The Witcher may scare off some people with its inventive combat, that replaces the conventional triggers happy rapid fires with hack and slash sword swinging. This is however no reason to avoid one of the deepest, most awesome adult role-playing to hit the PC in recent years. The game was developed by Poland based CD Projekt, and they have come with one of those landmark games that breaks just about any fantasy tradition out here. It is a truly mature take on swords, sorcery that lets you experience the grimy medieval world so realistically that you can practically feel like living in it. The game has traded the dreary good and evil quests for ambiguous “decisions and consequence” and innovative battle mechanics that adds a welcome twist to left-scrapping.
Anyone who plays this game once will find it awfully hard to go a back to playing the usual D&D stuff. The game is crafted on a 2007 edition of the Aurora Engine, which also powers the Neverwinter Nights. The Witcher is something of a cross between hack and slash RPG’s like Diablo and more complex ones like Neverwinter Nights. The developers have ingeniously worked on both sides of the court. The game spent many years in the development and saw some impressive changes to the Aurora BioWare engine; the game was finally released in the fall of 2007. The game is pretty strong thanks to the cleverly scripted story line set in an interesting world that is rife with moral divides. The game also features some thrilling background scores to fill in the mood. If it weren’t for some minor story inconsistencies, annoying load times and crashing issues the game would have been in the must have lists of any D&G fan.
The storyline for the game is a pretty unusual one for a fantasy game. The world is bleak, grimy, in a way that medieval towns and landscapes are expected to be. It is riddled with diseases, religious zealotry, fear and sick political maneuvering that ultimately spells doom for the powerless. The game in a way tries to throw open a window into our own world by trying to expose some vital issues, all the while providing the player with an exciting adventure and the ability to control an interesting character. The game tends to be a little cheesy as the developers have tried to shove too many present day problems into the game, however most of the issues are tackled in a very mature fashion and one cannot help but be drawn into the imperfect but hopeful world.
In most D&G games, the tension between elves, dwarfs, humans and other races are pretty common. However, this one pushes it to the limits by transforming those tensions to full blown racism. The protagonist, Geralt, was born human, but was transformed into something else. Thus he has to face the slanderous speech of humans and the hostility of the non-humans as well. Most humans you meet in the game are wary of you, while some are brutally hostile. The Witcher is a fun RPG game and combines some fast paced combat with a pretty decent storyline set in a visually stunning world. With tons of choice in character selection and point assignment, the game can easily burn 40-50 hrs of game time.
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