Stirring Up My Witcher's Brew
Potions and night vision? This is another pretty major part of the game: alchemy. Throughout the game, you will learn about new potions you can make by talking to people or reading books and scrolls. You'll also learn about various plants you can harvest for use in potions, and many of the monsters you slay will provide you with ingredients. With the appropriate recipe, take a strong alcohol and add in the necessary ingredients while resting and you create a potion. The quality of alcohol determines how many ingredients you can use — depending on the potion, you may need three (strong), four (high-quality), or five (top-quality) ingredients — the more ingredients, the higher the alcohol quality (i.e. the more expensive the alcohol). Luckily, you may use any strong alcohol with three ingredients to create a White Gull potion that can function as a top-quality (five ingredients allowed) alcohol. (Weak and moderate alcohol serves no use other than a way to get Geralt drunk.)
 Not as good as a crock pot, but it will do. |
Effects of potions vary, providing you with the ability to see in the dark (Cat), improved offense at the expense of your defense of abilities (Thunderbolt), accelerated speed and attack abilities (Blizzard), increased endurance regeneration (Tawny Owl), accelerated healing (Swallow), and dozens of others. The effects can also last for anywhere from 30 minutes of game time to as long as half a day. The catch with potions is that they all increase your body's toxicity — your mother warned you about drinking too much alcohol, right? The result is that you usually can't have more than about three to five (depending on level and attributes) active potion effects running at the same time. There's also one potion (White Honey) that will reduce your toxicity to zero, but it will also remove any other potion effects. Determining which potion to drink for certain battles can be critical to your success.
The game suggests that the necessity of using alchemy varies by difficulty level, and as I only beat the game on medium difficulty I can't fully confirm this. What I can say is that on medium difficulty, certain battles — especially boss battles — are nearly impossible to beat without using several potions. There were plenty of potion types that I almost never used, like the one that allows you to see invisible creatures and the one that turns your blood to poison, harming any bloodsucking creatures that attack you. Since I never encountered an invisible creature in medium difficulty mode and had few problems with bloodsuckers, these two potions were essentially useless. With a few tweaks to the difficulty level of the monsters, however, I could see alchemy becoming far more useful.
 'Ware the Striga! |
Besides potions, there are two other types of objects you can create using alchemy. The first of these is blade coatings. These appear similar to a potion in your inventory, but instead of drinking then you apply them to one of your swords. They can increase the effectiveness of your weapon against certain types of monsters, improve the chance of causing bleeding or pain, poison your enemies, and a few other effects. Basically, blade coatings make your weapons do more damage. They last 24 hours, but you can't stack effects. There are also a few miscellaneous objects you can find throughout the game that will enhance your weapons for 24 hours — grind stones, diamond dust, and rune stones to name a few. Blade coatings use grease as the base of the potion rather than alcohol, again with different grease qualities allowing you to use three, four, or five ingredients.
 The slowest level of the game — fire's bad, m'kay? |
The final use for alchemy is creating bombs — which requires a level 3 intelligence perk. Once more, there are three categories of powder that will allow you to add three to five ingredients. Bombs create an area effect "spell" around Geralt that will temporarily stun, damage, poison, ignite, or scare your nearby foes — certain creatures of course being less susceptible to the bomb effects. While I used plenty of potions and the occasional blade coating, bombs were generally not required. When completely surrounded, a bomb that would stun/blind/ignite five or six enemies was somewhat useful, but almost never required. At the highest difficulty setting, this very likely would not be the case and bombs would be more important.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
I believe I covered that on page 6:[quote]Then there are the mini-games: drinking, gambling, and womanizing. Okay, the last one doesn't really count as a "mini-game", but the presentation does make one wonder if the developers/writers behind The Witcher aren't a bunch of misogynistic — or at least sexually repressed — men.[/quote]
Amazingly enough, I don't encourage young children to play 17+ rated games, and I wouldn't suggest parents buy this game for their pre-teen kids.
Foxy1 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
I’ll make myself clearer, as you missed the obvious intent of my question: In your opinion,1) Does The Witcher portray women as vile temptresses, witches and whores?
2) Are women treated reprehensibly by all the male characters in The Witcher?
3) Is the underlying theme of The Witcher the sexual conquest of women?
4) As a father of a young daughter, were you offended by the objectification of women in The Witcher?
And regarding your comment: “I wouldn’t suggest parents buy this game for their pre-teen kids.” – what about teenagers (ages 13-17)?
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
1) Yes. It also portrays men as depraved, evil, murdering jerks; other women are nurses, concerned mothers, peasants, old women, etc.2) Hardly.
3) If you're hard up, maybe? I can think of better ways to get my jollies than playing an 80 hour game just so I can see a few PG-13 rated scenes and cards.
4) Nope, because it didn't exist any more than it does in the real world. There are women that have sex for money, sex for pleasure, or hate men - all of these are present in The Witcher.
Perhaps you should notify people like Jack Thompson about this game; at least he would care enough to be outraged.
chizow - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Lighten up guy, you're 700 years early on the topic of suffrage and equal rights in a fantasy world. Its a video game, squarely marketed towards the 18-35 male demographic that dominates the industry (and most others too). The game is rated 17-18+ in Europe and M (18+) in the US, so be a good parent and don't buy it for your 13-17 year old kids if you don't want them playing it.homercles337 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Why was there no time spent discussing the flawed DRM? Many people with this game have serious, game stopping issues with the DRM--FOR NO REASON. There is a 20 page thread at The Witcher Forums discussing this with no resolution.Overall though, i was happy to see a Witcher review right here at AT. :)
nHeat - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Without a doubt, that was the most idiotic introduction ever written on a Witcher review. Anyone else agree?vijay333 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/edit...">http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article...tion/283...JarredWalton - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
You might notice that this link is already in the article, on the last page. Thanks for reading. ;)chizow - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Nice review Jarred, I certainly agree with many of the points you've covered. I also wanted to give a BIG thumbs-up on incorporating some of the hardware/performance aspects of the game into the review to give it that techy edge. HardOCP has also done some featured game/patch performance reviews. I'd like to see more reviews of this type that bridge the gap between game reviews and bar graphs and help the end-user understand how they can improve their gaming experience.As for the game itself, I also found it very enjoyable. There's certainly some annoyances, many of which you covered in your review. My main gripe is with looting, how you can't loot while aggro'd and even something as simple as a "Loot All" bind key or making it closer to the center of the screen would cut down on the annoyance that is looting corpses. Some things I'd add to help new players or potential players is:
1) Books: Always buy Monster books for Bestiary entries ASAP. This will help advance some secondary/bounty quests and cut down on some of the running back and forth or frustrations with limited spawn monsters. Look for the Antiquary or Book vendors in new areas first.
2) Looting corpses: for Junk mobs, don't bother looting all of them all the time. Best way is to just find 1 readily available alchemy ingredient for each component and stick to only looting that (6 items). For advanced players, you can do this for each sub component too (18-24 items).
3) Gathering Herbs: same as above, only focus on the ones you need for specific alchemical values, ignore the rest. When buying books buy monster books first, then Plants if you have the extra scratch.
4) Sell everything unless you're sure you'll need it (meteorite, runes, potion alcohol, key alchemy ingredients), you can usually buy it back later and anything essential goes to quest items.
5) Food is pretty much useless, sell it off and keep only 1-2 stacks to help free up inventory.
Interesting comments about performance, glad you were able to compare on multiple systems. I ran the game with Vista 64 and 8GB from the start and found it very stable even before the 1.2 patch, but saw many others complaining about crashes in the forums. At first I wasn't sure if the game was /largeaddressaware but as soon as I got to Chapter 2/3 I saw the game would certainly take advantage of extra RAM and a 64-bit OS with all the zoning and transitioning. I've seen Witcher commit hit 2.85GB (~4GB system total) with another 4GB cached in Vista 64 but I'm sure they can improve load times even more.
I also found the game to be very CPU intensive. On a C2D E6400 @ 3.1GHz, the system would use 80-85% with CPU 0 pegged at 100% and CPU 1 fluctuating between 60-80%. Didn't really seem to impact performance until I ran FRAPs, at which point both cores would be pegged at 100% (similar experience with other games with FRAPs in Vista) and I would see a negative impact on performance with choppy gameplay. Upgrading to a C2Q @ 3.5GHz smoothed things out a bit, especially with FRAPs running. Only 25-30% (max 80% on Core 0) instead of 80% on a slower C2D. With FRAPs recording utilization hits 50-60% and gameplay is noticeably smoother with the Quad core. The Quad didn't address the brief slowdown I experience when zoning from indoor to outdoor in Chapter 3 (Trade Quarters) during the day. Figured this was a memory management issue and part of the reason transitions took so long, as the game is loading up all of the dynamic objects and NPCs.
Oh btw, when are we going to see that Vista 64 vs Vista 32/XP comparison? I know Derek was out sick for awhile so maybe that slowed things down, but we're starting to see more and more games that perform better/worst on 32 or 64-bit even if it doesn't show up on an FPS graph.
ghoti - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Thanks for the comprehensive game review, Jarred.