hmmm well my experience with the game was this:

"oh hey, I'm geralt and I'm soooo cool don't you want to be like me????"

and then there were a bunch of cliched charactesr and formulaic quests and storylines surrounded by a bunch of stereotyped female characters with big boobs going "oh please geralt, give me your boner! that is the ultimate quest for real, not to slay demons, but to lay women, because we all know that slaying demons is just a way to get into women's pants, but of course you're just going to play the "oh I'm too cool and don't care actually" angle which makes you all the more desirable, give it up to me, oh mighty geralt"

and he's liek "yeah that's right, baby!" and all the immature teenage boys are playing it going "OMG I LOVE THIS GAME!" and the people who made the game knew that was how it was going to be and that's why they did what they did with it

Well, I guess it's interesting how vastly different two people's perception of something can be :D

Nothing could posibly be further from my view of the game. In fact I'd the Witcher is jsut about as far from escapist wish fulfillment fantasy as RPGs get, where you tend to be some chosen one eventually fighting gods and demons on a cosmic scale or some shit. It in fact neatly subverts a lot of that, being about a guy who fights monsters not for any heroic reasons but because it's his job. And I definately don't see Geralt as some "oh look how cool I am" character. I mean I guess a character like that might have an appeal to teenage boys for the reasons you mention, but that's not all there is to him by a longshot. On the same grounds we would reject almost every Sergio Leone movie and those are masterpieces.

I guess I can sort of see what you mean about some of the women in the game and his interaction with them, but the whole sex thing is rally such a minor thing in the grand scheme of the game it seems ridiculous to hate the whole thing because of it, especially as no one forces you to persue it. It's players choice. It's kinda silly if you choose to "score" with every possible woman in the game, and then blame the game for Geralt doing that. You can pick any RPG, chose to solve all quests by fighting and killing everyone and then say "this game is totally immature, it's all about violence and murder, I'm sure all the immature boys will love it" :P

it's more "behind the scenes" than all of that - like the directorial agenda was to mask the wish fulfillment fantasy in something that appeared not to be it, but actually was, making it all the more grossly subversive and dislikeable, to me

Riiiight...

Again, I'm not really sure what you mean. You don't like playing a womanizer, don't play a womanizer. It's an RPG, you get to choose. Following your logic we should hate all RPGs because they give you an option to turn into something you don't like. You could easily hate Mass Effect for the very same reasons, even more than The Witcher. Is there anyone or anything humanoid in those games you can't hit on? But I decided early on that My Shepard is a professional- he's the commanding officer on this ship and he's not going to have relationships with his subordinates. Should I hate the game because the option to play a character I would not like to be at all existed?

We should even hate pen & paper RPGs. Maybe even more, since they give players even more freedom, and plenty of players often use it to create wish fulfillment characters. But... so what? *I* don't have to play it like that and neither do you or anyone. My longest running character in D&D was a cowardly thief, always dragged into some grand adventure by promise of ritches or plain bad luck, who preferred to use a bow even though he was no great archer just to stay at a distance from things with big teeth or armed men. Should I feel guilty about enjoying the game becasue someone else was playing Sir Cool Angstyalot?

yeah, seriously, you just don't have the ability to get it

I do however have the ability to ...

hey you're one of the few I trust around here that I'm actually okay clicking the link (:

how can you see it through all the fog and for how puny it is (I just be silly not trying to be mean at all)

Well, at least I have something to see there :D

:þ

I'm glad we've learned to be civil and jovial with our insults (:

What I think:

- Dragon Age: Origins

I only played it as a human noble until Ostagar...frankly, the game bored me, it was overly verbose and I didn't like the combat. Maybe I'll try it again some time, but it's not a priority.

- Knights of the Old Republic

Probably great for Star Wars fans, but I found it somewhat flawed...the game is actually at its most difficult at the start, later becomes ridiculously easy. If one isn't much of a Star wars fan, it can still be fun, but definitely not "best rpg ever".

- Fallout

Also definitely NOT "best rpg ever" as is often claimed imo. Combat is simplistic if you ask me, and unless you want some extra challenge and intentionally make a weak character, there really isn't that much variety in character development, no matter what people claim. But it's a fun, little game provided one doesn't expect too much from it. I disliked its sequel which has disgusting juvenile humour, lots of bugs and whose combat is simply tedious at times.

- The Witcher

Played this recently. Didn't enjoy the combat system, and imo the game is over-ambitious and falls apart at the end. Still decent though.

Haven't played Drakensang or Shadowrun.
Personally I'd probably recommend the games in this order (best to worst): Fallout - The witcher 1 - Kotor - Dragon Age.

In Baldur's Gate 2, there was a catfight between two of my female party members... over me! Yep, two women wanted me that bad that they couldn't even concentrate fully on saving the world with me.

In the end I went with the "fragile angel"-type chick instead of the stronger amazon queen, even if the angel-type was a bit bitchy. I even knocked her up before the end of the game. Totally worth it.

It's not quite that simple actually. I assume what drealmer7 dislikes about it is not that you are free to play any kind of Geralt you like - which you really aren't, btw, since he's a predefined character, you can only mitigate what you don't like about him - but that the game was marketed with a "sex sells" approach, that fans called it "mature" because or in spite of that and that even in-game there are rewards for being a womanizer. You can ignore them because they're pointless, but you can't deny that someone put quite a bit of effort into creating them. In other RPGs you can be a murdering bastard, but you don't get a nice souvenir for every corpse you leave behind, like a pat on the shoulder, so you can feel like you really achieved something there, and the games are not marketed with pictures of murder victims. :P

I'm obviously exaggerating a bit here, and I don't want to imply that (trophy) sex is comparable to murder, but it's not like drealmer7 makes these things up. To a certain degree Geralt is a womanizer in the books as well, and the game celebrates it in a silly way. You can ignore that part (and for me it's not really a big enough issue that it would ruin the whole game), but it's there and put there on purpose, not to give you free choice in everything but to show that Geralt is badass, even with the women, and to celebrate nude pictures.

It probably won't make much of a difference to you if you don't like the writing and combat, but having played almost all origin stories by now (apart from city elf), I can say that I found "human noble" to be the least interesting of them.

That's good to know. I think one of the reasons I stopped playing last time, apart from being bored, was being frustrated with the combat. IIRC, in the first dungeon after the tutorial I kept losing an encounter, and i didn't really know what to do differently as the combat was still so simple that it didn't seem to give me a lot of tactical options.

Out of curiosity, which game (not on the list) is the best RPG ever to you? :)

No, you usually get some much more usefull loot and/or an invitation to the Assassin's Guild so you can feel like you've achieved way more :D

Yeah, the cards are silly, but that's all it is - silly. Not offensive or anything. And beyond the cards I don't really see the problem at all. Oh no- your character can have sex with attractive women! And still it is the players choice how much of a womanizer you will be if at all. I stand by that being an aspect of it being an RPG, and in this case it's such a minor aspect of the game as a whole it's just weird to get so hung up on it. The game has a realy good story, plenty of interesting quests and locations and important choices and a interesting wrld that subverts a lot of typical fantasy tropes and puts a more "realistic" spin on your typical D&D world and fixating on that one minor, inconsequential and fully optional thing is way more silly than those cards :D