His criticism of the story seems more aimed at fantasy as a whole (i.e. everything is a derivative of Tolkein and why does everyone speak with an English accent or Scottish brogue?) and I don't think he experienced enough of the story to really justify applying those criticisms to The Witcher 2. Further, in fairness to fantasy, using English accents to denote class based societies is a favorite practice in movies, TV, and games - not just for medieval and fantasy societies either, but Romans and other such historical societies. That's also just the English localization of the game that does that and I imagine he could've had the game's characters speak in the original Polish with the subtitles turned on (or any of the other localizations) - though I don't know about how easily navigable the menu options would be at that point. Perhaps in Polish the game would've felt more slavic and less English high-fantasy to him. ;) Or does the XBOX version not allow you to pick your localization or subtitles? On the PC I've seen people play in the Polish voice actors and English subtitles underneath.
I tend to agree with him that fantasy is often too Tolkein-derived or often not written tightly enough to make the world believable which is why I am not often a fan of the genre myself. But I thought, that once I got into it, the game's story actually rose above many of the standard fantasy tropes fairly well, even if those tropes are where it is based on, and I give more credit to the story than he did. I agree the writing was mostly just good with occasional flashes of brilliance (and of cringe-worthy camp), but overall I think it was better than simply functional (i.e. there was actual characterization in the dialogue to flesh out even minor characters on top of the dialogue to simply keep the plot moving). All in all I thought it was a strong story with good characterizations/developments. So I actually give it two or three modest steps up from the standard fantasy story - especially the standard save the world/princess ones. :) Combined with as he said, the complexity in the moral choices and forcing choices based on incomplete information with possible unknown and tragically unintended consequences (or where no matter what you choose you simply can't save everyone), I think the game deserves most of the praise it received story-wise.
In the interest of disclosure, I have not read the books just as I infer Tom Bissell hasn't either, but I am fairly certain that the Empire of Nilfgaard is in the books (and extremely important in them) and so any fault Tom Bissell has with the name being dumb (or for that matter the presence of Elves and Dwarves in the story) lies with Andrzej Sapkowski. It seems unfair to ding the game's writers for their inclusion and prominence in the story except perhaps for the choice to adapt Sapkowski's works to a game in the first place.
However, since he hated the game's mechanics and the UI, the point about story is moot since he shouldn't have to endure them just to experience the story. I've not played the console version but his description of the meditation system for the PC version is wrong (you can meditate to any partial period of time) and I'm surprised the console version would be different in that respect. It could be though and that would be unfortunate.
I agree with his supposition that games should strive to balance depth with complexity and I do think there was some bad UI and poorly explained concepts in the game mechanics. But I didn't find it as complicated as he seems to have and I actually enjoyed the combat system a great deal. I do have some criticisms about the combat (the targeting system in particular), but insubstantial is the last word I would've used to describe it. Parts of it (the targeting system) are ropey though. But again, overall I thought the combat was a lot of fun with some actual tactics with how one combined various abilities and mechanics together just to survive combat never mind win it and yet it still fit in with the game's fast-paced, hard-hitting real-time action. In other words, it was refreshingly different from simply left clicking everything to death (though there is some of that).
Some of the character animations in cutscenes do feel a bit stiff, but not so much that I found them distracting (at least not as much as he did). For the environments I had to disagree about them feeling skin deep where Geralt simply glides over them, but again I haven't played the console version - though from gameplay videos I didn't see any difference in that respect. I thought the environments had a good amount of depth - even on my laptop which barely ran the game at the lowest settings.
In short, he didn't like what little, too little, he saw of the story and disliked the mechanics. I can certainly understand not liking the mechanics as they were not perfect and I can see what flaws there are irritating someone to the point of dismissing the game entirely even if overall I enjoyed the mechanics.
Post edited May 04, 2012 by crazy_dave
