A Farewell to Packrats
Given how much of your inventory ends up being devoted to storing potions, ingredients, and alcohol, this is as good a place as any to discuss what else can go into your inventory. The short list includes scrolls and books (you can sell or drop these after reading); various pieces of food and weaker alcohols (you can eat/drink/get drunk, sell, or sometimes give to hungry NPCs); jewelry, clothing, flowers, and gems (sell for money, or sometimes use as part of a quest); and a few other miscellaneous odds and ends. Outside of items that may or may not be used in a quest at some point — anything used in a quest can easily be acquired later — your inventory basically ends up being used to store items that you might sell for money.
 Not a lot of room, until you realize most stuff is junk you don't need |
You can't carry more than a few weapons at one time, and those that you can carry only fit in certain slots. During the course of a game, you will only wear three different pieces of armor and use perhaps half a dozen swords. For the most part, your inventory ends up being devoted to alchemy. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, provided you can overcome any latent packrat mentality. Simply pick up the few objects that you want and leave everything else behind. This is almost the polar opposite of Hellgate: London, where a vast majority of the game revolves around your equipment.
 As usual, lots of people need your help. |
Since we've now covered most of the user interface, we might as well take a moment to go through the rest of the options. Outside of inventory and character management screens, the only other noteworthy parts of the interface involve the Journal. As you would expect, the Journal keeps track of Quests. You can view just the active quests and quest stages, or if you want to look at old quests/stages you can uncheck the appropriate boxes. You can also view quests by chapter and whether they are a main quest or a side quest — very convenient. Any entries in the journal that have been updated since the last time you viewed the appropriate page will have a red exclamation point next to them.
 I didn't ever use many of the formulas |
The Formula page provides information about various alchemical formulas that you've learned. This information is actually largely redundant, as you can get the same information in the alchemy screen when you're brewing potions, and you don't actually need to manually concoct each potion. Simply click on any of the active potions (only potions where all of the ingredients are available are active), and the appropriate items from your inventory will be selected. Even less useful is the Ingredients page, which consists of one sentence descriptions of the dozens of the Ingredients you can find in the game.
 Oh, the people you'll meet… |
 The places you'll go… |
 And the indigenous life forms you'll slay. |
 Random background information |
The Characters, Locations, Glossary, and Monsters pages are all very similar and contain background information on the appropriate subject. Glossary is sort of a catchall area with details about some of the factions you encounter in the game, the history of the game world, magic, medicine, political forces, etc. There's also a tutorial page where you can reread the hints that pop up at the very beginning of the game.
At first blush, all of this may seem extremely complex and convoluted. In actual practice, the journal is mostly composed of extra information that you may or may not want to read — just like the many books that you find throughout the game. I enjoyed the extra detail and read everything, but then I did the same thing in Oblivion — and before that in the Ultima games and many other RPGs. If you enjoy that type of game, The Witcher will accommodate you; if you just want to stick to the meat of the story, you can do that as well. Outside of updating quest information (which updates the appropriate journal entry), none of the actual text that accompanies any book/scroll is required reading material. There also aren't nearly as many extraneous books as in Oblivion, where only a small fraction contained something more than background information.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
39 Comments
View All Comments
haplo602 - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
Nice review, I skipped the garbage at the beginning :) but rest is fine.I was quite interested in the game until the problems page. My old PC won't handle this game it seems (1GB ram, x1650XT, athlon 64).
Anyway I read some of the Witcher books and I can only highly recommend them. If the story in the game is only half as good, it's a great game.
sjaxkingpin - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
Nice to see a review of one of the best games in a long time. Seems like the Eastern Block is responsible for alot of good games recently, with Crytek, Stalker and now the witcher. Too much corporate influence over here, I suppose.BTW, to the earlier poster who linked to the Zero Punctuation stuff, I'd never seen em before and I think I watched every one back to back... HILARIOUS!!!
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/edit...">http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/edit...
saiga6360 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Bar none.WorldMus - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
this game is total garbage. A grindfest centered around collecting nuke cards. Oblivion makes this look like trash, not to mention the horrible interface, ridiculous bugs and loading times, and the overall boring storyline and poor npc coding. Two thumbs downstick to hardware jarred - you don't know gaming
hekuball - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Couldn't agree more - this game is total garbage. I have never seen so many cut scenes in my entire life!Every single tiny scrap of dialogue is done via lengthy cut scenes. Basically it gores something like this....
Walk to top of stairs, meet npc (cutscene dialogue), go through door (loading time), walk through for 5 yards (another 30 second cut scene telling you what you have to do for next 60 seconds), engage bad guys in short pointless combat involving choice of stance followed by repeated left clicking with a modicum of basic timing that a 2 year old could master, thrown in.
Kill enemies, cut scene, followed by another cutscene carrying on from the last one, run for 5 seconds til go through door (long load time), followed by cutscene...aaarrrggghhhhhhhh!
I got so fed up after a few hours, I rebooted and swore never to touch this amateurish excuse for a linear piece of crap rpg again.
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
There are plenty of "cut scenes" at the beginning, presumably to introduce you to the game world. All of them can be skipped by pressing ESC. I guess you played the first part of the Prologue and called it quits. Me, I enjoyed the background information, dialog, etc. To call all conversations "cut scenes" is ludicrous, though. I guess we're having a cut scene right now?To the earlier poster, having played RPGs since I was under the age of 10. Akalabeth, Wizardry, Ultima, Might and Magic, SSI's Gold Box D&D games... I remember playing all of those as a kid. Granted, it wasn't until around the time of Bard's Tale III that I began *finishing* games, but I'm quite sure I've spent more than enough time with computer games to know what I like and what I don't like.
Now, to the point of whether or not this game is "garbage": As evidenced by the comments (and other reviews around the net), there are MANY people that really enjoy(ed) this game. Obviously, not everyone is going to like it. Lots of people hated Baldur's Gate (and Dungeons & Dragons games in general); if you don't like PC RPGs, I'm *sure* you won't like this game. Even if you do enjoy games like Oblivion, there's no guarantee you'll like The Witcher. I'd wager that with the latest patch, however, most people that like RPG-ish games will enjoy The Witcher.
kilkennycat - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Er, I am enjoying The Witcher. Best story-based PC RPG since VTM:B (with Werner's patches, of course...). Great fun. And the V1.2 patch has significantly improved the load times. The Witcher also happens to have the most-polished (and story-relevant ) introduction of all the PC games in my collection. That short sample should be very tempting to any movie producer... The fact that The Witcher is based on an excellent story-line should make it even more tempting. If drek like movies based on Doom, Resident Evil, AvP can command an audience, what about a monster-movie based on a powerful core character and a great story-line?karioskasra - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Portrayed as food, unintelligent creatures, and cannon fodder, the animals in most RPGs are mere objects; treated reprehensibly and, even worse, ignored most times, by all their games' characters, including the main protagonist. The underlying theme of these games is the slaying of innocent helpless creatures for a pittance of experience points and "Raw Hide", clearly shown by its market value at your nearest vendor. RPGs' objectification of animals is sickening.Jarred, as an owner of a kitten, do you find this aspect of RPGs offensive? I demand that somebody call PETA post-haste.
strikeback03 - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
bwahaha!Foxy1 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Portrayed as vile temptresses, witches and whores, the women in this game are mere objects; treated reprehensibly by all the game’s male characters, including Geralt. The underlying theme of the game is the sexual conquest of women, clearly shown by the pin-up cards given as rewards. The Witcher’s objectification of women is sickening.Jarred, as a father of a young daughter, did you find this aspect of the game offensive?