Review: The Witcher II 2.0

That's some good lighting effects there buddy.

The Witcher 2 is a game that we were lucky enough to receive around the time of release from it’s publishers Good Old Games, and CD Projekt. This was in the spring of 2011 and I was very happy and felt very privileged to be getting another chance to jump into the world of The Witcher, which ended on something of a cliffhanger. However almost right off the bat there were some technical problems that prevented that from being possible. The game ran abysmally no matter what I did, and despite the fact that I absolutely destroyed the recommended requirements for it, it ran so bad that it made the game virtually unplayable. We’re talking 5 frames a second bad. I would try to tinker with the game’s graphics settings, reinstalling my drivers over and over but ultimately it was to no avail and I was left with a game that refused to run no matter what I did. Patch 1.2 came, and I had some real hope that my issues would be resolved, but they weren’t and I was still missing out. By that time countless other reviews had been written, and most of them were glowing, and saturated with high praise. Time crawled on. More games came out, and we did our best to cover the best ones. But in the back of my mind I was always sad that I didn’t get to finish The Witcher 2. So when I saw a significant amount of buzz around the fact that The Witcher 2 was celebrating being patched to 2.0 I was pretty hopeful.

I fired up the GOG Downloader, which for the record, seems to hate me, and got to making The Witcher 2 go inside my computer again. And lo and behold, when I finally had it reinstalled it worked. It actually worked. And it looked real nice and purty too! So after finally having been able to play this bastard from start to finish what do I think? Well…….

The Good

I wonder if I should also tell her that I'm hungry...

The Witcher 2 is largely powered by dialogue and character interaction, and an intuitive system that handles both things, and weaves them into the narrative and gameplay. It’s the stuff that Bioware fans clamor about but here it’s done in a way that is far more subtle, dark, and I daresay realistic. But I use that term loosely in a game about a man with cat eyes who fights monsters for a living. But there it is. The game makes sure that you know your actions have significant consequences from the outset when it asks for a completed game file from the first game so it can incorporate those choices into The Witcher 2. Wow. I was fortunate enough to still have the first game on my hard drive, so I got to witness said incorporation, and the ability to make your choices feel weighted, is unparalleled by any game I’ve ever played. And it continues throughout the entirety of The Witcher 2. So much so, that it made me a little neurotic, and I found myself making multiple save game files just to play alternating story paths here and there. In one instance this led to me being infuriated that I couldn’t keep one character from losing her eyeballs no matter what I did. I was that invested. Geralt himself is also a breath of fresh air for most modern RPG character design. He’s nuanced, and in dialogue isn’t so much directly controlled by you, as his dialogue is influenced by your choices. Simply put, it means that what you pick in a dialogue menu won’t be what leaves Geralt’s mouth, but ultimately he will get your choice, and point across in his own unique way. Sometimes that means interpreting a slap to mean a punch in the stomach, and other times it means you may inadvertently talk your way into or out of a fight, depending.

The Witcher 2 also happens to be an insanely pretty game. It manages to be lush almost all of the time, and captures the feeling of natural growth, and man made wonder in a way that a lot of other games in the same type of setting and genre completely miss. Plenty of other games have stone walled cities with moss on the walls, and ivy growing across some pristine archway, but here it looks and feels alive thanks to the powerhouse RED engine. If anything the only drawback is that you always feel restricted, and often don’t feel like you’re given a complete opportunity to explore and experience all of it. But that’s a symptom of the game’s subtle linearity and trying to keep you engaged, and always moving forward. As a plot device it works fantastically, and even as a design ethos, it works the majority of the time and yields it’s own reward. This means you’ll be less obsessed with exploring every corner of a world map just because you can, and instead experimenting on smaller levels with dialogue, and character development. You become more focused and goal oriented, but when you get to Act 3 it feels restricting, and like it’s trying to just push you through the finish line as fast as possible, which is a good or bad, depending on how you look at it.

The Bad

Geralt really isn’t all that tough… in fact since we last adventured together, Geralt seems to have lost the majority of his ass kicking abilities. I remember us traversing through the swamps in The Witcher and fighting a giant stone golem, and absolutely dominating it because I had poured my points into my swordsmanship and was rewarded with some very flashy and brilliant flourishes of lethal swordplay. Basically I was a white haired Cuisinart. The system from the first game employed a sword, and style selection that could toggle depending on the enemy type. You had steel swords for humans, and silver for monsters, and stylistically you are given fast, strong, and group to take down enemies in those respective categories. However innovative, the heavily tweaked Aurora Engine that The Witcher was built on meant that most of that was queued actions instead of real time combat. This led to a disconnect in the combat that should have been easily rectified in switching over to a real time combat system Ala The Witcher 2. But here the implementation is shaky. Instead of combat depth you’re given light attack, and strong attack. Sure the sword system returns and keeps that simple added layer of strategy, but we’ve lost almost all of the tactical depth from the first game pretty much right off the bat.

Geralt of Rivia. Witcher. Lover of magical ladies. Pincushion.

You’ll also find that Geralt is fragile, and not really built for combat at all. Just a few slashes of the sword, or some well placed arrows will bring him down in a flash, and again just like the first game… you can’t recover health during fights. Though I should have mentioned it earlier, the potion mechanic returns from The Witcher. In that you can only drink potions when meditating. It added a sort of dramatic sense of preparation before any fight, and definitely a tier of strategy missing from other RPG games. But here it’s been tweaked, some for good, and some for the worse. You can now meditate anywhere, instead of only by campfire which means that any place is a good place for preparation in a pinch. You can still mix potions, and bombs while meditating, and of course drink said potions. But there’s a new toxicity mechanic that limits the amount of potions you can take in at one time unless you want to poison yourself. Take my hotkeyed potions away from RPG design so I have to be more forward thinking, and cautious… fine. But make it so my potions are basically tiny hand grenades for Geralt’s virtual liver, and I draw the line. It’s too much restriction on something that ends up being critical way to early in the game, and though it can be remedied by pouring stats into alchemy, you probably won’t as you’ll be too busy plugging those points into combat skills to keep you from being skinned alive by Scoiatel and Nilfgaardians.

It’s just too bad those points won’t really make much of a difference as combat will still really depend on your ability to dash around and take cheap hits at enemies. This is because as I mentioned before early on, you suck and take bullshit amounts of damage from the weakest of enemies. In order to balance that out, you will try to parry blows only to find out that parrying a sword is about as useful as being Toni Braxton in a year other than 1993, and you’ll resort to dodging around like a jackass to avoid being hurt by those sharp pointy things called swords. Surprisingly fighting monsters doesn’t suffer the same fate because of another critical design flaw in the combat. Monsters can’t block, but humans can and they do. And unlike you, when a human NPC parrys your sword, it deflects almost all of the damage. This wouldn’t be a problem if you could learn an attack early enough that breaks their block. But you can’t unless you resort to Geralt’s magical signs or tactics that don’t involve swords, like traps, bombs, and throwing daggers. Predictably though, those things don’t fare that well either. Traps take a century to set up, and are mostly hit and miss in effectiveness. Bombs work about half of the time, either because of an input delay that makes Geralt throw them about 15 seconds too late, or because the bombs effects seem to be controlled by a die roll. I mean how else do you explain a bomb that lights an enemy on fire when exploding 3 feet away from him, and then another of the same enemy type being hit directly in the face with the same bomb, basically shrugging it off and asking for a cup of coffee? As for daggers, they just suck, and are ridiculously expensive.

By the end of the game, when you are facing down a dragon at the top of a tower all by yourself, you’ll be panicked. Instead of feeling like you’ve spent the whole game training for this moment, you will feel certain dread at the fact that Geralt has thus far barely survived most of his encounters with men armed with little more than salty language, and you’re likely to become the equivalent of dragon trail mix. Did I also mention that the UI is terrible? Because it is.

The Glitchy

Remember in the paragraph above when I mentioned input lag when you throw bombs? Ok keep that sentence structure but replace bombs with everything else, and add the words sporadically. Sometimes attacks will suffer from the input lag, and sometimes it will be you trying to use a sign, or throw a dagger. But it’s there. Also Geralt’s movement is strangely unnatural at times. He seems to only be able to move in four directions, instead of a true 360 degree range of movement it never affects the gameplay itself, but it makes Geralt look like he’s weirdly snapping into place whenever he turns. You’ll also contend with strange performance bottlenecks, and other technical blips and bloops that will likely leave you scratching your head. My favorite is enemies completely vanishing during a fight, and it happened enough that I thought I had unlocked a secret Black Hole Vortex Sign or something, but no it was just glitchiness. These things are honestly contrivances but they happen a lot.

The Final Verdict

There they are! The elder council of barbecued meats!

I know I’ve talked about this game at great length, but I could still finds things to write about if I really wanted. The Witcher 2 is a good game for it’s story, and divergent approach to telling that story in a way that captures the best intended design impact possible for the genre. It’s an earmark of writing that would earn any film contemporary a golden statue of some kind, and it’s handled with care and surprising restraint given some of the more mature issues it touches. There is sex, there is racism, and there are some truly controversial things going on in this game that would send most censorship groups into a frenzy, but it’s truly adult presentation (read not just M rated, but a title designed with the gaming adult in mind.) has placed the game in a wonderful if onerous position at the top where it seems to escape most of those criticisms. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t a pain in the ass to enjoy that film caliber script because the game that is wrapped around it is rife with problems, both from a technical standpoint, and from a design standpoint.

Should you buy The Witcher 2? If you played the first one, you have to. The resolution of the story and Geralt’s incredibly animated memories will make fans of the first game put up with anything just to piece it all together. But for anyone hoping that this would be a good entry point into the game, you’re probably better of playing something far more accessible, like Demon Souls. That was a joke. Because this game is not very accessible. All my complaints aside though, The Witcher 2 is still going to end up exalted by the press, and most gamers and rightfully so. It challenges enough of the current RPG design standard that it’s a take no prisoners approach to game development. People (myself included) will ultimately recommended this game because at the end of the day, you will be more infinitely intrigued by everything it tries to do, than you will be disappointed by the things it didn’t. That’s why despite the tone of this review I can easily give this game a solid B. And there’s a solid chance Barack Obama played it.

That last part I’m not even close to making up.

The Witcher II 2.0 is available now for PC.
It was developed by CD Projekt RED, and published by CD Projekt, and Good Old Games/GOG.com