My gaming Witchlist
The last couple of days I’ve gained a new interest for The Witcher, and as such started eyeing up it’s sequel as well. It also caused me huge grief as certain parts causes huge (and I mean HUGE) memory leaks that would cause my PC to crash, until I figured out a way to handle it somewhat well. And keep this in mind when I still completely recommend it for play. Now, as the sequel is coming up and I’ve kept myself somewhat ‘clean’, and also the fact it doesn’t seem to be much info available, I decided to sketch up my own ‘witchlist’ (see what I did there?) for the game. Three points I’d really see improved/added, and three things to keep.
Three things to improve/set on fire:
1. Useful extra weapons
The entire thing with a Witcher is that they’re masters of swords. They have different stances for fighting utilizing this, and a huge part of the character improvement section is making your sword combos bigger and more lethal. And you don’t only use swords, but also signs, which is the games very limited combat magic. But why then, does the game include weapons that you can’t use with above said styles and moves?
I do realise that of course not everyone can wield a witcher-worthy weapon, but I think it’s bad when the extra slots on your character becomes glorified holding spots for something sellworthy. The most useful extra weapon? A torch. Yes, that’s right, a wooden stick is your best alternative weapon. And it’s only useful because you set it on fire. And don’t fight with it.
2. More realistic character interactions
So I’m all for characters in a game looking more lively. A normal person shuffles about a bit when talking, being nervous, wanting to punch you in the face, that sort of thing. From what I know however, unless there is something really amazing happening, people don’t tend to focus much on things by their sides, or say, in the sky.
I can understand if a giant, pink hippopotamus in a ballerina skirt dropping haiku’s like raplyrics flew by, that’d definitely make you look away from a conversation. Just randomly looking away mid-conversation? Is he insinuating he wants a massage? Does he think you should take a shower? Maybe he saw a squirrel? Who knows.
3. Less strict enviroments
This is a technical limitation, and I understand that. I really do. The game is already big, it’s pushing…some kind of graphical limit, and why the hell would you render all that wheat anyway when you could spend it on oversized lady-goodies instead? I’ll tell you why.
If I have walk three times the distance just to get around a completely normal field of wheat fenced off by a wooden fence, or spend five minutes trying to navigate around a swamp bush that’s just a bit too big, I will set it on fire and burn it to the ground. Geralt, the main protagonist, has a sword. He’s got a fire spell. He’s got a damn wooden stick, so he clearly doesn’t have problem with maimed trees. Unless he wants to get it on with a dryad. In that case, he supplies the stick anyway.
Three things to keep/I’d want to see in bigger quantity:
1. Reasonable breast-sizes
I’ve talked about this before, and I will re-iterate. I love the lady humps, the mammaries, the funbags. And yes, before anyone says anything, there are plenty of the well-endowed medieval ladies we’ve all come to know and…drool over. But by all that is holy, this game has girls with reasonable breast sizes, and one of them is even a main character!
What this means is that the game is actually stepping away from the common ‘sexification’ of women (and then complete knocks that achievement out of the ballpark with the sex cards) and brings some diversity. We all do love the plump ladies, but give the slender ones some loving as well. Which appropriately enough, is something you can totally do in this game. Hayooo!
2. Gold mattering even late in the game
A classic RPG tendency is that as your power grows, so does your treasury, and at some point gold seizes to be important and more ‘that number that decreases slightly whenever you buy something’. In the Witcher however, they make it count. I was smugly making my way to Act 2 of the game with 3000 gold pieces and felt pretty damn good about myself. What then? Oh, I had to pay someone 200 involving a quest that is absolutely necessary. You started a new chapter, and due to the way the game is built, you gain knowledge of plants and monsters via books. How much are they you say? Anywhere between 100-600. And at this point there’s you need a minimum of 3 to even do any quests.
The kicker? The chest armor from the blacksmith costing a total of 5000. But it’s only chest armor you say? This is a game where there’s maybe 3 armor upgrades in the entire game, and that’s one of them. All of a sudden I found myself scrambling like a madman.
3. A non-clunky journal
A lot of games has the tendency to dump story and exposition in some kind of information center, like a journal, and if you don’t take time reading all of it, consider yourself blind.
The Witcher walks the balance between being relevant, useful and short to the point, while still having a good story focus. Putting the quest log in here together with the rest instead of keeping it separated is actually genial, as it minimizes the moving from window to window, and opens up the ability to casually read a quest to then be able to click and read up on the character the quest is about. It also does the really important thing of not having the game completely punching you in the face for not studying it for hours and hours.
I do hope they remake it a little bit, just with small touches and niches. For example, it would be nice to have a cross reference section where say, if I’m looking up an alchemy recipe, it’ll suggest me what kind of ingredients I’ll need for a specific potion, and point out what monsters I can slay or flowers to pick, without having to jump between three tabs to do so.
Let’s face it, any game where a big part of the gameplay is drudging through page after page of text just isn’t that great, and if I wanted that, I could’ve picked up a book. It does store all your sex cards though, so it could be like a book where randomly every 56th page there’s a picture of a pinup-girl that drops out. Although that’d make me tempted to just shake the whole thing to get all the pictures straight away, and that wouldn’t be very fun, now would it?
For those of you who don’t know what the sex cards I’m referring to are I’d direct you to The Witcher wikipedia sex card list. As you can see there’s quite a big list of…wow, there was a lot more of than than I thoug…I don’t have some of these. That means I’d have to do another playthrough and…be right back.
