As the game begins, Geralt is clearly skilled with a blade, but like any good RPG, he amasses experience and gains in skill. Leveling up gives Geralt the opportunity to amass new skills, dubbed Talents, which you can apply to Geralt’s base attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Endurance and Intelligence) to his spell-casting ability or to his skill with a sword. As you increase the sword skills you’ll see Geralt execute more and more complex moves during combat.
Magic in the game comes in two forms, the more traditional mystical form and the use of alchemy to brew potions. Developing your skill in either form is not strictly necessary, but you’ll find the game much easier to navigate if you take the time to collect alchemical ingredients for potions and learn to make efficient use of the spells at your disposal. This isn’t much of a chore with magic, which merely requires that you activate one of a small number of spells and then right-click to cast it. Alchemy gets a bit more complex in that the world is loaded with ingredients necessary to brew potions. At any given time half of your inventory, or more, will be taken up with these ingredients, which does seem a bit overboard. At the beginning of the game, you’ll have access to the formulae for a few different types of potions. But as you amass knowledge from NPCs and books, your knowledge of both formulae and ingredients will grow.
That brings up another novel part of The Witcher: the accumulation of knowledge. RPGs have long included books you could read to learn about the game world or otherwise expose yourself to vital information. The Witcher really takes the accumulation of information to another level, as reading books in this game is vital to amassing knowledge of plants, creatures, NPCs… well, everything really. Any vital knowledge Geralt accumulates from either books or people is logged in his journal, which is nicely organized into a bestiary, quest log, NPC log, a traditional glossary and a glossary of alchemical ingredients.
This journal is updated each time you encounter new information that you might need to remember. Read a book on plants and the plants you learn about are added to your journal, giving you the ability to recognize and harvest them in the field. Likewise, read a book about a certain class of creatures, Alghouls, for example, and you’ll then be able to better fight them and be able to “skin” them to obtain parts of their anatomy essential to many potions. Overall, the journal is extremely well organized, making it easy to find information you’re looking for, including marking active quests, which quests are primary and secondary, new information about characters or monsters, etc.
Questing in The Witcher is also extremely well done. The game, in a word, is huge. And while there are a lot of busy annoyance quests, like fetching gloves for an old lady before she’ll let you into her home, most are distinctive and are tailor-made for the world Geralt inhabits. Cities and towns are loaded with generic NPCs, but you won’t waste time in conversation with any of them. NPCs that do allow you to engage in conversation are a diverse bunch. Graphically, there are many that do repeat themselves, but the dialog and behavior from each is so unique that they never feel clumsy or generic. And really, as much as this game excels in other areas, dialog is where The Witcher shines brightest.
This is hardly the first game that asks you to make choices. Bioware and others have been doing that for eons. But even games that did very well at it, most choices you make are obvious in terms of their good or evilness. The Witcher gives you far more to think about when answering most questions. Will you risk condemning an innocent man in a plot against you if you’re not completely positive of his guilt? Will you bargain with a cannibal because he has information that’s of use to you? One quest, early in the game, forces you to decide the fate of a witch. Both choices have consequences and it’s not entirely clear, even after the choice is made, which was about the greater good. One certainly feels like the right thing to do, but the body count that ensues… well, even that choice doesn’t feel good when all the ramifications of it are made clear. Not since Fallout has a game so skillfully made the choices a player makes both vague and important.
Typically, when a video game (or any other form of media, for that matter) is billed as having content for “mature” audiences, what it really means is that it’s hopelessly immature, but in a way that’s inappropriate for kids. (See: Grand Theft Auto or Showgirls.) Yes, The Witcher has its share of eye candy of the female persuasion (though it’s been filtered some for the delicate eyes of the American audience). It uses plenty of harsh language, and drinking often plays a central role, but The Witcher’s less than PG content stands out because it’s not handled in an immature way. The characters that inhabit this game are eminently believable, precisely because they talk like you’d expect them to. For every shining knight who speaks in flowery language, there’s a thug dropping f-bombs and telling you to “piss off.”
Alcohol and drinking is often required to get information and its effects are extremely well modeled, with the screen getting blurry, causing you to eventually see double and if you drink enough it’ll leave Geralt unable to walk a straight line. And yes, while you can “get busy” with the ladies in the game, it’s handled in a more adult manner than the few other games I’ve seen that attempted to model sex. The picture cards you receive for going to bed with a woman in the game are probably unnecessary, but hey, they work.
