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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punko - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Is the demo North American or European ;)legoman666 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
I had major problems with the games DRM scheme. It absolutely refused to load even though I had a legal copy and the DVD was in the drive. It kept telling me to enter the original disc. I was at my wits end trying to fix it and I was about to take my copy of the game back.However, then I installed Vista x64 and it worked perfectly. (had XP x64 prior).
kilkennycat - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
Er, did you have any virtual-disk software (Alcohol etc..) installed on the machine when you had your so-called DRM problems? If so, did you try experimentally uninstalling it to see if the problems cleared up?legoman666 - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
Yes, I did have Daemon tools installed, but I uninstalled it and made sure there were no traces of it left in the registry.Ironcically, Using Daemon Tools Pro is how some people with DRM problems managed to get the game working. The game will install fine with the original disc, but then fail to load the game. A solution is to make an image of the DVD, and mount it using a virtual IDE drive with Daemon Tools Pro.
The reason it has to be an virtual IDE drive is because of the draconian DRM scheme that the game uses; It will not work on a scsi virtual drive (what Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120 use by default). Some people even reported having issues trying to play the game with their original disc using a sata drive.
BikeDude - Saturday, January 26, 2008 - link
Uninstalling the "offending" tool might not have much of an impact.I had briefly tried a tool for ripping discs (or similar -- I don't recall its name or purpose) and one game refused to run. Using Sysinternal's regmon (now Process Monitor) revealed that the DRM was looking at HKEY_CURRENT_USER and found the offending utility's user setup there. Most uninstallers leave HKCU alone, since users want to keep their settings in case they ever reinstall (or upgrade).
So, before you reinstall the OS, simply create a new user (thus giving you a fresh HKCU) and see if that helps. I think such DRM approaches warrants a full refund from the game's publisher. It is despicable.
FWIW: I use daemon tools to mount ISO images downloaded from a pirate site called msdn.microsoft.com. I get all sorts of OS and utility ISOs from there! grrr....
JarredWalton - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
Amazing how often that clears up problems.... Anyway, I have Daemon Tools installed on many of my PCs, and that didn't interfere with The Witcher. I think I had it whine about not having the correct disc once in all of my testing... I just closed out of the dialog and restarted and it worked. I will say that I'm not using any SATA DVD drives right now, so maybe that helped?ecat - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Nice review. Though I'd consider less emphasis on the problems to be more in keeping with the actual game play experience, I'm glad to see The Witcher receiving more main line coverage.I played this game in the run up to Xmas, best game I've played since VTM: Bloodlines. The writing and cross plots create a level of involvement that leaves Oblivion looking, well, empty. Bioshock ? Stalker ? Best I don't go there.
On stability:
XP, AMD 64 x2 (2.8GHz), 2Gb, 7800gt, DFI on board sound.
I could certainly play for 2 or more hours without a crash, but sometimes less. Crash was usually proceeded by voices starting to stutter.
Re-booting before starting the game appeared to help.
Greatest improvement came from forcing the game to run on a single core - fixed issues with stutter and allowed hours (and hours and.. lol :) of play.
dragosmp - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
The fix for the crashes is very well put on the official forums, but for whoever is interested here's how it goes:Start Command Line Console and write this (this DOES NOT apply to 64bit OSes):
"BCDEDIT /set IncreaseUserVa 3072"
This increases the max adresable memory/process from 2GB to 3GB. It works in 99% of the cases, but it's true that this game seems to urge for a 64 bit OS where the UserVa is no longer limited at 2GB.
Sc4freak - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
The reason it didn't crash as often on Vista x64 is probably because it allows the full 4gb virtual addressing range to any 32-bit program linked with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag. On Vista/XP 32-bit, this limit is by default 2gb (and expandable to ~3gb).Incidentally, you'll find the same behaviour with Supreme Commander. 32-bits just isn't enough for modern memory-hungry games.