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Saturday 21 May, 2011
Beat The Witcher earlier in the week and haven't had a chance to sit down and write about the last half. I thought I saw there were 6 chapters and an epilogue, so last entry when I was beginning chapter 4, I thought I was halfway through. Turns out I was wrong and there are 5 chapters and an epilogue, which is short, so I really wasn't far. Seriously a great game, and highly recommended RPG. The end was cool, story wrapped up nicely, yet obvious where the sequel begins, and the final boss's last words before he dies are awesome. Took me 44.5 hours, which according to howlongtobeat.com (a cool little site that averages user-submitted completion times), is just under the average. There are 7 DLC episodes that are extra story bits for some of the characters in the game. Dunno how long those will take, but I'm gonna go Riddick -> Amnesia DLC -> Crysis -> Witcher DLC -> Crysis x-pac, to split up all these shooters.
At the end of the game, the main choice you make unfolds, whether you helped the elves, the humans, or remained neutral. I think it was ambitious the way they tried to make choices matter, but really, you get one of 3 endings, same boss though. I thought the boss would be different, like, I thought the last chapter would basically have a different goal depending. And most of those 1 or 2 moral choices you make along the way don't have much impact, as in it changes some little things, like which female character falls in love with you or whether the witch or some peasants help you out for a fight. Some of the choices turn out to be meaningless, like I suspected earlier, especially who you implicate for the murders. It does in fact have to be Ramsmeat because Kalkstein and Thaler are written into the story later. I thought that meant the story would be different had you implicated Thaler, for example, but nah, it's the same because Ramsmeat has to die and Thaler has to play his role later. The Witcher 2 is supposed to have 16 different endings. I'm real curious to see where they take the idea of choices with consequences! The Witcher 2, by the way, is getting rave reviews across the board, so I will be anticipating the ol' price drop on that one.
A couple other random things...I ended up being the world champion of both boxing and dice poker, neither of which ever get any more difficult than the first matches, which is a shame. Fistfighting, you just block, punch, block, punch, and repeat until you win. Dice poker is all random, and the opponent won't raise or take any risks whatsoever unless he's like 99% sure of it. The last dice poker player plays no different than the first.
I thought I found a KKK reference which freaked me out a bit, until I realize that the leader of the Order is also called the Grand Master, and that the little kid who told me that he wants to play 'hang the elf' and that he's 'always the Grand Master' really was talking in context.
Just to mention again, the info screen is fantastic. It keeps records of all plants, monsters, characters, locations, quests, important terms, all in nice readable and searchable format. Whenever something new happens to a character, for example, that character's entry will have a new ! by it, letting you know there's new info for the entry. I like the auto-updating there, and all that information really, really, really helped me keep track of what was going on. Other story-heavy games should have the same at least.
After finishing any game, I look at cheats and walkthroughs to see if there was anything really neat I missed, to see what cheats and easter eggs exist, to see if anyone has any advice or strategies that I could have used or if I did something novel that other people didn't do. In the Witcher, then, I checked out all the alternate choices of story that I didn't choose, like what would have happened if I'd done X instead of Y. No real surprises there. There aren't any cheats to speak of, just a couple exploitable bugs fixed with the enhanced edition. I found out I could have been selling weapons, but I never did because you can only carry the ones for which you have free weapon slots. Since my slots were all full, I never picked them up off the ground, but I should have been selling what I had whenever I found a vendor! I never once modified or created a weapon, so all those runes and meteor stones were wasted. I never once upgraded my armor! I always wondered why there was only 1 hotkey for potions, and that was because better armor has more potion slots! Aaaah! No matter though since I never even used the 1 hotkey. I never once made a bomb, and I only used weapon coating like twice, so all those materials were also wasted.
While looking at extras and tips, I stumbled upon a box back of The Witcher and had a good laugh, and an idea for something to do after I play a game. The back of The Witcher has some truly outlandish claims. Obviously what goes on the box is put there to move the box off the shelf. Gamers need to be able to pick it up, be impressed, and then buy. But to what extent does the need to lay out eye-catching game features lead said displayed features to be...mmm...exaggerated? There's certainly an element of subjectivity to say that features are exaggerated, but perhaps some of these can be ranked along a continuum of more or less accurate, as identified by consumers who actually played the game. What if you had participants playing a game, and show them the box back when they were done, and then talk to them about how accurate they think the highlights listed there were in relation to their experience? This would be cool in general when prompting people to reflect on their gameplay experience.
So for me and The Witcher, I wrote down a couple that jumped out.
"More than 90 hours of nonlinear gameplay." Considering my time was 44.5 hours and the average on howlongtobeat was like 48, I'm going to reject this one. Perhaps if you played it through twice, but that is in no way 90 unique hours. 80 of those hours would overlap. And in my 44.5, I completed or at least started every quest I came upon, went to every area, spent probably a normal amount of time dying and retrying things, running around, picking flowers, talking to NPCs, exploring, etc. No way in hell there are 90 hours of gameplay.
"6 different sword styles." Actually there are 3, and then those exact same 3 with a different sword. So I would argue there are in fact 3 different sword styles.
"over 120 different attacks assisted by magic, potions of your creation and modifiable weaponry and equipment." 120?! Hahaha! This is what I used. 3 sword styles for each of the two swords. We'll be nice and call it 6 since we need to add up to 120. 5 signs. ... ...6+5=11. 11=120? Negative. Oh right, but I didn't use bombs. Maybe there are 10 unique bombs. What else performs a qualitatively unique attack? Maybe they're counting weapon coatings which make your weapon more effective against certain monster types. Maybe there are 10 of those. That's 31 total. Maybe they're counting animations. Each sword style has like 4 or 5 animations you can chain together. Oh okay, let's give them 4 animations times 6 sword styles = 24...24+31 is 55. Okay, we're almost halfway there. Yeah...No. No clue where they get the 120 number. But you know what else? It doesn't really matter because there are TWO(point five) types of button that you push to attack. (1)Right click to use a sign (1.5)Hold it to charge it (2)Left click to use your sword, and repeat the exact same timing for every stance in every fight in the whole game.
Was The Witcher overzealous with their box features? I think so.
Anyway, anyway, anyway. Fun stuff even with 10% of the attacks and 50% of the length. Go play.
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