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I remember some of my earliest PC game purchases with great fondness. Games weren’t cheap back then, even before adjusting for inflation, and after a slightly guilty purchase I would sit on the bus with a great sense of anticipation. Inevitably I would give in, bring the box out of my bag and start unravelling the contents on the bus seat. The smell of freshly printed manuals would greet me as a reverently plucked each extra goody out of the box. The game itself would just be on a bunch (often tens) of floppies, but already on the journey home I could start savouring extra materials like historic lore guides or imaginary ships magazines.
The move to plastic DVD cases for games made sense from a packaging and costs perspective, but it heralded the end of thick manuals and cloth maps. “Your game should be well designed enough to enjoy without a thick manual!” I can hear market experts proclaiming. They might have a point, but I’ve always felt most PC games have been lacking ever since.
It seems I’m not alone. Polish publisher CDProjekt understands PC gamers. They have always set out to add value to the games they published in Eastern Europe - through excellent and thorough localisations to providing decent game materials. In 2002 they went a step further and created a development studio (CDProjekt RED) to make the kind of games they understood PC gamers wanted. That game was The Witcher, which four years ago brilliantly brought alive the universe of Polish author Sapkowski in a dark and gritty RPG that broke straight into ‘must-have’ lists previously the domain of Bioware or Bethesda Softworks.
I don’t have to ride the bus home from town anymore, but in May 2011 a package arrived that for the first time since, brought about similar levels of anticipation. Like then, I couldn’t quite wait either, so I brought the parcel to work, and during breaks slowly unravelled it. It was, of course, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
Printing inks have moved on since those days, so I wasn’t quite assaulted by the array of solvents like I used to be, but the box contents - even of the standard, relatively cheap, version that I bought - are impressive. The game, on two DVDs and a manual, naturally. And a soundtrack CD, special features DVD, a map (paper, but at least that’s more readable than cloth!), two foldable card figurines, a game guide, and just like RPGs of old, a pointless coin trinket. Not bad, although I question why they included a game guide - a history or lore book would have been much more welcome especially as the setting (and events of the previous game) might be unfamiliar to many. I couldn’t wait to get home to try it.
The Witcher 2 begins only a month after the conclusion of the previous game, which makes the starting scene of Geralt, our hero, languishing in a prison all the more surprising. Thankfully this is all explained rapidly, with events in that month played out by the player as Geralt recounts his experiences. It’s a tactic that is also used in a few other places through the game, sometimes involving the control of other characters. It works well enough but isn’t much to my personal liking. Player choices in the previous game (who’s saves can be imported) have a noticeable, though relatively minor and non-influencing, effect storywise, and items are carried over which can provide a little starting boost - though they are quickly outdated. Choices in Geralt’s recounting however have considerably larger effects, both immediately and in the longer term. This again sets the tone for the rest of the game, making choice-consequence one of the defining features of The Witcher series. Choices are more obvious in the sequel, and tend to be a clear either/or. Thankfully there is less of the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ which the original was guilty of - not in pre-determined outcomes but that it rather overplayed the negative connotations of your particular choice. The consequences in the sequel are less damning and rather more predictable making it less of an exercise in blind trial and error, although there is the rare circling back round to a pre-determined outcome, which I guess is pretty necessary when you’re trying to tell a story.
And the story is worth telling. In the original, Geralt started the game suffering from amnesia, this was then hardly addressed, leaving one to question if it was just a convenient gameplay mechanic. The Witcher 2 proves that wasn’t the case, with a gradual exposition of the events prior to the original game and efforts to help Geralt restore his memory. It’s a shame then, that this interesting story is presented as more of a side show to the political events that dominate most of the main game, and in fact as welcome as they are, for most of the game the expositions don’t really seem connected to the gameplay or what Geralt is doing, appearing more like rewards for finishing a chapter. Not that this political story isn’t also interesting - it is, but it doesn’t have the same draw as the stories surrounding Geralt and the other characters close to him. It may also be a little confusing coming into the game fresh - many characters and events are mentioned in passing without explaining their significance to the player. Some of these can be picked up from the first game, some from Sapkowski’s books (though few are translated into English). It’s not vital, but the sense of missing something is slightly annoying, and makes the case for the inclusion of more lore (even a glossary of characters) in book form rather than the game guide. The journal system might have been a place to correct this, but although excellent again, and rather humorous, it doesn’t contain quite as much historical or character information as it needs to to bring players up to speed on events and people mentioned in the game. Despite this, the game’s setting is as intriguing as ever, although the first game’s references to ancient real world myths (the fisher king for example) have been updated with more modern references which go just a bit too far - it’s fine to include the odd easter egg for players about contemporary games like Assassins Creed as long as characters in the game don’t react to it, but when two main characters have a discussion about the events in The Lord of the Rings it does jar the immersion somewhat.
Actually playing out the main quest is more interesting than before - there is far less progression via just running around and talking to people, and more genuinely interesting gameplay scenarios that require you to make use of Geralt’s various abilities to progress - for example tracking trails of blood to find someone who is injured - you can do it visually, although it gets very hard especially when the trail crosses a stream or is confused by other blood trails, or you can drink a potion that highlights such marks and makes the job in dense undergrowth much easier. Outside the main quest lines the side quests are also much improved from the original and no longer are monster contracts a simple matter of going somewhere and killing x monsters. They now each require gathering of information - to find out about a weakness perhaps, or to investigate a deeper route cause, and it is now much more work, and more satisfying, to complete them.
While Geralt’s story choices and consequences require less trial and error than before, the same can’t be said for combat. This has been overhauled for the sequel and now consists of a more action-like hack as often as you like with different types of attacks - light or strong. Weapon choice (steel or silver blades, or other weapons which are now useful at last) is important, as are the correct preparations for example oils or potions. This isn’t a bad thing at all when it comes to using your intelligence to prepare or inform tactics for a fight - information can often be discovered to help, but there are unfortunately many moments that will require a several reloads. It’s not just that the combat is tough, especially at the start of the game, but one of the changes for the sequel is that potions can now only be drunk while meditating, which you can only do in a non-combat situation. What tends to happen is that you are watching some series of cutscenes or dialogues, and then at the end of them you have a tough combat situation. You then discover that you need a potion or three to give you a decent chance of surviving the fight, but you didn’t get a chance to quaff one. So you have to reload and get to a point, or even change your conversation options to allow you to get to a point where you can then meditate and drink the right potions for the up-coming fight.
Worse is yet to come however. QTEs, or quick time events, abound in The Witcher 2. Fistfights, boss scenes and various mechanics may require you to watch for instructions appearing on screen and hit buttons or keys quickly in response, sometimes mashing them. On one hand it’s a way of getting the player a little more involved in what’s going on rather than having a magical one-click awesome button, but on the other hand it gets amazingly boring when you have to reload the same bit time after time because you don’t quite understand what the game is asking or it’s not seeming to register your right click properly in the right time frame. Unless you (by trial and error) memorise the up-coming instructions it’s also rather easy to focus on them rather than whatever is happening in the background.
That’s a pity, because the background is stunning - the new game engine created for The Witcher 2 is probably on par with any other PC game at the moment, again straining DX9 to the limits and leading you to question why we need later technologies. HDR lighting, god-rays, shadows, amazing textures and techniques that make stone structures look like they’re using tessellation, an SSAO implementation that actually works, great weather and spell effects... the list goes on. If there’s some payback for using DX9 it’s possibly in the very high CPU requirements of the game as all these effects seem to require hefty amounts of calculations to be performed outside the GPU. It’s proven in practise as well - a powerful CPU paired with an old GPU performs far better in the game than a less powerful CPU and modern GPU. With a mildly overclocked i7 950, 6gb RAM and a HD4870 512mb the game suggests the ‘high’ preset, which runs fine and looks amazing.
This engine is also put to work with the very lush gameworld. Rather than striding on top of an environment like many games seem to, you feel completely enveloped in The Witcher 2 - buildings tower around you with a proper sense of scale, and forests stretch upwards in dense and detailed canopies, the thickness properly making initial exploration bewildering. In fact these are the best forests I’ve seen in any game. Game areas are also far larger than the original, although there are fewer of them to go with the fewer chapters.
There’s little to complain about in the sound department either, with suitably meaty effects and a cinematic soundtrack, as well great voice acting with far more variation and quality than the original game. However in becoming so cinematic the soundtrack has lost quite a bit of its individual character, and is inferior in my opinion as a result.
Pacing-wise, the sequel has moments where you simply don’t want to put the game down, but overall the pacing isn’t as exquisite as the first game, and big sequences can have you stopping out of frustration or boredom. It’s not as long a game either, but branching caused by choices is so much more significant that replays should be factored into total game time.
At the end of the day, The Witcher 2 is a quality game that really shows Bioware et al how RPGs can be designed to appeal to today’s market as well that that of yesteryear. In the whole it has significantly improved over its predecessor in gameplay and visually, however not every new introduction to the game is fully successful and it doesn’t quite have the same magical touch as the first game.
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Originally Posted by Steven W
