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.
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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.