[Dev Null]

I am - right at this moment, as I type this - playing The Witcher (the enhanced edition.) At this late remove, I don't expect anyone cares what I think about the game, but felt compelled to jot down a few notes on a blog all the same. I'm going to repost them here in case, somehow, this desperately needed bit of feedback hasn't made it to the designers yet.

I'd heard good and bad things about it when it first came out. Its an RPG, and the moral choices you make in the game are supposed to have something like real consequences, so I liked the sound of that. But there were complaints about the graphics and bugs and long loading screens, and life's too short, so I left it alone.

But here's a twist: the publishers of the game apparently responded to the criticism. They released a new version of the game that supposedly improved the graphics (not just the detail, but the style) and fixed (most of - you never get them all) the bugs, and removed a bunch of loading screens and shortened the others. So I like to reward that kind of responsiveness, and it did sound like an interesting game, so I picked it up. (The fact that it was on sale for like $10 on gog.com, as a marketing stunt to drum up interest in the sequel, certainly didn't hurt.)

And I've really enjoyed it so far. Its a dark story, and if you assume that pretty much everyone is a bastard you won't be far wrong, but your choices do seem to make some sort of difference to the plot. And the character you play is only really likeable at a stretch, but if you play him as more good guy than bad then you can fill in around the gaps with your imagination and not hate him. Something must be working, anyways, because unlike most games of the sort I actually _cared_ enough to _try_ to make him likeable by doing the right things. The combat gameplay is kind of simplistic and feels like it was designed for a console (which is odd, because I think it was native PC, and don't think it was ever ported to a console) but it works well enough.

But here's the thing. Long about the end of act 3, when you've been playing the game for just about exactly as long as I have, and you've got a feel for things and how they work, suddenly, out of the blue, it all comes screeching to a halt. The myriad parallel quests I was working on are all obviously stalled with things like "so-and-so needs to think about this come back later" kind of messages. The only quest I have anything concrete to do in is to go to a party with some old friends; cue backstory montage. No! Wait! Instead of showing me some cutscene from out of my character's history, they instead decided to torture me with the most tedious, makework, obnoxiously pointless serious of tasks ever invented by adventuregamekind. First I have to invite someone to the party... by walking around town and asking everyone until I find the couple of people I have the option of attempting to invite. Then I have to talk to every merchant in the game until I find some very specific types of alcohol I'm supposed to bring. Then I have to talk to the hostess - but only when she's at home, and there's no indication of when she'll be at home, or why I can't talk to her about the party when she's not at home. Then you have to get into her apartment past her landlady, who ambushes you automatically as you walk in the door, and engages you in a randomly selected conversation _only about 1/5 of which have ANY correct answer which will get her to let you in!_ Yes, thats right. You just keep trying over and over til you're lucky enough to be allowed in. No skill. Doesn't matter what you say. No influence on the outcome at all. Just bang your head against the door til one or the other gives. Then they get you horribly drunk - which in this game makes any activity, including walking, _incredibly_ slow and painful - and then they force you to creep around in this near-paralytic state to perform some fetch-it type quests, because apparently the game designer thought it would be funny to watch drunk people stagger incompetently around. Slowly. Very, very slowly. Hope they enjoyed it, as I certainly didn't. Then they force you to leave but tell you that you have to come back again - and again you have to talk to your hostess, but only at home, with no idea when she'll be home, and presumably all because it lets them force you to smash your head repeatedly against the Random Landlady Crapshoot every. Single. Time. You want to check.

This is the worst segment of any adventure-style game I've ever played. I'm serious. I'm not just saying that because I'm currently spitting lava over the fact that I just waded through it (most of it, and there'd better not be much more or I'll never know how this ends...) I played Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide. I got the Babel fish. I've paid my dues. I am trying very very hard not to let this one passage ruin the entire game for me (remember? Up the top there I was quite enjoying this thing...) and I'm sure taking a moment to vent here will help with that. But wow; in whose twisted dreams from past the edge of sanity did anyone ever imagine that this sequence would be fun to play? Incorrect. Guess again. Maybe if you try the exact same plan 5 or 6 more times the landlady'll randomly let you in one time. But somehow I doubt it.

[Corylea]

I loved the party in Chapter 2. But that's because I'd done things differently than you have.

Shani is an important character, so I'd gone to visit her several times already. That means that I'd already gotten past her landlady, and I already knew that she would only talk to me at home. I already knew when to find her at home.

You're supposed to invite a FRIEND to the party. It never occurred to me to try to invite random people to the shindig -- why would you do that? Who has acted like a friend of yours? I wanted to invite Zoltan to the party and did so. Lots of people want to invite Siegfried, and you can invite him just fine. (It turns out that you can also invite Carmen, but you have to pay her.) There's nothing at all random about this -- Geralt doesn't have a lot of friends at this point in the game, and Zoltan and Siegfried are the obvious choices.

You should be saving strong alcohol to make potions with, so I already had two of the three kinds of liquor that Shani wanted. As for the third, you don't need to go to every merchant in the game. Would you go to a blacksmith to buy a drink? Of course not! Would you go to a book seller? Get real. To someone who sells jewelry and flowers? Don't be silly. You go to the inn, where they sell food and drink. It's the clear and obvious place to go to buy a drink.

In other words, they're not random tasks, to be solved in a random manner, at all. If you stop and think for a second, everything makes perfect sense.

The Witcher is like that, in general. It repays observation and thought. That's one of the things I like best about it.

So, keep that in mind for the rest of the game. Pay attention to what's going on around you, and think about what makes sense. The Witcher will repay careful attention with a depth and richness that few other games can match.

[Dev Null]

Yeah, I'd been to see Shani half a dozen times already too - both at work and at home. She'd never been difficult to find nor reticent to talk about the things I needed to talk about before, so I had no reason to pay attention to the times she was in one place or the other. And yes, I'd been through the annoying random landlady quizshow the other times I'd been, but knowing its there doesn't help you any - you have to do it every time anyways. So after the second time I went to check if Shani was home after the party, when it took me a full dozen tries to luck into the right mood with the loony bat in the basement, I just _stayed_ in Shani's room til she got home; sitting in front of the computer reading a book, and ducking downstairs and back up every hour or so of gametime in case I needed to leave for her to turn up. It was less painful than going away, finding someplace they'd let me meditate, and coming back. Generally speaking, if your players are willing to sit in front of the computer reading a book in order to avoid one of your "challenges", its probably not a real fun part of the game. Made me feel like a creepy stalker too, sitting in her room waiting for her to turn up.

I'd been _using_ the alcohol to make potions, so I didn't have any of the 3. Not all 3 were for sale at the tavern. Maybe because I'd already bought them out, but how was I to know to save it?

And none of that explains why they get you so staggeringly drunk that it takes painful minutes to walk across a room, then send you downstairs to dodge the mad landlady and riffle through all her cupboards looking for pickles. Having consequences to getting drunk in the game is kind of cool, but forcing me to get drunk and then forcing me to suffer the consequences is just torture. And then she catches you and throws you out and won't let you back in under _any_ circumstances, no matter how random, because you're drunk, so go back to your last save game and start the whole party again.

I should add that I did enjoy the party itself. Hanging with Shani, Zoltan, and Dandelion was cool, and a better way to get me some backstory than just making me watch a cutscene. But the landlady and the forced drunk walking weren't challenging or fun at all.

[Corylea]

Yeah, I hate it when the game forces you to get drunk, too. You might want to make a Wives Tears potion to keep on hand -- it cures drunkenness instantly. (If you don't know the recipe for it yet, you can look it up in the Witcher Wiki and just make it anyway.)

You might want to check out J_Slash's wonderful Stuff that Makes Geralt's Life Easier mod. The mod allows you to access your Inn storage anywhere, which saves a lot of running back and forth, and it allows you to meditate anywhere.

Dev Null said:

I'd been through the annoying random landlady quizshow the other times I'd been, but knowing its there doesn't help you any - you have to do it every time anyways.

Actually, there are a couple of ways to get in good with Shani's landlady. If you do one of those things, then you don't have to go through the crap with her every time; instead, she greets you with friendliness at the door and lets you go on up to Shani's room.

Dev Null said:

I should add that I did enjoy the party itself. Hanging with Shani, Zoltan, and Dandelion was cool, and a better way to get me some backstory than just making me watch a cutscene. But the landlady and the forced drunk walking weren't challenging or fun at all. ›››

I love the party. Geralt is alone a lot, and most people greet him with fear or hatred, so I found the camaraderie of the party to be a really refreshing change. Every time I play The Witcher, I look forward to the party. I'm glad you persevered enough to get there.

[Dev Null]

Meditate anywhere? I'm sold already; thanks for the tip!