Zero Punctuation: The Witcher

Boricua_bob

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Nov 8, 2007
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Wow, sounds a lot better than Antiques RoadShow: Return of The Witch King's Watch.

Also Yahtzee I kinda got a request, even though I know requests are done by email. I think you should do a review of 'In The Name Of The King.' Yeah, it's a movie, but it features the guys from The Transporter, HellBoy, Power Rangers (no lie), and someone who had the godchild of Joey Lawerence and Shawn Michaels from the WWE. Plus Uwe Boll directed and produced the film, so it's no surprise that 'suck' should be on the title...along with 'balls.'
 

Um...TE

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fugori said:
Think about it this way: if your reaction to this review is "I loved this game and can't believe that Yahtzee is misrepresenting it so!", then for a minute imagine the reasons that Yahtzee has provided. Obviously you would have a rebuttal to each of them, but I think it's absolutely fair to say that many people would not, and would in fact line up much more with Yahtzee's line of thinking than yours or mine. Now imagine that you're that person. Hasn't this been a helpful experience?

Personally, I have yet to play The Witcher, but I think this review has informed me just as competently as to the content of the game as any of the lengthy previews I previously checked out.
If you're like me, you watch Yahtzee to get a sense of the game's flaws. The serious reviews tend to concentrate on the positive. But he missed many of this game's real flaws.

1. Not enough inventory slots for all the crap you can collect.

2. Tiny item icons, making it hard to tell just what all those twigs and berries are.

3. No at-a-glance means of telling what secondary properties those leaves and guts have.

4. Somewhat confusing talent tree (can I take Slashy II without having Slashy I? Looks like I can! I wonder if it actually does anything, though). You can probably pick talents at random and do fine.

5. Not nearly enough character models! Too many people look alike. The models aren't bland, they're just over-repeated. I guess if the models were generic it wouldn't matter as much. No, you have some really interesting character models (tall, shirtless guy with tattoo of naked woman on this chest, or an obese man with a bell around his neck) that are repeated for both scrub NPCs and main characters (look, another fat man). Not good.

6. Staging the first boss fight after a lengthy cut-scene exchange. Come on. Almost everyone will die, usually repeatedly. Don't make the players click through the cut-scenes every darn time!

7. Ill-timed spell ("sign") acquisition. By the time you pick up the other signs, you'll have Aard and Igni developed to the point where spending points on the others doesn't make sense.

8. Bland side-games. Not as bad as Bioshock's single flow-puzzle they use for everything, but boxing and dice kinda suck. Should have just ripped off Puzzle Pirates for good diversionary games. On the plus side, I guess, the NPCs are so retarded at playing dice that you never lack for funds.

9. Clunky fight mechanics. This is the Aurora game engine's fault, but sometimes when you click to do something it doesn't "take." Very annoying.

10. Auto-sheathing of weapons. Almost guarantees you'll be caught flat-footed at the beginning of every encounter. That also causes you to pause during that animation. You can loot items before and after, but not while precious Geralt is adjusting his accoutrements.

11. Infinitely-respawning scrub creatures at higher levels. Gee, I can take out a half dozen Drowners with a single sword swing in Act V, so why torment me with the little buggers? At least let me kill them all so I don't have to deal with them anymore.

12. Little or no foreshadowing that you're about to enter a boss battle. Let alone any idea how difficult or easy it might be. You go from slaughtering hordes of thrall with a sharp stick and disapproving glance to "die if you open that next door without a half-dozen potions streaming through your bloodstream and Oil of Ickiness on your silver sword" without warning.

You get the idea. There are real faults with what is, overall, an excellent game. Those are the kind of things I watch Yahtzee to have illuminated for me. All I got was "oooh, it's so complicated my head hurts" when, in fact, the Witcher is one of the most simple RPG games I've ever seen. Simple enough to be a console game. (heh)
 

Rune R.

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Dec 31, 2004
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Um...TE said:
If you're like me, you watch Yahtzee to get a sense of the game's flaws. The serious reviews tend to concentrate on the positive. But he missed many of this game's real flaws.

1. Not enough inventory slots for all the crap you can collect.

2. Tiny item icons, making it hard to tell just what all those twigs and berries are.

3. No at-a-glance means of telling what secondary properties those leaves and guts have.

4. Somewhat confusing talent tree (can I take Slashy II without having Slashy I? Looks like I can! I wonder if it actually does anything, though). You can probably pick talents at random and do fine.

5. Not nearly enough character models! Too many people look alike. The models aren't bland, they're just over-repeated. I guess if the models were generic it wouldn't matter as much. No, you have some really interesting character models (tall, shirtless guy with tattoo of naked woman on this chest, or an obese man with a bell around his neck) that are repeated for both scrub NPCs and main characters (look, another fat man). Not good.

6. Staging the first boss fight after a lengthy cut-scene exchange. Come on. Almost everyone will die, usually repeatedly. Don't make the players click through the cut-scenes every darn time!

7. Ill-timed spell ("sign") acquisition. By the time you pick up the other signs, you'll have Aard and Igni developed to the point where spending points on the others doesn't make sense.

8. Bland side-games. Not as bad as Bioshock's single flow-puzzle they use for everything, but boxing and dice kinda suck. Should have just ripped off Puzzle Pirates for good diversionary games. On the plus side, I guess, the NPCs are so retarded at playing dice that you never lack for funds.

9. Clunky fight mechanics. This is the Aurora game engine's fault, but sometimes when you click to do something it doesn't "take." Very annoying.

10. Auto-sheathing of weapons. Almost guarantees you'll be caught flat-footed at the beginning of every encounter. That also causes you to pause during that animation. You can loot items before and after, but not while precious Geralt is adjusting his accoutrements.

11. Infinitely-respawning scrub creatures at higher levels. Gee, I can take out a half dozen Drowners with a single sword swing in Act V, so why torment me with the little buggers? At least let me kill them all so I don't have to deal with them anymore.

12. Little or no foreshadowing that you're about to enter a boss battle. Let alone any idea how difficult or easy it might be. You go from slaughtering hordes of thrall with a sharp stick and disapproving glance to "die if you open that next door without a half-dozen potions streaming through your bloodstream and Oil of Ickiness on your silver sword" without warning.

You get the idea. There are real faults with what is, overall, an excellent game. Those are the kind of things I watch Yahtzee to have illuminated for me. All I got was "oooh, it's so complicated my head hurts" when, in fact, the Witcher is one of the most simple RPG games I've ever seen. Simple enough to be a console game. (heh)
You did what I did not bother with. You outlined everything thats lacking about this game; and probably more eloquently then I could have done.

QFT
 

entropy3ko

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Jan 17, 2008
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RabbitDynamite said:
And for guys like this, what Yahtzee desribed was equivalent to Irenicus' Dungeon in BGII. If you're like me youprobably installed Dungeon-Be-Goneto by pass that mind numbing bit of rubbish on your hundredth play-through, but it was worth going through once.

Having actually played Painkiller,I found the "intro-theatre" very funny, but was vaguely disquieted by the fact this made a LOT more sense than the original cinematic. And was better acted. And it has only just occured to me that, coincidentally, both of these games were Polish made, as your total irrelevancy of the day.
I liked the Irenicus Dungeon, and I have not replayed BG 2 after finishing it. Since I already know how the story evolves it does not excite me anymore. In a game for me the story itself is the most important thing. And like with books after you finished it you are not really compelled to replay immediately. Although I do read the same book more then one time I do it on intervals of several months of years.

I bought only recently Neverwinter Nights 1 ( I am actually still playing it I am only at Act 3.. I do not have that much time for games), since it was not so expensive and I was not sure to buy NW Nights 2 (which I still haven't) Of course the all'Dangoun & Dragons rules' in NW Nights and BG does not appeal too much to me but they are fun to play for an hour or 2 after a long busy day. What I meant is that I usually have MORE FUN after buying an OLD game with perhaps less atractive graphics than the new ones. I do not say they are 'Fantabulous' and that you can play them 10 times without getting bored... but they at least do their job the first and maybe second time you play them.

The point is that, while the games improve graphically and have maybe physics engines build into it and other gadgets, the FUN they deliver instead of improving, it gets worse.
As a matter of fact no RPG yet can top Morrowind in my list of favorite games. It is the only RPG I played completely through twice, actually.
Perhaps now that we have such great graphics and sound and gadgets, we should get back at writing interesting plots and quests.

I actually watched a few trailers of 'the witcher', being my curiosity stimulated, and some youtube movies of it... it makes me think that the writers of the game also write porn... The dialog was pretty cheese and lame. It was not too funny to me, in any case.

I have not played the game, but from what I have seen it looks like it targets the sexually frustrated population.

All in all it might not be so bad... perhaps one day I'll give it a shot and it might surprise me... or perhaps future RPGs will be so bad that The Witcher will seem like 'the shit' by comparison and not by true quality...
 

Um...TE

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Jan 23, 2008
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entropy3ko said:
I bought only recently Neverwinter Nights...not sure to buy NW Nights 2
I've played NWN1 and all its expansions. Just started NWN2 co-op with a friend.

I liked the Witcher much more than either as a single-player CRPG. After playing the Witcher, NWN looks like a game of Peggle (and WoW, heaven forbid, looks like it should be pink with the words "Hello, Kitty" stenciled on its side). There's a grittiness that goes beyond the sex scenes and "your momma" comments.

Even though it's based off the engine used in NWN1, it takes a lot of iron to run Witcher.

Enspik said:
I'm glad I'm not the only one to see what a broken piece of trash The Witcher is.
On the contrary - the game is great despite such flaws. That is, if you like story-based games. One could just read the books, I guess, if you can read Polish.

Which brings up a meta-flaw of the game: people who have read the books in their native tongue acting smug on the boards because they know more of the story and background than you, a mere player of the game.* No less annoying than the Tolkein freaks who'd point out NPCs in LOTRO who were dressed in the wrong shade of green. I'm looking forward to WAR, but I just know that the boards will be filled with decades-old Warhammer hobbyists who'll nit-pick the game because on page 32 paragraph 4 of compendium VII it stated the Hammer of Oog is a two-handed weapon and the game represents it as a hand-and-a-half weapon.

* {Edit: not referring to uanime5, who posted while I was writing}

But the Witcher is not "a broken piece of trash" as much as it's imperfect - unless those imperfections ruin your enjoyment of the game (then it's a broken piece of trash). Thankfully, there's a demo that takes you through the prologue and most of Act I. If you don't like it by then, you're not going to like the retail version.
 

ElArabDeMagnifico

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Dec 20, 2007
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lol, well since Yahtzee's Crysis review and his hatred towards RPG's I wasn't gonna take this one seriously, and I ALREADY knew he was gonna hate it, and everything after these reviews cuz apparently no one actually does like it when he enjoys himself, but man Yahtzee.....

you made a HUGE MISTAKE PUTTING THE PAINKILLER THING IN, NOW WE'RE GONNA WANT MORE!! THAT WAS FUNNIER THEN THE ACTUAL REVIEW.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, song choice at the beggining = bloody brilliant!
 

nianoniano

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Oct 31, 2007
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he should really stay away from RPGs,he says that some games are too lineal and stupid, but when there is a little bit of depth and complexity its just boring crap for elitist pricks

they gave him a game, and he have to complete it in a week... you can't like a deep and complex non-linear RPG if you play it with a time limit like if you were in a race and having a review in mind all the time

the review was fun, but most of the things he saw as flaws, most gamers see them as cool features that they are looking for, he just hates RPG, thats all, I respect it, but what I don't respect is the people that write stuf like "this game is shit because yahtzee didn't like it"

to those: nice decision to not buy the game, because if you can't think for yourself, and base your opinions completely on someone else's, then The Witcher is NOT your game anyway.
 

fugori

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Jan 23, 2008
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Um...TE said:
You get the idea. There are real faults with what is, overall, an excellent game. Those are the kind of things I watch Yahtzee to have illuminated for me. All I got was "oooh, it's so complicated my head hurts" when, in fact, the Witcher is one of the most simple RPG games I've ever seen. Simple enough to be a console game. (heh)
This continues to assume that he is obligated to run through the game, exhaustively chronicling every design flaw. He is not. His impression is a valid one, because it quite clearly describes some very simple problems that a certain segment of the gaming population might have with it at the very start of their The Witcher experience.

This is a serious review. It's a real review. It just doesn't do justice to the good qualities of the game, presumably, because its written from the perspective of a person who saw too much bad too quickly to continue. If the first 100 pages of a novel has you bored to tears, you should feel no obligation to continue, even if you're reviewing it. I could shout in praise about it, desperate to convince you that The Great Gatsby is an important work of art (it is, and I would), but that won't change your personal experience at all. The thing is, your review would not be for people like me at all. Unless it was funny, that is. That's why I enjoy ZP reviews so much - even when I disagree (Super Paper Mario, Super Mario Galaxy, Bioshock to some degree), I still have a good time, and I get a perspective I otherwise wouldn't have had access to, or would have otherwise dismissed because of the style of delivery.
 

Chis

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Nov 28, 2007
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razor said:
[/quote]

Sooner or later you'll all grow out of it and realise that this just ISN'T FUNNY.

Granted, this is the only faux pas Yahtzee has made thus far, but it's still a big one.
 

razor

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Chis said:
Sooner or later you'll all grow out of it and realise that this just ISN'T FUNNY.
Now this is funny. I mean, is there anything more funny than someone trying to tell you something that is hilarious, isn't funny? I really do picture one person stamping their foot in a room full of laughter, insisting there is nothing funny.
 

Smokescreen

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Chis said:
razor said:
[/quote]

Sooner or later you'll all grow out of it and realise that this just ISN'T FUNNY.

Granted, this is the only faux pas Yahtzee has made thus far, but it's still a big one.[/quote]

Sorry, but you sound like an epic whiner.
 

Alzxul

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Jan 24, 2008
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Um...TE made some very good points.

This was probably the least funny Zero Punctuation for me so far. Obviously I don't expect a highly professional, objective review of a game, but as Trevor Griffiths so rightly pointed out in his play 'Comedians': 'Comedy is truth'. The biggest reason why I find Yahtzee's reviews so hilarious, is because I've played the games, and he picks up on the flaws that exist within them, and shines a great big amusing light on them for all the world to see. The biggest problem I had with this review, was the fact that instead of bending, or extending reality for his own comical purposes, he said things which simply weren't true; for example, 'Clicking once on an enemy once, or twice if your advanced'. Unless you can kill an enemy in one hit (which is possible, but not frequent), you never click on an enemy once. In fact you have to click several times, at the right times, to build a combination. He also made the alchemy and general GUI seem complex, when it tends towards the scale of a console game as opposed to a PC one. I never read game manuals, and I, as could everyone else by my reasoning, could work out the game nuances absolutely fine; so yes I would have to call Yahtzee 'Retard McSpackypants'.

Yahtzee could have made incredibly amusing points on the list of things Um...TE made, but instead he focused on things with little relevance or things which weren't true. Personally, I thought The Witcher was one of the best RPGs to come out in a long time, and reminded me how things used to be with games like Fallout and Baldur's Gate. It had a fantastic story, which brought up contemporary issues without patronising the player (e.g. the Fisstech drug trade and the damage it dealt to its users; the persecution of foreigners; the political militancy of the elves, very reminiscient of modern terrorist doctrine). Also as many have pointed out this game /lives/ in the grey area, along with baby eating Mother Theresas. It has none of the black and white Yahtzee usually complains about.

Obviously the above is just my opinion of the game, much in the same way Yahtzee's review is his; it just seems like he was destroying this game for the sake of destroying it. I certainly admit there are issues with the game, many of which would have made for hilarious exposure (I can't believe he didn't mention the loading times), but he didn't seem to focus on them. Instead he looked at it from a very high level and picked things off without much accuracy. That's not to say it was bad... It was just shallower than one might expect from a Zero Punctuation review.
 

Um...TE

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fugori said:
This continues to assume that he is obligated to run through the game, exhaustively chronicling every design flaw. He is not.
I'm not saying he's obliged (I don't have his contract in front of me) - I just said he didn't do it.

fugori said:
His impression is a valid one, because it quite clearly describes some very simple problems that a certain segment of the gaming population might have with it at the very start of their The Witcher experience.

This is a serious review. It's a real review. It just doesn't do justice to the good qualities of the game...
He called it "First Impressions" precisely because it's not a real review. Playing the first 10% of a game, or reading 10% of a novel, or watching 10% of a movie, or eating 10% of a meal may be enough to form an opinion (especially for personal tastes), but it's not enough to produce an informed opinion (for a general audience).

And that's okay. He comes right out, up front, and says that he didn't get very far. That's fair. I've read some game "reviews" that are passed off as such where it becomes painfully clear that the reviewer doesn't know what he's talking about because he didn't play the damn game. This week's video wasn't that. It certainly wasn't a review, either. It was, ahem, a first impression.

Chis said:
Sooner or later you'll all grow out of it and realise that this just ISN'T FUNNY.
The picture, though, is funnier than the line. Give props to razor for the picture.
 

Chis

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Nov 28, 2007
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razor said:
Now this is funny. I mean, is there anything more funny than someone trying to tell you something that is hilarious, isn't funny? I really do picture one person stamping their foot in a room full of laughter, insisting there is nothing funny.
Well done, you're living up to your forum tagline.
 

JATS111

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Jan 20, 2008
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lol, "Claevage you could lose your dog in", still had me laughing half an hour l8r, keep up the good work!
 

Rodge

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Jan 24, 2008
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Well, I laughed all the way through this, especially at 'THIS IS A MUMORPUGER!" Such outrage!

If something bores you enough you can't even finish it, you obviously can't give a fair and balanced review, but you can say 'I couldn't finish this, here's why.' It's like me with Wuthering Heights and The DaVinci Code.

(Confession: The only game I've played out of any of the games Yahtzee has reviewed is 'Silent Hill Origins'. I haven't watched that review yet because I'm still hugely in love with SHO and I know I would get butthurt about criticism. Perhaps you guys, knowing as you do that Yahtzee hates everything, could do the same?)