The Witcher by Bioware and Atari incorporates the best of the qualifications I mentioned above and wraps it all into a single player RPG that’s easy to play, yet complex enough to offer a challenge, sports beautiful graphics with extremely detailed models, entertaining cinematics, fluid combat maneuvers and magical effects, as well as a concept and story line that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Character progress is measured in levels. Every level you’re allotted points to distribute between core abilities (strength, dexterity, stamina and intelligence), which offer bonuses and special traits for other abilities, and/or magical “signs” and fighting styles. You determine what role your character will play in combat by how you assign your progression points.

One thing to note is that this game is not for children. Aside from it’s dark tone, there’s adult content that wouldn’t be suitable for kids. Geralt, your hero, has slept with three different women in the course of my playing thus far. The game cuts to a blurry cinematic sequence when your character has an encounter. It’s not pornographic, but it’s still not something you would find in most RPGs. Characters in The Witcher curse. I’ve heard sh**, bit** and fu** so far in the course of play. Since all sequences are cinematic, you hear it all as well as see it in the subtitles. This doesn’t bother me, but again for children it may be too much.

Playing The Game

In The Witcher, you play a genetically enhanced mutant, a magically inclined monster hunter - a Witcher. You begin the game with amnesia, which is a little cliché, but it fits. You’re found unconscious in the wild and taken to the Witcher castle, which is subsequently attacked and ransacked. You triumph over the bandits and set out to find the cause of the attack. This is when Chapter 1 begins. There’s a good two hours of play before you begin the actual game. As of this writing I have just started on the second chapter, and already I’ve spend a good 5 hours on this game.

Combat is not haphazard like other non turn-based RPGs. You click on opponents to attack, but clicking too fast may actually cancels your offense. You have to wait for the cursor to change icons before you can execute more advanced tactics in combat. This is a good thing, because it means the game doesn’t turn into a click fest - think Diablo. Your forefinger will never get tired while play The Witcher. You can easily pause the game and queue potions to drink, change fighting styles and select signs, which again means you’re not in a frenzy to click icons in combat. Geralt can perform a coup de grace on stunned or immobile opponents, which is a lot of fun to watch. He’ll hop on top of an opponent and slice his sword down through his/it’s head, decapitate the opponent, sever limbs, slit throats and other novelties. You see your character do this, rather than read it in subtitles. This feature makes combat seem very real and makes you feel a little bit like god when fighting lesser combatants.

Fighting styles are chosen during combat and should be selected for the appropriate opponent. One is useful against single powerful opponents, another is used when facing off against smaller, more agile enemies and the last is used when facing groups of lesser foes. The last is a brilliant concept. It saves a lot of time when you need to plow through an army of smaller opponents, rather than clicking on each one individually. Fighting styles are different for steel and silver weapons. Silver is best used on monsters and incorporeals, while steel should be used on humanoids and animals. This is one aspect of the game I didn’t like. It would have been less complicated to use the same fighting styles with both types of weapons.

That’s all I can say about the game at this point. I’ll modify this post or post a follow-up once I complete the game. All-in-all, this is a superior single player RPG and one worth picking up. I would recommend a decent system for this game, however. It would be a shame to lose the ambiance if you were forced to play The Witcher on older hardware with mediocre graphics.

What’s laughable, however, is the fact that the game this laptop is marketed for, World of Warcraft, can be played smoothly on a computer that’s 1/20th as powerful as the super, self-aware Dell XPSM1730 WoW edition notebook. On my previous AMD 5000+ based PC, with an 8800GTS and 2 Gigabytes of memory, World of Warcraft played flawlessly on the maximum graphic settings. It’s beyond me why anyone would need a Solid State hard drive for this 4 year old game, much less SLI video. This is a blatant gimmick on Dell and Blizzard’s (the company behind WoW) part to sucker unknowing and/or WoW addicted consumers out of almost $4,500. Shame on you Dell. Shame on you Blizzard.

You can read my totally biased (and slightly less agitated) review of the World of Warcraft HERE.

After almost 3 years in the World of Warcraft, with it’s cartoon-like character models, large-scale guild gatherings (demanding 40 or more people to work in cohesion to complete an objective, which ultimately was the biggest timesink) and never-ending character development (in other words, wasting 8 hours trying to get some kind of item), my interest in the game slowly subsided. I dropped it completely for a while, only to pick it back up for another stint and, as it seems now, drop it again - for good this time. In total, I spent approximately 150 days playing World of Warcraft. That’s full days, one day being 24 hours, or 3600 hours in total. Granted this was over a 3-year period, but that doesn’t change the fact that this game ate about 3.5 entire months of my young life.

Now that you know the potential this game has for turning a normal, sociable individual into a complete recluse, let me highlight one of the (possibly the only) positive aspects of the World of Warcraft. The game forces the players to make friends. Of course, you’re not playing face-to-face with the people you meet online (unless you could somehow get the 10s of millions of people playing this game together in a large stadium - or small country) but it does promote a sense of unity and loyalty with other gamers you see regularly within the game. Friendships established through online gaming can potentially extend beyond the life of the game, as was the case with my old Everquest guild. Althought, I ended up losing contact with them. Otherwise, the only benefit is that you don’t need a top-of-the-line monster gaming machine to run WoW. The graphics are designed to display smoothly on lower-end PCs.

Now for the bad. My list of negatives associated with MMO gaming is a lot longer than the positives. The major negative, as I explained above, is the amount of time the average gamer spends online. My 3600 hour marathon isn’t uncommon for a lot of people. With millions of gamers playing WoW, that’s a lot of wasted time! The anonymity of playing a game online, where everyone is faceless and the consequences of treating other gamers poorly are almost non-existent, makes some people do or say things they probably wouldn’t in real life. Some games, this one in-particular, have policies punishing players who make derogatory and insulting comments toward other gamers, but unless the offense is particularly nasty (racist or sexual) there’s usually no repercussion.

Sometimes online, the lines of what’s right and wrong are blurred. Due to the amount of time gamers spend in the virtual world, they tend to take the game too seriously. In Everquest, where there were two factions which were able to attack and kill each other, the good side were referred to by the players as Lighties, while the other (evil) side were known as Darkies. To me, that seemed to have a racist slant. Trash-talking was common in Everquest. One thing I liked about WoW - members of opposing factions couldn’t speak to one another (which I’m sure prevented a lot of problems).

That’s the World of Warcraft explained from the perspective of an ex-addict. I mainly discussed my issues with the game (and that pretty much applies to the whole genre). If you want to know more about the mechanics of the game, I suggest you visit the Word of Warcraft website. There are more games to be released in the near future that I may decide to check out but due to my experiences with WoW (and Everquest), I will always be more in-control of my digital addiction in the future. I had to learn how to delegate my time the hard way. The 10s of millions of current WoW subscribers will need to learn the same lesson eventually as well!