Anyone else playing this? I picked it up last week, and have been enjoying it so far. You play Geralt, a Witcher (monster slayer) in medieval Europe who has lost his memory, and has to figure out who these people are that attacked the old fortress where witchers are/were trained. You travel through dirty plague ridden medieval towns, kill stuff, and seduce women along the way. As you explore, quest, kill, and seduce, you gain levels, and with each level you get talents to distribute amongst the various skill sets, and attributes. Right now I'm focusing on physical combat rather than spell casting.

In combat you have two main weapons; a steel 2h sword for killing people, and regular beasts, and eventually a silver 2h sword for killing monsters, undead, and the like. Alchemy will help a lot in combat by giving you various potions to drink, oils to coat your swords with, and bombs.

Even with the 1.2 patch it's still prone to crashing, but playing in windowed mode, and turning down the graphics seems to have eliminated 90% of the crashing. You'll need a decent system to run it with the eye candy, my 3800+ x2 with a 1950pro is brought to its knees pretty easily.

It's pretty, but it has probably the worst voice acting I've ever seen since Two Worlds.

Insane load times, even after the patch turn a lot of people away quickly.

It's a fun button masher, and I picked it up because I enjoy the world its set in, but ugh that acting is just horrible.

Ha, yeah, the voice acting and talent is pretty bad. Some of the stuff they say makes me cringe, but maybe it lost a bit in the translation from Polish. Geralt sounds like that character on that awful show from Adult Swim, Xavier Guardian Angel, and another character sounded like Scrooge McDuck.

There's actually a way to patch the Polish voices + script into the game, it just requires a 550mb torrent and some registry editing. It's more natural sounding, but the lip synching is still a little off and the dialogue can still be goofy at times. It suffers less from the translation and more from the publisher butchering the script down to a shorter length so they wouldn't have to pay as much for the voice acting. I liked the overall presentation of the game though, if only because it's a refreshing take on the cRPG genre without rehashing the gameplay or setting from somewhere else.

The main flaws that stood out to me were the horrible loading times (which the patch fixed) and stumbling into boobie cards at every step. The guy really takes advantage of the sterility + disease immunity mutation. There were also a few times where you're forced to get drunk that I didn't really like, if only because it made walking to a rest area annoying as hell. On the other hand, the alchemy system is cool, the combat is fun even though it's very limited and repetitive, and the city based, non-combat oriented quests were done really well.

I'd rate it a 878/1000.

I liked this one once I got it running properly...

Good action, beautiful graphics.

Camera felt a bit odd though but I'd consider it one of the few games worth buying.

The US version is censored but you can get a int. version from uk.atari.com or something as a digital download.

Fry's sells the Unrated version. That's where I got mine anyway.

I played it for about a week but lost interest and like givin, I got tired of the horrible speaking parts...

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... he-Witcher

Be sure to watch the mini film at the end of the review!

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lol

I systematically closed it at the end credits, thanks for the comment!

That was funny~

The only difference between the unrated and US releases were you don't get tits in your card collection pictures, and they removed a gaping vag from a nymph.

Oh and a giant floppy gargoyle zombie penis

Outside. Twenty minutes. Pufferfish.

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Ha, the PC gaming master race. I guess he'll never review Victoria.

If one of those knights walking around town shouts "Honor!" one more time... grrr. Other than that chapter III's been good so far.

I just got it this weekend.

Only on chapter 2 (just started the city quest in the temple zone. Seems to be pretty good so far. Took a bit to figure out what I was doing wrong with the clicking and swinging on that boss at the end of the outskirts zone. I kept turn attack off .

Potential chapter I spoiler stuff:

Thanks for the link tarot, after that wonderful review, I felt compelled to watch a few more of his reviews.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... -Societies

that one on the sims was pretty good

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Jake Rivers - Senex Legio
Get off my Lawn alliance

They're going to release a new and improved version with different voice overs, among other things.

http://www.thewitcher.com/community/en/news/444.html

I LOVE him. Actually someone else around here originally posted about him, which is how I found him. But yeah his reviews are highly entertaining and witty. His review of bioshock I think is my favorite.

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Some of the flowcharts on his personal website make me laugh out loud every time I look at them.

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/features/life.htm

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/features/premed.htm

Wow. That impresses the hell out of me.

If they did that for KOTOR II restoring the voice work for the 'real' ending and actually making the ending they intended, I would go buy it again, and sing their praises.

I'm sure some people will be annoying, bitching that such things should be done freely and in patches, but the reality is that this is (so I've heard) a really good game with some flaws that require production work. The game is playable with shitty voice acting.

I'm all for games doing this.

I'm sure some fanbois are screaming NOOOO with the anticipation that publishers and developers will shit out even more unplayable releases (cough TROIKA cough) and now not only have Ye Olde Patch as an excuse for fixing their produce post release, but also look at actually finishing a game with an additional year of post production production time. But that's not going to happen. In fact as much as I'd love to see many games (my left tit for KOTOR II) do this....it's not going to happen.

It won't happen IMHO for most games. People who aren't ready to buy the game at release (the preorder crowd types) who only become interested after buzz is generated can happily wait for a polished version a year down the road. But if the game doesn't sell gobs of games, making it viable for a polished version to both produced AND have a market...it won't happen.

So halfassing post production isn't a viable option when you don't have the base to buy it. VtM:Bloodlines is one of the best RPGs out there, yet it's a game that did poorly in initial sales, because it was unplayable on release. And became part of the reason that Troika folded after ironically releasing only 3 games (all of which were plagued with release problems).

Sooooo, great concept, forsee lots of whining for people who will have already purchased the game and will want it free screaming it's essentially a patch (when it's not), and don't forsee it becoming popular in the future.

But seriously. Left tit and firstborn for KOTOR II.

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Hell I'd be tempted to offer a man-tit for a full re-write of Vanguard, if it would do any good. Not the Eq2-ification of it, but for a full scale re-visit to the original concepts with real world optimizations from the ground up, etc. I know SOE is "working the issues" post takeover, but I think player expectations will not be met with the currently available funding via less than expected subscriptions. Go-go VG2! Woot!

Also, my apologies for the temporary hijack of the thread for those that are bound to scream TAKE IT TO THE VANGUARD FORUM! *sigh*

From that article...



Even better stuff after that point.

Pretty spiffy, even tho I already torrented the files I needed to see boobies and bush. English dialog change is mega huge however.

I missed that, and was focusing on the beginning where they're all 'too bad this version couldn't be this but this version wow!' ...and misunderstood.

The fact that they're giving all that shit to people who've bought the game already as a patch...wow. Most games sell add ons, maybe a lot cheaper...but they still sell them.

MUCH impressed.

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Question:

I downloaded the demo and love the game. Should I buy it now, or wait for the Super Duper Version to come out?

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Personally.. I'd wait

If you see it hella cheap on sale, buy it now and wait for later to play it... otherwise wait.

I'm at the beginning of act III and I'm considering waiting for the new dialogs to come out to continue.. just because it's pretty bad.

The Inventory management changes, if they don't suck will also be very welcome.

That being said, I'm one of those that usually can't stand going through a game more than once..

From "The Witcher" newsletter.

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

This game would be good with Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden style combat.

As it stands now with the retarded "The Summoner" chain attacking, slow moving, bullshit combat system, it makes it unplayable.

Sorry to any die hard fans...

Yea, the more I read about this game the more bad things I hear about its combat system =/ The skill system sounded somewhat promising(and nice environs), but it sounds like the gameplay leaves a little something to be desired.

Combat is fine. The voice acting, story translation is not. That if anything makes it nearly unplayable. It's the baby bitch brother of KotOR II pretty much.

Now about the upgrades. I didn't register this thing so i guess I'm sol unless I can do a reinstall and get back to it. Haven't looked yet to see if its just a link or what. I don't register software.

Combat is fine?

Have you even played the game?

Click...click...click...

It's also the slowest paced shit I've seen since, well, like I said, the Summoner. It's terrible, and of all people I find it hard to believe that you think the combat is fine lol.

The overall game was so good, I could care less that its a mindless clickfest, not like that matters anyway.

Can you name any other game that isn't a variation of "click click click click click"?

Didn't think so.

I don't know what you guys expected, Call of Duty 4 with swords?

givin to register you click the register link at the witcher loader

don't need to reinstall

GREAT MORE CLICKING?!

I lol'd

*BUMP* I just started playing this. Anyone still play it? Any must-have mods that make the game better?