The Witcher - Presentation @ Twenty Sided

Shamus Young continues his experience with The Witcher, this time discussing performance and presentation. As before, Shamus has nothing positive to say, although the article is marred by an inaccurate description of the interface and complaints about terminology clearly discussed in the manual. Here we go - on performance:

So I fire up The Witcher and it’s the same damn nightmare from Oblivion all over again. This game does not look appreciably better than Oblivion. Okay, the character models look better, but the Oblivion models were notoriously ugly. You didn’t need technology to improve on those. You just needed decent art direction.
But The Witcher runs like an inebriated John Madden trying to run in the Boston marathon while pulling a busload of other John Maddens. The game is unplayable at the default settings. If I turn everything down I can get the game to look very terrible and still stutter quite a bit. Let me make this clear: At these settings the game looks far worse than Oblivion and yet still somehow runs slower. Considering that Oblivion was an appalling glutton when it came to GPU cycles, that’s really saying something. What is the game doing with my processor? Building fractals? Trying to find the last digit of Pi?

Click to expand...

More information.

This guy sorta sounds like a moron.....and I'm being nice saying that....the game runs fine on my machine.

Don't know what he's playing it on, but I never had any of those problems at highest settings.

Broken link btw...

Is he making stuff up just for a chance to use his great John Madden joke? C'mon! What's he running the game on, a 5 year old laptop?

Bugger. The correct link:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1793#more-1793

He has a couple of valid points. On the other hand, this sounds like a "I'm going to elaborate on the most tenuous points because I've decided I hate this game".

Geralt is a nasty and alienating manwhore, and I hate him. Full stop. Playing for twelve more peasant-screwing hours isn’t going to make me like the filthy geezer.
[...]
I am going to beat the hell out of this ugly chore of a game.

Click to expand...

One of those "let me tell you how much I'm going to hate this game" articles.

Agreed

This guy must have played 10-15 minutes, then decided to form an opinion based on that material.
The game runs great, maybe he just needs to upgrade

My first thought was exactly the same as the first commenter's. This guy sounds like a moron. Admittedly, the game did run extremely jittery on my machine before I upgraded my RAM and video card, but those needed upgrading anyway. Now it runs like a charm - smooth as silk.

Besides, even if the game isn't "technically" better-looking than Oblivion, didn't he notice the FAR superior art style? You can look out at any scenic vista in the Witcher - at the clouds stretching off toward the horizon, the trees forming clumps on distant hills and swaying in the breeze - and it's almost breathtaking. A hundred times more realistic and atmospheric than Oblivion. Of course, it's all mostly made of skyboxes and cannot be explored like Oblivion's, but you get my point.

But eh, this guy's just a techno-dork with no artistic appreciation. He's only concerned about how many mip-maps the thing has, not how beautiful it looks when you step back and suspend your disbelief for a while.

I know I just had a huge rant on this the other day, but this is such a perfect illustration of the problem that I can’t resist. I’m within the system requirements (on the low side, but I’m still in) and I have to make the game look horrible just to make it quasi-playable, and even then it chokes and pukes all over itself when I get into a fight. (You know, when frame rate is most crucial.) The phrase “Minimum System Requirements” has morphed from its original meaning and has come to denote the minimum system on which you can install the game without it killing anybody or starting a fire. But even if I had the hardware to run the game, it doesn’t look that much better than the last generation of games. Which means we’re now spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade our machines so just to run in place, visually.

Was that the part you view as legitamate Dhruin? Because yeah, I agree with him there. And he did have a point about the loading screens. But...

This is on top of other inexplicable slowdowns, like that fact that the entire game locks up for two seconds when you hit the map button.... You click on someone. Then the screen fades out as it enters “dialog” mode. Then it fades in on the person you’re talking to. Then there’s this pause of a half second while they stare at you blankly. Then they speak, “Hi there.” Then there’s another pause. Then they wave. Then the view cuts to Geralt. Pause. “Hello to you as well.” Pause. Change view back to the NPC. Pause. “What can I do for you?” Pause. Back to Geralt. Then the dialog menu appears. It’s like seeing a power point presentation of the conversation.

I'm no computer expert, but it sounds like he's got an extremely slow processor, not so much the usual video card issues. I've never seen problems like this.

What the heck is Toxicity? There is a bar for it right under the health meter. The tooltip explains that “Excessive Toxicity adversely affects Geralt”, which I managed to deduce all by myself. But how does it affect him? What makes Toxicity go up and how do I decrease it? Rest? A potion? A tryst with a bored housewife? More questions come to mind: Do I earn XP for killing monsters? How much damage am I doing? How can I tell if I’m using the right fighting style for the given monster? Despite all the screens and tutorial messages in the game I never felt like I knew how things worked.

...And there's where he hit 'moron' level. In fact there's no excuse for that sort of stupidity. I would even feel stupid for pointing out to such an individual that there is a game manual for those sort of questions.

and at this point the game needs to come up with something really spectacular to counterbalance the slow start. After this much drudgery, the game would have to let me relive the alleyway scene from Spider-Man, where Toby Mcguire beats up the thugs and then hangs upside down with his mask halfway off so I can kiss him.

Does anyone find the Toby Mcguire analogy as disturbing as I do?!?

Even in that first paragraph you quoted there are mistakes.

For instance, minimum system requirements have always translated to "below this point, you have no hope." It's the minimum specifications you need to be able to get from the start of the game to the finish. Look to the recomended specifications to find out what you need to actually have fun doing it. That is how it has always been since games started coming out for the IBM Clones.

Jabberwocky said:

Was that the part you view as legitamate Dhruin? Because yeah, I agree with him there. And he did have a point about the loading screens. But...

Click to expand...

Not really. Across the two articles so far, I agree that the sex cards are silly (although I disagree with how important that is), loading times and (some) stilted dialogue.

As far as I can see, Shamus doen't reveal the specs he is using, or whether he has patched. I've run pre-release code on a P4 2.8 / 6800GT (surely a modest gaming computer) a P4M 1.7 notebook with x600 video (surely inadequate) and my new laptop. It was clunky on the old laptop - but still playable - so I find it hard to reconcile the performance he describes on any sort of system someone would expect to play modern games on, based on my experience. I think it's hyperbole, driven by his desire to "beat the hell" out of the game.

Everthing else ranges from a stretch to misrepresentation. The 15 "sub panels" are actually tooltips, for example. Could the interface be improved? Absolutely - yet Shamus misses the most egregious problems.

For an articulate programmer who loves RPGs (including PnP), I think it's a bit embarrassing to not understand many of the questions he raises - Toxicity, the right sword style, XP for killing monsters...since Shamus is clearly smarter than that, I can only assume it's hyperbole for the sake of meeting his goal.

In other words, a lot of exaggeration (and ill tempered defensiveness in the comments) to justify the course of action he decided from the beginning.