The Witcher - "Making of" Day 3 & First Reviews
 

Day 3 of The Witcher's "Making of" series of videos is up at GameTrailers:
…and the official site has posted news of the first European reviews:
Thanks MikeZZ, who also sent this in.
More information.

Sweet! Love to see something positive about a PC only game once and awhile.

I hope witcher 2 wont be consolized too much.

Another year? PC's will be pretty far ahead by then. The 360 will be dusted soon and the PS3 probably will have lost all support.

Does the game have all voice dialogue or does it include text-only too? Just wondering.

EDIT:
Apparently it has 100% voice dialogue:

For long there has been discussion on the major drawbacks of all voice dialogue (i.e fallout/oblivion). I guess witcher isnt that perfect after all.

I thought I read somewhere that you could enable text so you can click through dialog, I'll probably only enable that feature for the second play through though.

You can interrupt the dialogue by clicking. Personally, I'm quite happy with partial voiceovers but you won't get too many of those for games that aspire to be AAA titles, because the broader market doesn't find it "cinematic".

Hm… the complete voiceovers in the Gothic games took a big part in making the overall atmosphere so good (at least in the original german version ; - ).

it also contributed much to the atmosphere in the english version: remember Mud or diego, or the lonbg talk with Lee or the first time you speak with xardas? :D

GameStar gave it 73%.

Could you Gorath translate for those non-german what they liked and what they didnt like in the game?

There were few things that lowered the score considerably:

"balance" 4/10
"atmosphere" 7/10
"Operation" 5/19

EVALUATION
Diagram pretty architecture
beautiful light effects, day night changes
Animations
exchangeable interiors
Nose
8/10
Sound good speakers
tendencyful music
atmospheric effects
no Surround sound
not lip-synchronously
8/10
Balance three degrees of difficulty
Charm and Alchemie unnecessarily
Group style too powerfully
strange cube AI
4/10
Atmosphere alive play world
often illogically
misleading translation
arbitrary level delimitations
Nose
7/10
Operation two control modes…
… however none perfectly
complicated interface
kleinteiliges inventory
Load times
5/10
Extent long play time
in great quantities orders
Repetitions of level
always-same character models
badly play world limited
8/10
Quest/Handlung hid tasks
multipart Quests
exciting basic action
Decisions and consequences
partly konfus
9/10
Character system numerous talents
Specialization possible
regular of ascents
Effects not always clearly
8/10
Combat system Tactics necessarily
good mixture from thinking and Action
hakelig
no remote fight
only five charms
8/10
Items spassige Alchemie
massively added
Weapons improvable
few articles of equipment
8/10

Thx zakhal!

Its just a rough babelfish translation. You can translate the entire review with it:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Just stick the http address into the babel and it does all the work.

Yeah, you probably need to replace all 'noses' with 'bugs' ;)

I wonder if the review version was patched. There was a patch mentioned somwhere just yesterday.

I wont be betting my head on it, but from what I know patch should be online tomorrow.

I have received my copy of Witcher on Monday and I am having a good time and I am not forcing myself to play what was the case with NWN2 (to a lesser extent) or Gothic 3 (wasted time).

f anyone has questions please ask them and I will give my best to provide an accurate response. But take into consideration that I am just few hours in to the game so far.

How much GameStar gave to Borelivion? If it would be more than 70% we have nothing to talk about here…

Gamer.no, one of the biggest sites in Norway also has a review out. They gave it 7/10, and said it was a great roleplaying experience, if somewhat unstructured (questwise; sometimes you lose quests because you progress the game. Not always easy to know in which order to do things to get it all done). Also confirmed that the game is very large, and were talking about 100+ hours of playtime.

So what didnt they like in the game so much as to give it 7/10 :) ?

It's not from a big name developer that pays for lots of ads and invites you to fancy press events with free cookies, T-shirts, beer, and girls? And its not being hyped by everyone else so you don't feel stupid giving it less than 9/10…
[/cynic]

I don´t want to translate all the details because this article is only an excerpt from their upcoming issue, which subscribers should receive tomorrow.

The reviewer thinks the concept is great and the focus on an adult audience was refreshing. The priorities work: graphics, combat (minor problems), side quests, main characters, and especially forcing the player to choose a side when he makes decisions.
The devil is in the details though. The reviewer calls the implementation "sloppy" and "insufficient". The interface is uncomfortable, there´s a lot of walking despite (useless!) teleports, "exorbitant loading times", lots of bugs, and lots of illogic dialogs and story parts. Many NPCs are clones, key NPCs are jumping from one emoption to the other without reason.

I wouldn´t overvalue a single review though. It´s only one opinion.

No. They used the official gold master version they have received from Atari, of course together with the usual written test clearance. Tests on other sites and in other mags are probably based upon the same version.
GameStar linked to two other articles at the end of the review. One with an overview over all the bugs they encountered, which are mainly B and C bugs IMHO. The other includes an excerpt of the temporary fix list of the upcoming patch. It included 219 solved issues at the time the GameStar article was written.

Hmmf. Well, I'm pretty confident that the version North American reviewers are playing is in a better state than the one in Europe… the Euros got a pretty early version, and with the patch, the North American guys also have the benefit of a ton of extra fixes.

It is worth checking user comments at Gamestar.de - mostly they are criticizing the Gamestar for being much to harsh for The Witcher.

And when it comes to that norwegian site… well, sometimes good games get crappy notes because another big competing site gave it maximum note. Another big competing site was called "the biggest", so the first one felt angry and cut the final game note. It's just a sample, nothing more, of course… :>

It wouldn´t be the first time a print mag slaughters an RPG just "because they can". The difference to other games is that GameStar hyped The Witcher and that the test was written by their resident RPG expert, who usually is a very analytical guy.

But who cares about print mags and their deadlines. Dhruin will tell you how good The Witcher really is. ;)

The weaknesses mentioned in the Gamer review:
- Certain balancing issues combined with a fairly simpleminded AI makes the group attack a bit overpowered. Sort of similar to Gothic 3, with relatively passive enemies during group combat.
- Great graphics, but at a cost - load times and so on become an issue.
- Good voice acting, but too many similar voices all over the place. Not enough variety.
- "Clones" walking around everywhere, even certain central NPCs look so similar they might be close relatives.
- Unstructured question, meaning you might miss out on many quests if you suddenly make progress without doing all quests. Hard to understand which order to do quests in.

Other than those few weak sides, there's basically two full pages of positive comments though, so overall they say it's a very solid RPG experience. They're also very happy with the fact that the world is very "serious"/mature.

The patch is released today (120 mb).

I think some parts could be lost in translation, some problems coulb be result just of diffreant culture or no kowledge about world created by Sapkowski.

Another review from Germany - Online Welten - 84%

http://www.onlinewelten.com/reviews,…underkind.html


Some earlier Spanish rewievs:
8,8/10
http://www.3djuegos.com/index.php?zo…go=the-witcher

8.5/10
http://www.meristation.com/v3/des_an…79862&idj=5605


If think the most interesting to read are first impresions of players:
http://www.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?topic=2273.15
http://www.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?topic=2370.0

From those what I read, only concerns&distrubs me (personally) long loading.

And here are complaints:
http://www.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?topic=2343.0
http://www.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?topic=2445.0

Where is that damn postman, should be here yesterday>:(

A few sites are marking the game down because it's not always obvious how to do a quest, or what Geralt should do next. Apparently figuring things out for yourself is not next-gen. I fear Oblivion has rotted the brains of much of the video games media; mindlessly following that arrow around for too long is dangerous.

Based on the impressions I've read so far it looks like a pretty fun game. You have to find books and research monsters and potion ingredients, figure out how to convince people to help you; it sounds like there's a lot of 'figure it out for yourself' in this game. It's aimed at adults, so that should be considered a good thing.

Looks like those reviews are made by some funny little kids which have to be held by hand when crossing the street. I am playing Witcher for three days now and most of those cons are just silly imo. We are talking about RPG here, not Crysis. Fallout 2 had so many bugs you couldn't count them, it has funny graphics, tons of clones, just like Witcher has, and it is still one of the best of the best. Good RPG is about story, characters relations, background, dialogs, vibe, not some fancy mambo-jumbo like Borelivion ffs. This GameStar magazine gave Borelivion 90% at the time, so please, don't give me that newspaper as an oracle of cRPGs, I beg you. If you really wanna know what kind of RPG experience The Witcher is, find a review written by someone who knows what he/she writes about…

I suggest RPGWatch and Gamebanshee for instance… I really hope Brother None will review The Witcher someday… ~_~

:D;) Oh, where is that big red arrow which show me what to pick and who talk with?……..ehh

From what I've read the game sounds refreshing. Just like Crolug said "Fallout 2 had so many bugs you couldn't count them, it has funny graphics, tons of clones, just like Witcher has, and it is still one of the best of the best."

I've been waiting for a game that doesn't hold your hand through each and every quest. Bring back games like the Quest for Glory series and fallout. You know games where you actually had to use your brain.

New reviews:

Eurogamer 7/10
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php…d=86156&page=1

Gameswelt 83% (90% with 1.1 patch)
http://gameswelt.de/artikel/index.php?id=2887&page=4
http://gameswelt.de/artikel/index.ph…887&page=fazit

Next review from jeuxvideo.com: 16/20
http://www.jeuxvideo.com/articles/00…tcher-test.htm

I"ll quote the French guy from offical forum:

"They said it's a good game but the thing that annoyed them the most was the loading time which are a bit too long, and that there are too much clones.

"The Witcher est assurément un très bon jeu de rôle. Il rate juste l'excellence de peu, mais pour un premier jeu c'est vraiment prometteur. Affaire à suivre, donc.

The last lines. It said that The Witcher miss a "perfect score" (because of the two points quoted above) but that for a first game, it's really promising. "A case to follow" (not sure that means something in english …)
They totally like the fighting and the alchemy.

So … Good review "

Clones are not a problem for me, they may look the same, but have different voices, very nice acting attached to them as well (in Polish version that is), and the story and dialogs are the most important factor here which keep me exited like all the time :). And yes, the loading takes places a lot, but it is sadly rather unavoidable because of the Aurora, but sometimes I think they are not that bad thing, I have time to take a breath… :D

Buy this game asap and have goddamn well deserved fun!