The Witcher - Game of the weekend
by snide
As usual, I'm playing games this weekend. I'm skipping on Saint's Row 2 , since sandbox games kind of bore me. I may try it out next week if Ryan gives a decent recommendation and I can borrow the office copy. In general though, sandobox games seem to try to do too much and end up just being a miss mash of mediocre mini-games with spotty controls. I tend to like more focused genre games or ones...
As usual, I'm playing games this weekend. I'm skipping on Saint's Row 2, since sandbox games kind of bore me. I may try it out next week if Ryan gives a decent recommendation and I can borrow the office copy. In general though, sandobox games seem to try to do too much and end up just being a miss mash of mediocre mini-games with spotty controls. I tend to like more focused genre games or ones that focus on character creation. With SR2 out of the way that left Dead Space, but that one looks good enough that I think I'll wait for the PC version, since the only thing I hate more then scary games is scary games with unresponsive controls. I know, I know, I'm one of those dying breed PC players that hates playing shooters on a console.
The over the shoulder combat had me worried, but it's actually pretty smoothMy search led me to Steam out of boredom, and I noticed that an Enhanced Edition of The Witcher was out at a reduced price. Although I thought the game looked spotty from the gameplay cinematics and I wasn't very trustful of a over-the-shoulder, aurora-engine game I figured I'd give it a shot after reading a couple nice user reviews here on GB.
My mark of a good game? A complicated skill tree.I'm glad I did. Although I'm only a couple hours in, I can already tell this will be a fav for the year. The story immediately grabbed me and although it uses a tired cliche of a man who lost his memory, the lead character seems pretty cool. The combat, which looked a little hokey and unresponsive in movies, is perfectly adequete, if a bit easy in practice. Although I'm more of a fan of BioWare style pause, shoot, pause gameplay, the more action oriented feel is pretty decent and not getting in the way of things. Graphically I'm pretty impressed with the amount of modification must have been made to the Aurora engine. While I loved games like NWN, I also thought they looked kind of lame. The Witcher has closer ties in style to Oblivion though, just with a level based world instead of an open one. Which brings up the one downer, load times. While I hear they've improved, the start, load, stop, load progression is currently my biggest annoyment with the game so far. It's not drastic, but I'd prefer that it didn't happen so much during the course of a mission. Other then that I'm having a good time with the game.For those curious, I've started to slow down my King's Bounty playing. While it's a good game for the genre, the amount of grinding is kind of bumming me out. I feel like I'm fighting too many boring low-level monster fights between the awesome, story based boss fights. This is common for the genre, so if you like TBS games I wouldn't let it deter you, but I doubt I'll end up finishing the game.