The Witcher Enhanced Edition

Image via Wikipedia

I thought I was pretty up to date with Bioware stuff, but I guess I was wrong. The Witcher went completely under my radar and I never knew of the game till just a week ago or so. I was down at Sim Lim Square, getting more RAM for my new PC (oh yes it’s now running on 4GB dual channel). Since I was there, I thought I might as well swing by my regular game shop and check out what’s new over there.

Crysis Warhead and The Witcher caught my eye. Hence, I came home with 2 new games 🙂

First off – the studio that did the game is Polish (ie, from Poland). Hence the original dialogue, story and so on are all in Polish. It is pretty obvious when playing the game, because when the characters spoke, the English sentences sometimes sounds a little…. weird. Translations usually have these kind of problems.

However that doesn’t really detract from the game itself. As far as I can tell, the story is pretty interesting. Witchers are monster hunters for hire, and usually are mutants. Hence they are often scorned by people and are caled “freaks”. The story tells of a witcher, Geralt, who has lost his memory. The introduction movie sequence shows you that he is a witcher of some renown, as he’d been able to cure a princess of her curse of being a monster previously.

Some time passed, perhaps years, and the next scene shows Geralt running from something or someone. He collapses, and is found by fellow Witchers, who bring him back to a Witcher’s haven. When Geralt wakes up, he had lost his memory. That is where the game starts, and that is also where the tutorial starts too.

The video clip above just shows a small section of the game. This is in Chapter 1, right after the Prologue is completed. I have just made it into a small village and have saved someone’s life. In the clip, all I’m doing is just running around and exploring. By this time, I am already about 4 hours into the game.

The game is supposed be running on Bioware’s Aurora engine, but a heavily modified version of it. At first glance, the screen looks nothing like Neverwinter Nights. Nor the inventory screen, nor the skill tree. However, during fights, familiar things start to appear such as the damage figures floating above the character’s head (or the monsters’). I even went into the game editor and discovered some default scripts in there still had “Neverwinter Nights” as the name of the script.

The version of the game I got was the “Enhanced” version. It comes with the original Witcher story, and 2 more “modules”. “Modules” is a pen & paper term for “adventure”, based on the Dungeons and Dragons rules. Right now I’m just playing through the main story. I’ll get around to the 2 extra stories after I am done with the main story. The other disks in the box are 2 more audio CDs of soundtrack from the game, as well as a music CD of similar music that inspired the soundtrack for The Witcher.

It also comes with a novella and a paper map. Usually I never look at paper maps in game boxes, preferring not to spoil my enjoyment of the RPG.

As I said, the game looks pretty interesting. You can check out the links below to get a more in-depth look at the game itself.

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