Witcher IGN Review - 8,5 :)

Here's the link:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/831/831264p1.html

I wonder about those technical issues: I haven't had a single crash or technical glitch worth mentioning so far. I have had a few occurrences of clunkiness or outright (minor) bugs in scripting, though.

I also wonder about the load times -- they're not *that* long IMO; much shorter than in Bioshock, and no worse than e.g. VtM:B, Half-Life 2, or KOTOR.

OTOH it seems that many people with ATI cards have issues of various degrees of gravity. Perhaps they didn't do enough testing on those?

The problem with the loading times is the frequency. If you walk around town a bit, entering and exiting buildings all the time (for example during the investigation quest), it becomes rather frustrating (to me at least).

Truth be told, we are probably dealing with the RPG of 2007 here. MotB might be a contender if it had been an actual game and not an add-on. Two Worlds was great I suppose, but so far The Witcher seems better.

I agree with most reviews; they usually point out the same strengths and (gameplay, story, etc) weaknesses (loading times, NPCs looking similar).

About the loading times - i don't find them long, altough i find them alot. Everywhere.

But this is not something that bothers me, altough, i see how people could be bothered with them.

For the few hours played i have had no problems, and the game is extremley fluid on my old rig. Using a Nvidia at heart.

I am so diplomatic.

Prime Junta said:

I wonder about those technical issues: I haven't had a single crash or technical glitch worth mentioning so far. I have had a few occurrences of clunkiness or outright (minor) bugs in scripting, though.

I also wonder about the load times -- they're not *that* long IMO; much shorter than in Bioshock, and no worse than e.g. VtM:B, Half-Life 2, or KOTOR.

OTOH it seems that many people with ATI cards have issues of various degrees of gravity. Perhaps they didn't do enough testing on those?

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I haven't had crashes also and the Witcher runs smoothly. I play on xp and downloaded patches before starting game.
But loading times are annoying - it still is the only major bad thing about this game for me. And I stopped to care about it.

And: "Do I love Shani or Triss?" - well Yen is your destnity Geralt, you moron . Hard to say she is your bless or your curse but you wanted that (the last short story in "The Last Wish"). ok, to be seriuos I won't have problem with that decision .

OR it could be that IGN didn't receive the usual blowjob from the devs and are looking for excuses to bring the score down. In fact, saying that a game has nasty bugs and crashes a lot is a very gentle way of slaying the game.

I can't recall any reviewer complaining about the inability to sort alchemical ingredients when reviewing Oblivion and that game used to crash a lot upon release (it still does).

Now I'm looking at Gamespot's first page of threads and I can't find a single post complaining about crashing, or any other bugs for that matter - let alone the 'big ones' that the IGN reviewer complains about but fails to describe.

Wait - I'm reading the comments to his review now, guess what? They are all playing a bug-free game!

I'm not saying that no-one experiences crashes, some people are bound to for a multitude of reasons: crappy OS (Vista), crappy hardware configuration (SLI), inability to keep their computers in shape and so on and so on. But none of these has anything to do with the game.

Eurogamer: Reviewer score 7/10
Reader Score 9.4/10

Strategy Informer: Reviewer score 7.7/10
Reader score 9.6/10

Total Video Games: Reviewer score 8/10
Reader score 9/10

IGN: Reviewer score 8.5/10
Reader score 9.4/10

Does anyone else detect a pattern here?

This has nothing to do with The Witcher really, it's more about the major sites publishing paid reviews (either that or they are idiots, you choose). That is also the reason I am making this post.

Or am I the only one here who remembers that Gamespy moron who took points off in his G3 review because he couldn't configure his mouse?

I vote "idiots who are easy to manipulate." Outright corruption in press is rarer than many people like to think -- as in, "here's your brown envelope, make sure the critiques look good."

However, I think that game reviewers are easier to manipulate into giving good reviews than, for example, automotive reviewers. They tend to be younger, more excitable, and more easily swayed by "exclusive access," bling-bling demos, and so on. More, the pressure to get the review out on release day is huge -- and you're much more likely to get butchered if you're perceived as being "out of line" with other reviewers.

For a game like The Witcher that easily takes 80 hours to play through properly -- *and* one that has two zero-day patches, with apparently some non-trivial issues affecting a significant minority of people left in -- there's no way they can do justice to the game. Either they're playing a buggy beta build, or they're rushing through it like mad; either way, the results aren't good.


OTOH with something like Oblivion, they have months of very careful PR management feeding them with "facts" they will be too rushed to properly investigate when writing the actual review (e.g. how radiant is Radiant?)

So, if you're doing a rushed play-through in order to get the review out, you're worried about not getting caught in a firestorm by having a different opinion than everyone else, what do you do?

(1) You take the industry-standard hype level as your baseline.
(2) You want to make sure that you won't get caught singing the praises of a game that doesn't get the fundamentals right -- i.e., that won't run properly, that has egregious UI bloopers, that performs like rubbish, etc. If you trust the studio/publisher to support the game with patches (i.e., it's a big, well-established, well-resourced one), you might go a bit easier on the bugs than if it's a new entrant (to you). Again, you don't want to be the one who made a zillion people buy it and then not be able to play it.
(3) You adjust the final score up or down a bit based on your general feeling of the game, which, of course, is largely determined by whether you like the genre to start with, whether you like long or short games, whether you weight action or story, and so on.
(4) Even if you have doubts about some much-hyped feature (e.g. Radiant again), you won't have the time to properly investigate it, so unless there's something completely unambiguous that you happen upon and can point at and say "look, it ain't working!" you will let it slide.

So, basically, a wily publisher who knows how the press works and has a decent budget to work with will have no trouble working up a great pre-release atmosphere, and will find very few reviewers cool-headed and dedicated enough to actually cut through it... until much later anyway.

But I don't think it's as simple as "paid reviews."

Look at the comments to his review, they keep getting better and better, several of them mentioning bribes too. It's a similar situation to the response to the Eurogamer's review.

It really does not matter much if it is bribing or idiocy, the thing is that those reviewers fail to reflect the general sentiment, this is professional journalism failing; something must be really very, very wrong.

Re bribes, I'd say don't judge everyone by your standards. Where I live you need to bribe doctors (on top of paying them), if you are to receive a decent treatment. I can easily imagine at least some sites being paid to publish good reviews.

Lethal Weapon said:

It really does not matter much if it is bribing or idiocy, the thing is that those reviewers fail to reflect the general sentiment, this is professional journalism failing

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But reflecting the general sentiment is not the purpose of impartial criticism or reportage. I believe it was the great dramatist Terence who wrote "quot homines, tot sententiae", which loosely translates as "opinions are like assholes, everyone has one". And a professional game review is nothing more than one man's opinions plucked from his asshole and dusted off for public perusal. Whether the general public agrees with it or not is irrelevant, its value lies in providing an impartial, informed and informative opinion.

Won't disagree with you, after all there are such things as 'folie a millions' and mass hysteria. But there is no need to generalize too much, at the subject at hand would you think that those reviews are 'impartial, informed and informative'? The Eurogamer review is downright retarded. The Strategy Informer reviewer recommends the game only to FPS fans :lol:, the IGN reviewer advises those who can't obtain the patch (= no Internet) to stay clear, forgetting that the game requires on-line activation anyway; his review past the first page screams 'don't buy', then gives a score of 8.5 etc etc

Now if you check metacritics, the game scores above 9/10 amongst players. Could it be folie a millions? Maybe but consider 2 facts: Part of a journalist's job is to voice the thoughts of the many and the will of the many is to be accepted (even if wrong) in democracies. Statistically speaking they are usually right too.

Shacknews has a nice Witcher review. It seems they actually played before writing.
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=650

Most of the professional game journalists today couldn't notice a good game even if it slapped them in the face. The problem is that all the big boys lick publishers to gain access first glances and other bs while small players like rpgwatch write what they want. For the big gaming sites previews have become more important that reviews which is absurd. Imagine any major news paper writing a huge preview about upcoming hollywood movie and when its released the critic wouldn't have balls to judge it fairly or he simply refuses to do it because he got or didn't get that deal with the film company.

Its cool to know about upcoming games, but with the cost of honest reviews? Hell no.

Luckily Metascore and small independent fansites like Rpgwatch serve us players first.

Well, movie reviewers ain't perfect either. Anyone remember Time magazine's review of "Titanic?" It ended with "Our verdict: dead in the water." They also predicted that it would be a colossal flop that would spell an end to Cameron's career.

Well, The Sims is one of the most successful game series ever created. That doesn't make it great though (depends on definition, of course). Personally I can't stand Titanic, so its success means little to me. If I had reviewed it, it would get a rock bottom score.

When asked my opinion of the movie "Titanic," I always say "yeah, there were a couple of good parts."

...It would seem that the same "good parts" were censored out of The Witcher.

Maylander said:

Well, The Sims is one of the most successful game series ever created. That doesn't make it great though (depends on definition, of course). Personally I can't stand Titanic, so its success means little to me. If I had reviewed it, it would get a rock bottom score.

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Sure there must be some objective criteria though. If everything was just a matter of personal preference it would make no sense to say 'Beethoven is a great composer'. Then there are some straight facts that are either true or false 'is the game buggy or not?' And lastly if you were to review Titanic or The Sims you would have to take into account your audience, otherwise your review would serve no purpose.

I enjoyed titanic..not the best film, but hell no rock bottom. Ok I admit its cheesy etc, but the whole ship sinking scene was awesome. lol since the opening credits I was waiting the moment when it will sink..spotting that iceberg made me nearly cheer outloud.

Lethal Weapon said:

at the subject at hand would you think that those reviews are 'impartial, informed and informative'?

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Nope, I'd rate The Witcher reviews I've read between poor and appalling. It's surprising how many RPG reviews are assigned to writers with blatantly little interest in RPGs. The problem with games journalism is that it's quite an immature, in all senses of the word, industry. It lacks established professional standards and the age range of its employees is skewed towards youth and inexperience. There exists an air of hysterical excitability where every game is either "OMG teh best gaem EVAR" or "suxxxxor" and popular genres are shown favouritism in the ratings.

@Lethal Weapon: you're confusing the responsibilities of the professional journalist versus the professional critic. While, in simplified terms, you are correct that part of a journalist's job is to reflect and summarize the "feelings of the people", this is certainly not the job of the critic. The job of the critic is to provide "the people" with an informed and insightful opinion on a topic or piece of work in order to give them something to think about in making the choice as to where they stand on said topic or whether said piece of work is something they'd be interested in experiencing. Very different jobs. Very different purposes.

Jabberwocky said:

When asked my opinion of the movie "Titanic," I always say "yeah, there were a couple of good parts."
...It would seem that the same "good parts" were censored out of The Witcher.

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Pefect! My thoughts exactly.