Description

The Witcher is a hub-based third-person ARPG. You travel through a bunch of small to medium-sized areas and kill monsters with swords and spells. You also talk to people and do (often generic) quests. Along the way you gain skills, learn to make new potions and upgrade your equipment a bit.

The Good

I used a texture mod which makes the game look quite decent, especially for its age. The world it is set in is a bit generic but still interesting because of the factions and various details. The strongest part is probably the handful of moral choices you have to make, especially because they're not 'easy' choices between an overly good and overly bad side.

The Bad

So yeah, everything else is bad.

• No fast travel. At least half of the game is just walking to places. Locations are absolutely riddled with invisible borders so travelling is a total pain.
• Ferry travel is the worst. Click the ferryman. Dialogue. Select 1. Dialogue. Confirm payment. Dialogue. Select 1. Cinematic. Loading screen. Cinematic. You have to go through these steps back and forth a dozen times, holy fucking shit.
• Constant backtracking. Even for this type of game it has an excessive amount of sending you back and forth. It should've been called The Backtracker.
• Boring combat. You can either spam an AOE fire spell (Igni) or use swords. The latter require you to time subsequent clicks to built combos. Both are completely uninteresting. Igni is the better option since it's 10 times faster and requires no tedious weapon/stance switching.
• Dreadful inventory system. You get far too many items for the space available and your stash is at the local inn that is often in an inconvenient location.
• Looting is really bad. It requires precise clicks on bodies that obscure each other. Worse still is that you always have to wait a few seconds for combat to end before you can loot. And this happens 100+ times...
• Annoying crafting. You can make potions/bombs/oils (weapon upgrades) which involves a whole bunch of items and a terrible menu that can only be accessed while meditating.
• "Gotta fuck em all". The game practically forces you to have sex with half the women you meet, even if you don't want to or think you're just having a conversation. And you get "rewarded" with cartoon porn. Ugh.
• Disjointed story. Most of the time i had no idea what was going on. It often made no sense too. I could tell people they were no longer a suspect before actually starting the investigation. Or i told Shani several times i wanted to be friends and she still acted as a partner.
• Static quest markers. They show where someone should be, not where they actually are. Depending on the time of day they may be somewhere else. When they're supposed to be there is sometimes vague.
• Poorly implemented quests. It's quite easy to miss the opportunity to complete quests. The worst example is the "teeth" quests. You have to get devourer teeth in Act 4 and keep them until Act 5, which has no devourers. If you don't you'll miss out on the best steel sword in the game.
• Drowners. The swamps are filled to the brim with these worthless bastards. Their loot is irrelevant, they only give 1 XP and they lock you in combat mode preventing you from looting bodies, gathering plants or entering places.

Conclusion

The Witcher is a bad game that is not worth your time. Not even with mods. You're better off downloading someone else's savegame and importing that into The Witcher 2.

There's something good in this game buried beneath all the crap, but I can't find it and it's just too much. After hours of struggling, I decided to give it up when it mercifully crashed to desktop.

Combat is not only extremely rough, but borderline broken. Fights consistently start instantly after a load screen (sometimes even before) and your character will have his sword sheathed and will take his sweet time getting ready while enemies are clobbering at him. Special abilities are triggered with right click, but for some reason it's completely unreliable. It's got a huge delay, sometimes it doesn't even register and some other times it doesn't even work! Stunned enemies can be one-hit killed while they are on the ground but, again, often your character will stand still near a fallen enemy doing nothing. And even if he does, the killing animation can be so unbearable slow and lengthy that other enemies can kill you in the meantime. There's a "pain" mechanic in which enemies can reduce your effectiveness, but they also stun you for several seconds and if you're fighting with two of them, they can easily stun-lock you to death.

Turning the difficulty down helps to ease all those faults, but at the same time, it makes the combat even duller.

Ostensibly an "Enhanced edition", the broken combat makes it look like an early beta.

The setting is generic as I get out, the voice acting and dialogues are wooden and haven't found any memorable character so far. Special mention to the deplorable treatment of woman. Oh, boy. The prologue features only one female character that of course is wearing a low cut top and of course it need saving and of course you end up having sex with. And the following chapters are only worse. You quickly realise that the players is supposed to fuck every female character with any dialogue and he gets creepy "sex stamps" as achievements every time he does it. Women are constantly being used as plot devices that need to be saved from being raped or in some cases, plot devices that have already been raped.

After many hours, I've still got no idea of what's the main story supposed to be. There are some glimpses of an interesting plot, but the game undermines the pacing at every step. For example, there's a time-of-day system in which some missions have to be completed at night or during the day which, while in theory is neat and helps to create a sense of place, in practice it means that you are forced to run from one corner of the map to the other to "meditate" on fireplaces to get the time to pass. An even more egregious example is the annoying old woman that randomly bars you from entering an important house so that you are forced to try again and again after you get the right dialogue that let you in.

But even missions that keep things moving are just glorified fetchquests. The hunt for information about a sword ping-pongs you trough multiple characters, every one of them telling you basically nothing and pointing you to the next. Completely pointless.

I just don't get it. I can sort of understand the rave reviews it got at the time, when the graphics and systems weren't so dated but I can't fathom how are current gamers still in love with this game. It's got to be pure nostalgia.

The Witcher is a janky-ass European PC game with a lot of problems, but I very much enjoyed it. The combat system is a little obtuse but serviceable once you get used to it. The voice work is pretty terrible, and the localization wavers between "not great" and "god awful." The majority of conversations sound like two characters having separate, tangentially-related conversations with other people off screen. It took me several years and a new video card to get the game to run well enough to make it through the Prologue without crashing, and once I got it working, I still had the occasional crash to desktop.

All that said, there is something very unique and refreshing about The Witcher. The story feels a bit cliche in parts, now that "dark, gritty fantasy" is the norm rather than the exception, but was probably a bit fresher 8 years ago when the game came out. Still, the story goes to interesting, unexpected places, and incorporates choice much more organically and with more interesting and far-reaching consequences than the modern BioWare and Telltale standards. The game is filled with interesting lore behind its creatures, and need to research and learn about different threats before fighting them (as thin as that system actually is, in reality) makes for some interesting quests and diversions.

The game is a very slow burn; Chapters 1 and 2 are very long and not particularly compelling on their own. Things eventually open up and spiral out into more interesting places, but Chapter 2 in particular I found to be quite a slog. And then Chapter 3 dumps you back into some of the same areas again and, ugh. The game could have used some streamlining.

All in all, you should probably just go play The Witcher 3, if you haven't gotten around to this one yet. Everyone seems to love it. I'm a completionist, though, and really wanted to play through the whole trilogy. If you feel the same, then The Witcher is a flawed gem. Get past the jank and the rough stuff and there is a lot to like.

QUICK EDIT TO ADD: This game is set after an entire book series. I've not read the novels, but I DO know it spoils the series' ending and possibly some other major plot points. The books aren't required reading.

I've seen a lot of people describe this as feeling dated. While that's true, I don't think that especially detracts from your enjoyment of the game. I often find RPGs sit behind the curve of modernity anyway, presumably because the developers are more focused on an array of quests, complex dialogue choices, skill trees and inventory management systems than devoting time to graphics in the way an FPS might. Depends what you care most about.

I sunk 80 hours into Skyrim and never completed it. Partly because there's TOO much to do (both in terms of grind-y quests and a massive map) and partly because the world just feels so bleak. I didn't have this problem with The Witcher. It's 5 chapters + an epilogue long, each chapter changing location with some crossover during 2 and 3. These occasionally drag, but the story's generally fast paced enough to keep you engaged and dark at times without being depressing.

It took around 45 hours to complete.

+5 hours to that if you wanna complete every "hunt X of monster Y and bring back Z body parts" (I began skipping some of these by chapter 3).

-5 if you aren't interesting in collecting the "romance" (sex) cards by banging every woman in sight after bribing them with gifts.

PROS:

• A wealth of well developed characters.
• Engaging plot and events that play out organically around you.
• Just enough additional reading material to fill in the world if that's your sort of thing, without so much you feel you're missing out on something vital should you skip over it.

CONS:

• Combat is boring to begin with and it can be frustrating during the rare moments you want Geralt to disengage and he refuses.
• An array of potions, blade oils and bombs you will never use. The only 3 I frequently needed were Cat (to see in the dark), Swallow (to speed up vitality recovery) and White Raffard's Decoction (to immediately restore vitality).
• No fast travel.

This is my second playtrough of the "The Witcher" saga, and even from the first game, which has been released nearly at the end of 2007, I can only say good things. I am a huge fan of this universe and a hardcore fan of the RPG games, so I am going to be very correct about this review.

The Witcher I has been released in 2007, but personally I think that the game was a way ahead of its time and it might even surpasses some of the titles released nowadays. I will begin by saying that the storyline is top notch and the character development depends of every player, as we already know that is the case with CD Projekt Red's games. The story I think that is complex, with a lot of plot twists, it's not boring and it helps us to understand and familiarise with Geralt of Rivia, the main protagonist, following some past events (probably from the books), in which he loses its memory and he doesn't know how he is, neither who are his friends. Actually the game follows his storyline, his journey in hunting a criminal organization named "The Salamandra", which stole the secrets of Kaer Morhen. Of course, Wild Hunt appears even from the first game, which adds a lot of context when you are playing the third one. I don't want to spoil it, but the story is complex and entangled, with a lot of schemes of power and foolish ambitions.

As for the gameplay, firstly I want to talk about the fighting mechanics, because I've heard a lot of people saying bad things about this game, only because of this aspect. I know, you can't find in this game the same mechanics as with the newly released titles, but it's not bad either and when you learn how to control it, then it even becomes enjoyable, because you have a lot of spectacular moves and styles. In addition to this, a strong trait of this game is the very evolved side of alchemy. Every type of monster that you are killing, has its own "animal parts" which can be collected and every component has its own alchemical ingredients, which are being used in potion making. This aspect I think that it's very complex and developed.

What I didn't like about this game, but mainly because I am a completionist and a looter, is the fact that the inventory is relatively small and you can't expand it whatsoever. Also, you have to be careful with the quests, especially the side quests, because some of them are not very explicit and you end up failing them, just because you probably missed something.

The Witcher I is a very good RPG game. Don't mind the graphics (which by the way, are not that bad), or the fighting mechanics. Try to play the game as it is and understand it, because it has a strong connection with the second installment and also with the "Wild Hunt". Also, the game might be hard and if you like to play it on a higher difficulty, as I did, you really need to consider alchemy, all the time.

Game begins in 1270, when Geralt of Rivia is found unconscious and amnesiac by his friends. Over time, we slowly learn that there are friends and enemies everywhere. The player's actions in the game will allow you to redefine your relationships with people and choose your path in the political intrigue that surrounds you. Since the combat system is automated, you only need to click on the enemy once with the mouse for Geralt to attack, but you need to click continuously and at the right time for him to continue. So you can also do combos. Also the block system is automatic. There are three fighting styles in total: strong, fast and group attack. We use them by choosing the most appropriate one according to the type of enemy. And we have five Witcher signs that unlock as you progress, each with a different function. Weapons and armor can be bought from the environment or from merchants.

Our character has a skill tree. When we level up, we need to meditate. For this we need a campfire, or you can squeeze a few bucks from an innkeeper or talk to some hospitable hosts and sleep in their houses. So we can distribute points. I should mention that Geralt is a master alchemist as much as he is with the sword. You can create various potions by meditating. Potions have a lasting effect. You can get the ingredients from the environment or from an alchemist with money if you don't want to deal with it. There are many different types of creatures in the game and we need to prepare Geralt for this. Drinking potions before each fight helps us survive. Especially if we are playing on high difficulty.

The game has a day and night cycle. The weather is also very variable. Sometimes there's torrential rain and sometimes there's a scorching sun. But unfortunately there is no open world and freedom in the game. There are 7 chapters and although there is a huge map throughout these chapters, there is no need to use it and Geralt is confined only to the areas where the main missions determined by the producers take place. And frankly, these areas are quite narrow and lack freedom. On top of that, we encounter a lot of loading screens in the game and this becomes annoying over time. The number of characters in the game is quite high. We have interaction with them. While the dialogs with the main characters are varied, there are simple conversations with NPCs. Sometimes, depending on the choice we make in the dialogs, the mission and story changes instantly or with consequences that we'll see later on.

I can't say that the AI is very good. Even though there are simple things like NPCs talking to themselves, sweeping in front of their houses, escaping under the roofs from the rain, etc., these things can annoy the player when they repeat themselves over and over again and you see and hear it over and over again. And sometimes they can become indifferent to what is happening around them. For example, in Vizima it's only dangerous at night. That's when things like monsters and bandits appear. When someone is being killed and eaten somewhere, you can see NPCs who see this and act as if nothing is happening. We also have a diary where these and everything else is recorded. In it, there are tutorials, information about characters, creatures, potions, maps and buildings, and much more. The game has a wide variety of camera angles depending on what the player wants. The interface is very simple. There are three difficulty levels and over 100 quests to do. I think the length of gameplay is quite sufficient.

The fact that the follower system was added just for the sake of it, and that sometimes missions put you in a situation that you are not prepared for at all, makes it difficult for players. Also, some of the missions are located far away from each other and you have to constantly travel and run around. Missions are gradual. Doing a mission does not mean you have finished it. Sometimes when you finish a side mission, another sub-mission will follow or it will be a different mission. There is a series of missions that I personally feel uncomfortable with, which are the contracts we get from the boards. There is really a logic error in these missions because when we get the contract, for example, there is a hunter who wants us to bring 10 wolf furs. In any other RPG we would simply go and kill the wolves and get the furs, but in Witcher it's not like that.

First you have to find those wolves. Wherever there are rare creatures, those quests appear in the contracts. In fact, access to the places where some creatures are located is even closed at the time we get the contract, which is a completely different nonsense. This also applies to other side quests. In order to finish some of the side quests you get, you need to progress in the main quest and open new locations. Anyway, you barely find the wolves, you slaughter them, and what do you realize, there's no fur inside? But why? Don't start questioning because the mission description states that you must first read a book about wolves. Once you learn about that animal or creature, then the contract can be dropped. This is the thing I hate the most because these books are not readily available and they are very expensive. When the contract reward is 50 oren and the book costs 100 oren, you start to go crazy. I don't understand the logic of taking a loss to make money. As you progress in the game, this gap gets wider and wider. No matter how hard you try, you cannot put money aside for a certain period of time because of the expenses.

This seems like something that is done to extend the gameplay time, but it is a factor that reduces the fluency. When you repeat these things over and over again, you can get really overwhelmed. When the negativities such as the excessive loading screen and lack of freedom, which I have already mentioned before, are added on top of it, it may cause players with little patience to get bored. In Witcher 1 one of them is played with dice and the other is fist fights in taverns. The graphics are really nice for the year of production. Geralt and other character modeling, details, lighting are well designed.

However, other NPCs are not given the same attention as the main characters. The same NPCs are used in different areas with different clothes and hairstyles. You may feel a little uncomfortable when this starts to catch your eye. Sound effects are of good quality. The voices are great, especially for the main characters. In-game music and atmosphere sounds are also very good. I don't want to go on too long, the game is like an open book. It tells and teaches itself to you more than enough. In short, it should definitely be bought and played in original. Those who are not sure can try piracy for a while, but then if you have the situation, it will be worth every penny. The game offers an average of close to 50 hours of content.

Woof, this game it is defintely... an experience. I have not had access to gaming equipment for most of my adult life, so I have missed out on several of these games first they were released. Of course the video game industry was vastly different back in 2007, so probably this game flourished in a time where hardcore roleplaying games were not the cultural behemoth they are today. And I can see the bright spots. The last ten hours of The Witcher are reaaaaally good and exciting.

But the rest... holy shit sometimes I felt like I was playing a Delivery Simulator: Go to point A, take somebody's request, go to point B to pick up that request, go back to point A, maybe go to point C and D for additional exp, quest completed, repeat.

I am partial against games divided by chapters, and for the life of me I cannot fully explain why. I guess I like my roleplaying games linear and without intermission? Chapters mess with my completionist urges? Honestly no idea. The point is this division by chapters probably has to do as well with my negative feelings towards the original Witcher.

The game system is also... very very rough. The equipment has little to no influence in the battles and the fighting feels so... clunky. The spells also feel like a waste of progression points when you honestly can just Aard your way out of most of this game, seriously.

On a special note: The voice acting is really good. Doug Cockle is specially memorable in his role. I am so happy to know that Geralt has the same voice actor for the whole trilogy.