The Witcher: a Study in Neutrality

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.