The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (2008)

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (2007), developed and published by CD Projekt RED, based on the characters created by Andrzej Sapkowski

Some games do not age well. The first of the Witcher games is one of such games, though I must admit, I have never been a huge fan of it. Even when it was a new game, I thought it was somewhat a clunky game, technically and in terms of the writing, but the older it gets, the less gracefully it ages. And the Enhanced Edition is the only one I've ever played, the original release was, of what I've heard, technically much worse.

Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, is stumbling through the forest, running from something. When he finally collapses, he is found by his witcher brothers, who carry him back to Kaer Morhen, the weathered and grumbling home of the wolf school of the witchers.

When Geralt finally awakens, he finds out, that he has lost his memories. He might remember who he is, but he doesn't remember what he has been doing for the past couple of years or where he has been. He doesn't remember the art of witchering either, but he is a fast learner of skills once forgotten.

Geralt at Kaer Morhen. It has seen better times and witchers are no mason.

Just as he is re-learning the ropes of his trade, an attack takes place on Kaer Morhen. A bandit group called Salamandra, lead by a rogue wizard Azar Javed, storms the castle in order to steal the most sacred secrets of the witchers, the mutagens, that make the witchers what they are: monster hunters that are agile, deadly, strong and faster than a normal human.

So, from the get-go, there are two mysteries to solve: what happened to Geralt and what is the goal of Javed. This question takes Geral to several locations to solve several different quests, that are often less related to the main story itself, just as you'd imagine from an RPG.

Technically The Witcher is somewhat of a mixed bag, that is to say, it isn't by any means terrible, but it doesn't really shine in any technical aspect either. You can control Geralt either from over the shoulder mode or fully mouse-controlled mode. The mouse-controlled mode with its two fixed camera modes plays and feels the worse of the two options. There is something stiff about the whole thing, no matter if you were moving or fighting. The over the shoulder camera fixes the moving, but the combat is still rather dull, almost quick time even kind of a thing.

Zoltan, one of Geralt's buddies is one of the character models that could have used a complete remodelling. His animations leave a lot of room for improvement as well. 

The battle, what you do often is based on using the two swords of the Witcher: a silver one for the monsters, a steel one for the humans. With either sword, you can use three different stances, a strong style, a fast style and a group style, each effective in different situations. The group style is used when fighting, multiple enemies at the time, fast style when agile enemies and strong when armoured ones. You can alter these on the flight to suit the situation.

As an addition, you can enhance the weapons with concoctions Geralt can make with alchemy. He can also ingest different kinds of potions, which affect his speed, reflexes, regeneration and such. And obviously, on levelling, there are several attributes that can be enhanced, like strength, dexterity, Witchers signs, that can also be used during combat, and so on. Depending on the difficulty level you play, you have to use rely more or less on those potions, which also poison Geralt, so you have to watch out not to overdo it.

In theory, the combat could be pretty tactical, but in practice, it is not. What the combat system boils down to is chucking a couple of drinks, then attacking the enemies. While you beat them, you have to watch for the cursor to flame up in order to chain combos. You can also do some clumsy pirouettes and sidestepping, but that's that. In essence, the system combines badly some sort of a real-time strategy style with a sort of quick time-based combat.

Shani doing an autopsy. She's also one of the possible romantic interests for Geral in the game. And he has lots, him being a regular withcer poon hound. Witchers might be sterile, but there's nothing wrong with them otherwise.

Another thing is the writing, which supposedly was even worse on the original version. While there are bold themes and bits that are quite well written, there is a lot of discussions and writing in the game, that is just disjointed and cloudy. At times the discussions feel like the lines were meant for a different situation altogether, as they seem to have very little to do with each other or they are just clumsy.  This also reflects the voice acting, as at times it seems like the actors are in different places altogether as far as understanding the situation goes.

The Enhanced Edition has over 50000 re-written and re-recorded lines of dialogue alone, so considering how disjointed it often feels, I do have to wonder how bad the original game was. I mean, I've heard it was terribly translated, I've never played it, nor even seen snippets of it.

The game areas leave some room for improvement as well, as they are mostly rather boring. You run around in cities, with similar-looking buildings and you run in forests and swamps, which have very few points of interest. And you do literally run between places, doing your quests, killing monsters, helping people and so on. There are some pretty good missions in the game, as not all are about killing things, there are moral choices as well. The swamp that is a good chunk of gameplay in the middle of the game is especially dreadful places.

Javed. He has a grand plan.

During running around and killing things, Geralt has to pick up herbs and monster parts in order to make the potions and concoctions he needs. Reading books is needed to recognise the parts you need to collect, so you also need money for buying books or just rummaging through every house you can get into.  While the system works well enough, there are a lot of materials you can collect and the inventory is limited. This leads to, especially on the more difficult levels, storing problems and constant need to run between inns and merchants in order to either store items away or to see what you don't need.

And while you do need money, collecting it isn't as easy as just running to a local blacksmith with all the looted weapons the enemies might drop, as you can carry only four weapons: two witchers swords and two additional weapons, of which one is a dagger and one can be anything from a club to a third sword. The item inventory itself can't hold any weapons, they need to be scabbarded on Geralt all the time.

Him you get to know better in the later games.

Technically speaking, I'd say The Witcher was mediocre even when it was originally released. I do remember thinking it looked better when I played the first time, but now, after time has passed, I don't think it has held up time that well. Especially the character models are relatively poor, at least as far as facial features go.

It's not all bad though, as this game did make The Witcher series and its writer Sapkowski a better-known name outside Poland. And CD Projekt RED did do the fantastic 3rd part of the game later on, which still is one of the best open-world games made. And now they are making Cyberpunk, which is looking mighty fine.

And it is great, that CD Projekt spent time and money trying to fix the game after it was released. Many developers would probably have left things as they were, but there was, at least, an attempt to improve it technically and contextually. It just probably would have needed a lot more work, time and money.

I don't know for how many of the CD Projekt developers the Witcher was their first-ever big project, but it does feel like a game that was a far too ambitious project for the team. It doesn't fail in everything, it has a lot of good in it, but as a while, it definitely could have been much better.