How in God's name did this game ever get any scores above 4/10? Has everyone on its Steam page showering it with positive reviews collectively lost all their critical faculties? The game is just stuffed to bursting with bad design, poor gameplay and shockingly inept storytelling. I'm 23 hours in, and not once can I say I've had fun. Not for one fucking minute. Argh!
- The UI sucks. It's overdesigned, poorly laid out, the inventory is a mess, and the symbols displaying your status effects fade to the background almost completely, making the whole affair basically pointless. Oh, and let's not forget the fucking quest tracking! Being only able to track one quest at a time is bad enough, but when the tracking repeatedly just plain misdirects you you can no longer say "well some people like different things". Sometimes when opening the menu, it's switched tabs without your input to display some insipid lore. No, fuck you! I don't want or need to read about goddamn generic town #237, I want to track my quests!
I think that's all. Honestly, avoid this game like the plague. The only possible recommendation I can give is if you bought it for 50 cents and feel an obsessive need to play through the whole trilogy (this is why I've been putting myself through this quagmire of shit). This game is not worth its price even at 75% off. It's so full of plain unforgivable flaws. And this is supposed to be the """"Enhanced""""" Edition. I don't even dare to think what the original was like!
Phew. That felt cathartic.
Edit: yes, this is about the first game and only the first. I've yet to play the others.
- The UI sucks. It's overdesigned, poorly laid out, the inventory is a mess, and the symbols displaying your status effects fade to the background almost completely, making the whole affair basically pointless. Oh, and let's not forget the fucking quest tracking! Being only able to track one quest at a time is bad enough, but when the tracking repeatedly just plain misdirects you you can no longer say "well some people like different things". Sometimes when opening the menu, it's switched tabs without your input to display some insipid lore. No, fuck you! I don't want or need to read about goddamn generic town #237, I want to track my quests!
The combat sucks a big floppy donkey dick. It's repetitive, shallow, simplistic, repetitive, unresponsive, boring, repetitive and repetitive. It doesn't matter if you're fighting humans, giant spiders, ghouls or the guy you spend half the fucking game chasing, it's always the same click-click-click with no variety aside from throwing a sign or two in there. And since the whole thing is essentially just a timing minigame, you're not even looking at what's happening, but at the mouse cursor to time your clicks right. Combat styles are a joke. It goes like this: test whether enemy is weak to strength or speed, and switch to group style if more than 3 enemies surround you. Wow. Many deep. So technique. It's unresponsive too: multiple times I've had Geralt simply not do what I've wanted him to. He switches targets seemingly on his own, letting enemies whale on him while he tries to circumnavigate one simple enemy. The dodge move is so badly executed it's almost comical.
Oh, the game gives you different weapons, but you never use them. They display damage numbers, but since witcher swords only say "damage varies based on combat style" you have no point of comparison and therefore no way of knowing if a weapon is good or not. Then there are the status effects. Most are basically unnoticeable, but one or two make Geralt stop for a 40-minute soliloquy while the enemies pull his lungs out through his nostrils, ending the combat possibly in seconds once inflicted. The game doesn't signify how or what enemies inflict these or how to avoid them, so it's basically a random chance. Different weapons you get can inflict status effects, but since they don't affect enemy behavior in any way, what's the point?
And lastly, there's the element of preparation. Except the game hardly ever properly signifies to you when a difficult combat scenario is coming up, so you really have no way of knowing if potential combat even warrants preparation. And the combat you do know is ahead is most times so easy it's not worth the trouble. Even when you know to anticipate a difficult enemy encounter it's basically a guessing game as to what buffs are useful. I've used the Blizzard potion multiple times, and fuck me if there's been any discernible difference in the results whatsoever.
Oh, the game gives you different weapons, but you never use them. They display damage numbers, but since witcher swords only say "damage varies based on combat style" you have no point of comparison and therefore no way of knowing if a weapon is good or not. Then there are the status effects. Most are basically unnoticeable, but one or two make Geralt stop for a 40-minute soliloquy while the enemies pull his lungs out through his nostrils, ending the combat possibly in seconds once inflicted. The game doesn't signify how or what enemies inflict these or how to avoid them, so it's basically a random chance. Different weapons you get can inflict status effects, but since they don't affect enemy behavior in any way, what's the point?
And lastly, there's the element of preparation. Except the game hardly ever properly signifies to you when a difficult combat scenario is coming up, so you really have no way of knowing if potential combat even warrants preparation. And the combat you do know is ahead is most times so easy it's not worth the trouble. Even when you know to anticipate a difficult enemy encounter it's basically a guessing game as to what buffs are useful. I've used the Blizzard potion multiple times, and fuck me if there's been any discernible difference in the results whatsoever.
- The visual design sucks. While the graphics are quite nice for a mid-tier game from 2007, the look of the game is bland and generic to an almost astronomical degree. Nothing stands out and nothing is memorable. It's the same medieval towns, meadows and marshlands you find in every RPG ever made ever, and only that. While there are some mildly interesting monster designs, the aforementioned cosmically shitty combat lets them down every time. If one were to compile a ranking list of the most generic looking games ever, this'd easily make the top 5.
- The quests suck. This is the game's most glaring throat cancer tumor besides the combat. Basically every one is just a fetch quest for one character or another, for increasingly confusing and obscure reasons. This leads the player to trudge the same fucking locations over and over and over and over again to do Some Shit #569 for Random Dickhead #8301. Also, many of the quests overlap and interweave with each other, becoming accessible or gridlocked depending on the player's progress. Not only does the game signify this, but the quests you're literally unable to solve still stay as active quests in your journal. And let's not forget the fact that NPCs locations change depending on the time of day. But if you want to skip ahead, we can't just have a simple wait function, oh no! You have to go buggering back to some **** who will allow you to meditate or find a campfire. Honestly, who the fuck thought of this system, and who approved it?
- The alchemy... well okay, it doesn't suck, but it's basically pointless. Of the potentially dozens of potions and mixtures available, I've found exactly 2 to be useful: the healing potion and the night vision. The rest, completely useless, or at least I have experienced no scenario on normal difficulty where I'd think of any of them being useful.
- The quests suck. This is the game's most glaring throat cancer tumor besides the combat. Basically every one is just a fetch quest for one character or another, for increasingly confusing and obscure reasons. This leads the player to trudge the same fucking locations over and over and over and over again to do Some Shit #569 for Random Dickhead #8301. Also, many of the quests overlap and interweave with each other, becoming accessible or gridlocked depending on the player's progress. Not only does the game signify this, but the quests you're literally unable to solve still stay as active quests in your journal. And let's not forget the fact that NPCs locations change depending on the time of day. But if you want to skip ahead, we can't just have a simple wait function, oh no! You have to go buggering back to some **** who will allow you to meditate or find a campfire. Honestly, who the fuck thought of this system, and who approved it?
- The alchemy... well okay, it doesn't suck, but it's basically pointless. Of the potentially dozens of potions and mixtures available, I've found exactly 2 to be useful: the healing potion and the night vision. The rest, completely useless, or at least I have experienced no scenario on normal difficulty where I'd think of any of them being useful.
- The story sucks. The overarching narrative is actually pretty interesting, and a refreshing change of pace from usual fantasy plots... if you can follow it in the first place, that is. The story is so poorly told, the characters so weakly established and introduced, the twists and turns so out of nowhere, and the game just assumes so much of the player that the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards during Hurricane Katrina within the first few hours. The game starts out, and immediately assumes you to give a shit about 5 or so different characters, who all have maybe 1 character's worth of introduction or setup between them. What's more, I read the whole fucking Witcher series, and I still didn't, and don't, care!
An example: at one point Geralt comes across a werewolf that can talk. It turns out it's a character we've met before acting as a vigilante at night in werewolf form, and is willing to help us. Then the game presents the player the opportunity to kill him, as if assuming the player's automatic response to any monster is "kill kill killapalooza". This is retarded, because 1) this is the first werewolf we see in the game, 2) werewolves haven't even been mentioned or established at this point with any preconceptions to the player, and 3) there's really no other reason for the player to want to kill the werewolf other than the game assuming them to want to.
Character motivations, basic introductions, setup, none of these things are present. Characters just pop in left and right without rhyme or reason, and the game just assumes you to care. What thin pretense of plot there is established at the start is swiftly buried beneath an avalanche of completely unrelated busywork that for some godforsaken reason becomes the game's main focus for hours at a time before shifting it again to completely different, but still equally unrelated busywork. By the point which I'm at now I've completely and utterly lost any speck of interest, and am just skimming through the dialogue to not have to suffer this shit any longer.
An example: at one point Geralt comes across a werewolf that can talk. It turns out it's a character we've met before acting as a vigilante at night in werewolf form, and is willing to help us. Then the game presents the player the opportunity to kill him, as if assuming the player's automatic response to any monster is "kill kill killapalooza". This is retarded, because 1) this is the first werewolf we see in the game, 2) werewolves haven't even been mentioned or established at this point with any preconceptions to the player, and 3) there's really no other reason for the player to want to kill the werewolf other than the game assuming them to want to.
Character motivations, basic introductions, setup, none of these things are present. Characters just pop in left and right without rhyme or reason, and the game just assumes you to care. What thin pretense of plot there is established at the start is swiftly buried beneath an avalanche of completely unrelated busywork that for some godforsaken reason becomes the game's main focus for hours at a time before shifting it again to completely different, but still equally unrelated busywork. By the point which I'm at now I've completely and utterly lost any speck of interest, and am just skimming through the dialogue to not have to suffer this shit any longer.
I think that's all. Honestly, avoid this game like the plague. The only possible recommendation I can give is if you bought it for 50 cents and feel an obsessive need to play through the whole trilogy (this is why I've been putting myself through this quagmire of shit). This game is not worth its price even at 75% off. It's so full of plain unforgivable flaws. And this is supposed to be the """"Enhanced""""" Edition. I don't even dare to think what the original was like!
Phew. That felt cathartic.
Edit: yes, this is about the first game and only the first. I've yet to play the others.
