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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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.