous areas you just steamroll everything.

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The second game…eh, not so much. Playing it on PC is not ideal with a mouse (the first game was a point-and-click style RPG) because it has clearly been designed with a controller in mind. Also, it is a very Hollywood game with a great deal of cutscenes. One thing I really like about older RPGs (like Ultima, Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, etc) is that they use text to describe a lot of things, so it gets your imagination going. In Witcher 1 there is a LOT of text and a LOT of stuff to read (95% of it optional) and it was neat being able to read through it and get absorbed into the world. In Witcher 2, it seems like every single little thing, every single action, every single important plot point has to be conveyed through a cutscene. Another thing I hate in W2 is all of the T&A. I mentioned before that these games are “adult” because they include sexual content. In the first game, you slept with a woman, there was a quick dialog, you see a blurred cutscene and a lewd picture of her appears in your “collection”. Okay. Whatever. But in Witcher 2, all of the sex scenes are made so much more integral to the story (especially if you romance a certain person from the first game).What was meant to be a quick distraction and a guilty pleasure from the first game turned into a full-blown movie romance.

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Anyway, I hope that is a good summary of those two games. I would recommend the first game just because it’s fun and it encourages people who are accustomed to taking notes and it doesn’t hold your hand. The second one isn’t a bad game but it feels like it was aimed at console owners and the PC fans simply got to have the best graphics._____________________________________

Interesting in how you describe how different the two Witcher games are. I definitely got the ‘Hollywood trash’ vibe from watching the Witcher 2 trailer. My theory with the Witcher 2 pirating is that they’re pirating it because they don’t respect it, they don’t value it. Sure, everything gets pirated. However, the company didn’t say, “Don’t pirate our stuff or we can sue you,” but more like “Since you like the game, go buy it or we can sue you for three times as much as it is worth.” What if they don’t like the game? What if they feel the game insults their intelligence? I’ve noticed that gamers tend to reward really great games with sales.Even during the NES era, the best selling games are today what we call the classics. (Yes, I’m typing out that line to enrage the guy who keeps sending me VGCHARTZ data. There’s a reason why games like Blaster Master got a sequel [although on the Genesis] and that Mega Man 2 got a ton of sequels.)