Posted May 27, 2011
Played on hard difficulty, a kind of poor(I imagine) jack of all trades build but more focused on magic despite my initial plan to go alchemy which didn't pan out.
Graphics, environments, visuals, details and design in general - definitely the main strong point of the game. Good performance on high settings on my somewhat older comp as well. Only complaint is there wasn't more of it, larger areas to just explore.
Dialogue is pretty good relatively - it's voiced by non-painfully bad voice actors, the characters have some ... character. Not amazing but not a weak point either.
Story didn't amaze me but it wasn't bad and relatively good compared to other recent RPGs. Managed to actually make the PC's decisions have a large and not-entirely illusory impact on the story and game - without it all coming to the same end as with so many other games that boasted that their choices had consequence.
Interface and inventory were just plain bad - not customizable, items not sortable, inconvenient in a variety of ways, simply incomplete in others. Very few map markers, talents only displaying one rank and not displaying whether they're mutate-able until 1 point is taken.
Combat was mediocre - it had it's moments, the basic concept was good, but it was clunky(blocking and signs often simply not responding) and imbalanced and it's flaws glaring at certain points of the game. It didn't help that talent trees were not only poorly designed but unforgiving due to having no option to move or reset them. Encounters were not very diverse. Boss fights, and many scripted/quest related fights, were unsatisfying and/or frustrating with gimmicky QTEs and instant-gib attacks and unfriendly towards certain character builds. Alchemy in particular was a major disappointment due to being unable to use potions on some of the most difficult fights, as well as just how tedious using potions was in general. Despite initially putting talents and into alchemy(changed my mind early-ish luckily), I didn't even bother with potions for the latter two thirds of the game.
Replay-ability I'm uncertain of, but I know I plan on playing through it again to try different choices and see the apparently entirely different chapter 2. So it's not bad. Unfortunately it's on the short side per individual play-through, however. But I'm a quality > quantity sort, so I can't complain too much.
A significant number of times I found myself wondering in a sort of awe how anyone could've thought certain aspects of the game and certain parts of quests were a good idea - and further how anyone could've missed some it's most obvious issues. However I can't deny the game has a certain quality, a degree of genuineness or potential shining through the problems, that's endeared it to me and that has to count for something. I hated certain parts and yet still felt compelled to suffer through them to see the rest of the game.
Luckily, the developers seem to have a good history of not abandoning their games after release, and fixed things up a considerable amount in the previous Witcher game. So hopefully the worst of it's issues get sorted out in the near future.
Graphics, environments, visuals, details and design in general - definitely the main strong point of the game. Good performance on high settings on my somewhat older comp as well. Only complaint is there wasn't more of it, larger areas to just explore.
Dialogue is pretty good relatively - it's voiced by non-painfully bad voice actors, the characters have some ... character. Not amazing but not a weak point either.
Story didn't amaze me but it wasn't bad and relatively good compared to other recent RPGs. Managed to actually make the PC's decisions have a large and not-entirely illusory impact on the story and game - without it all coming to the same end as with so many other games that boasted that their choices had consequence.
Interface and inventory were just plain bad - not customizable, items not sortable, inconvenient in a variety of ways, simply incomplete in others. Very few map markers, talents only displaying one rank and not displaying whether they're mutate-able until 1 point is taken.
Combat was mediocre - it had it's moments, the basic concept was good, but it was clunky(blocking and signs often simply not responding) and imbalanced and it's flaws glaring at certain points of the game. It didn't help that talent trees were not only poorly designed but unforgiving due to having no option to move or reset them. Encounters were not very diverse. Boss fights, and many scripted/quest related fights, were unsatisfying and/or frustrating with gimmicky QTEs and instant-gib attacks and unfriendly towards certain character builds. Alchemy in particular was a major disappointment due to being unable to use potions on some of the most difficult fights, as well as just how tedious using potions was in general. Despite initially putting talents and into alchemy(changed my mind early-ish luckily), I didn't even bother with potions for the latter two thirds of the game.
Replay-ability I'm uncertain of, but I know I plan on playing through it again to try different choices and see the apparently entirely different chapter 2. So it's not bad. Unfortunately it's on the short side per individual play-through, however. But I'm a quality > quantity sort, so I can't complain too much.
A significant number of times I found myself wondering in a sort of awe how anyone could've thought certain aspects of the game and certain parts of quests were a good idea - and further how anyone could've missed some it's most obvious issues. However I can't deny the game has a certain quality, a degree of genuineness or potential shining through the problems, that's endeared it to me and that has to count for something. I hated certain parts and yet still felt compelled to suffer through them to see the rest of the game.
Luckily, the developers seem to have a good history of not abandoning their games after release, and fixed things up a considerable amount in the previous Witcher game. So hopefully the worst of it's issues get sorted out in the near future.
