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OH Brave New World!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 50
Date: November 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am not reviewing the game per se which looks amazing!

I was actually about to buy it when I saw that the US version is censored.
Since we apparently live in communist China I will go and buy my game in the UK.

Game crashes constantly on Vista

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 38
Date: November 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I really, really wanted to like this game because I love the premise. However, I was unable to play it more than 30 minutes at a time due to it crashing constantly. It would happen when the game was loading a new screen and when I tried to save my progress. My computer specs go above and beyond what is recommended, I have downloaded all of the patches available, I have tried everything under the sun to get this game to work, and yet it STILL crashes. This is now a well known issue and there are tons of people, besides myself, having this problem.

If you have Vista wait until they come out with patches that fix this because the game is unplayable.

Avoid this game unless your computer is newer than new

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 15
Date: December 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I have a Dell XPS 700 Dual Core 2.4 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM, and an NVidia Geoforce 7900 GS.

Transitioning zones is painfully slow; I could read up to a chapter of a good book while I wait. Moving in and out of buildings as small as a hut is considered a zone where the system needs to load the zone. The game crashes frequently as well.

This was the most money I completely wasted in 2007. I'm sorry I purchased the product.

Yes, if some one pays for full shipping, they can freely have the product from me.

ENCRYTION CODE WON'T LET ME FINISH GAME

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: December 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First, great visuals, interesting story. But....two quest characters failed to spawn for me in chapter one. That means I can go no further. Researching the community pages for The Witcher reveals others also have this problem. It seems this problem is related to an encryption code error that prevents even some legitimate game disks from loading these quest characters early in the game as a piracy prevention scheme. So, I am stuck in chapter one.

This may only apply to the uncensored version of the game, the one I
bought.

EDIT UPDATE 12-27-07
I finally got the game to work. Here's what I did. I installed patch 1.2 (latest patch released just prior to Christmas), started the game all over again (took an hour or so to replay into chapter one) and I always start the game by reinserting the disk instead of leaving the disk in the drive between plays. Now the two main quest RPCs appear!!! Researching the community pages for this game indeed revealed that the game developers (CdProjekt) hired a European security company (TAGES) to install an anti-pirate scheme. It works by not allowing two key RPGs from respawning later in the game if you have started the game using a pirated copy. So, one can not finish the game with a pirated copy but a pirate will presumedly have played it enough to want to buy a legit copy.
Unfortunetely, many folks with legitimate copies also had this problem (me included). Writing to CdProjekt or Atari(US distributor), or TAGES (Security company) got me no usefull responses. Actually, no response from either CdProject (sent to two DEVs) or Atari (sent twice). The email response from TAGES was so poorly written in english, I could not decipher it's meaning.
So this remains a bitter sweet review. Even though they finally fixed the problem (I suspect the new patch), I have also learned that Cdproject and Atari have absolutely no usefull customer service to help someone when a problem occurs. Unlike Bethesda (Morrowind/Oblivion) and Ubisoft (Silent Hunter/Sturmovik IL2 series sims) who always answered me within one day with solutions or recommendations to my querries, Cdprojekt/Atari did not even respond that they will look into the matter. Hope this helps.
02/13/08 Final Update
I thought patch 1.2 fixed everything but I was wrong. When I started chapter 4 of the game, it started crashing constantly, every 5 minutes. I was just about to give up when I went back to the community pages and researched if anyone else was having similar issues. Sure enough a player named Mobidoy had the crashing problem and suggested modifying your vista machine. Go to the community pages and search Mobidoy to get the specifics (go to The Witcher Official site. Navigate to the forum pages. Select search. Type in "mobidoy". Scroll down to "Things to try to get the game running on vista".). You may not have to do them all but following Mobidoy's steps difinitely helped me. NO MORE CRASHES. The steps involve turning off user accounsts, increasing user Va, removing Enable Write Caching on the hard drive, disable visual theme and desktop composition. It seems like alot of mods but I did it in just a few minutes. I have not noticed any bad effects with my new vista machine or with any other software on the machine. My hat is off to Mobidoy for sharing the fixes. They really worked and probably helped my computer's overall performance.

It was a dark and boring night...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 14 / 28
Date: November 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I start this review with a confession: I haven't finished the game yet. In fact, I've only played through most of the quests outside Vizima; I'm not yet into the city proper. Alledgedly the game "picks up", but I'm seriously running out of patience after investing many hours, bored out of my skull. Here are a list of observations:

The graphics engine is really lovely (excepting a lot of random aliasing at night, which I try to tell myself are fireflies) and so are the sounds. The voice acting is above average, but the conversations are often structured poorly and are therefore not believable. People offer the same dialog choices over and over even though previous conversations should have made them obsolete, resulting in conversations that make no sense. (Especially annoying, the conversation trees frequently dump you out when you intend to continue speaking, so you have to click on a character again, to hear his/her oddly identical opening phrases once more.)

This game ships with a hefty manual, but it is amazing how little information is actually provided. Like most recent game manuals, it's just installation instructions, a pile of spoilers for those interested, and not much else. This comes to your attention as you level up and find yourself navigating the most senseless skill tree of all time. Pre-requisites are unclear, skill distinctions are unclear, so what the heck, why not just select them all at random? That will be really fun.

So character customization is out the window. 8 hours into the game, inventory has proven mostly useless, so trading is equally uninteresting. Gameplay is reduced to repetetive combat, and walking from place to place waiting for the odd conversations to spawn new quests and/ or cutscenes. Oh, had I forgotten to mention the walking? The outdoor environments are relatively large, and walking from point A to B happens essentially in realtime which, again, is insanely boring. Never have I seen a game so desperately in need of a fast travel solution. (Top it all off with long fences, your inability to jump over a fence, or even step off a ledge without a staircase, and the whole world becomes a big, dull maze.)

When you do finally get to where your going, the boredom theme reaches it's apex: eternal load screens. Everytime you enter or leave an indoor location, you'll see as many as four delays. The current screen will pause for a few seconds, followed by a saving screen, followed by a generic loading screen, followed by (I couldn't make this up) a location-specific loading screen. And *each* of these are longer than any loading screen I've seen in any video game ever. If you suffer through this only to find your destination less interesting than you hoped (quite likely) you'll have to turn around and wait for it all over again, just to go back outside. Enjoy.

Other niggles: if you expect the map to aid in your travels, note that there are no notations on it. You'll need to mouse over every location waiting for text to pop-up over its mysteriously identical dot markers. After you've waited a couple of seconds for it to - you guessed it - load.

I could go on and on with the little niggles, but in many ways the game is very polished. The real issues are pacing, and the nearly meaningless skill tree. As for pacing, how many hours are we expected to invest before a game begins to entertain, or even make a point? I started to think about this during one of the "minigames", essentially rolling dice with the locals. I guess this is somewhat appropriate for a simulation of a boring rainy night in a medievel 'burb, but you know, I've got a Playstation in the next room, and could probably find something more fun to do. Failing that, maybe I could get some chores done.

Unless something miraculous happens in the next 15 minutes of gameplay, I'm giving up on The Witcher. Even worse, this is the sort of game that makes me wonder whether I still like RPG's, after 20+ years of considering them "my genre".

Do not believe the hype, screenshots nor any of the vidoes.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 18
Date: December 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

After watching a number of video reviews and previews for the game, and after veiw the simply incredible screenshots, I decieded I had to have this game. All the reviews and previews promised fasxt paced and innovative combat, deep character customization and a large, explorable game world.

Simply NONE of this was true.

To begin with, the combat just doesnt feel right. It consists of simply clicking your opponent, watching some rather cheesy combat animations and then trying to time your next click so that your character performs a combo. Thats it. That is simply not innovative, but rather repettive after the first few battles.

Next comes the camera. Where to begin? None of the camera angels feel right and all of them have defects. The up close camera constantly gets caught, faces the wrong way or simply impossible to maneuver. The mid range camera is too far out, making you miss out on the graphics, while the even further out camera makes your character look like little more than an animated dot.

Next, traveling. Walking around in this game is problematic due to the camera, which gets caught.

Load times. Load times are ludicrous in length and ruin the feel of the game.

This game is simply not worth it, I gave it two stars for the decent graphics.

Not Very Good

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 18
Date: November 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Maybe it is just that Oblivion set the standard so high for RPG games but I am disappointed with this game. Graphics are only average, the game is pretty linear, combat not that fun, and much to my disappointment I just could not get into it. Maybe you will have a different experience but I would be cautious about spending over fifty bucks for this game like I did.

Resource intensive

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 10
Date: January 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Has some merits but pales in comparison to Morrowind\Oblivion, Dungeon Siege, Lion Heart, etc. Its obvious the creators have opted for glitz over substance. My suggestion? Save your $55.00 + replay Diablo. Far more fun and satisfying without the obvious performance and technical issues. When the 1.2 patch for this game is about 115 mb's its obvious there are some serious technical flaws.

Horrible Combat

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 14
Date: April 12, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I have been a big fan of all the best and most popular games such as Half-Life2, BF2, Halo, MOH, COD4, and most importantly....Oblivion. I played all expansions of Oblivion to the fullest. Many other PC games I have played I cannot recollect at this moment. I was very intrigued about the upcoming Witcher for at least a year. I also waited until the price was normal before I tried it. The result was disapointing. I spent two hours trying to figure out the combat. Did you know the main character can never take his sword out except in combat? Did you know that when he is in combat he ALWAYS has his sword positioned over his head? You cannot click, hit and dodge...oh no..you have to wait for the EXACT time to left OR right click. yup. no messin around. You can only attack the guy with the little red ring around him. the enemy behind you can keep busting you until he has the little red ring. You also have to push a button to change your tactics depending on if your attacker has armor or not. My arm was sore after two hours of right and left clicking as fast as I could.

Compare to Oblivion? You know it...and this is a dismal failure. I predict the price TANKS by mid-summer or earlier.

wait until its 10 bucks in a few months before you buy it.

combat kills this game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 31, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I am interested in why most people are happy with this game. I can not stand the combat, it is for me a game killer. Combat is as follows: left click the mouse, wait 1.0 seconds, left click the mouse, wait 1.0 seconds left click the mouse, wait 1.0 seconds..left click the mouse, crap clicked too soon...left click mouse... oh lets cast a spell, right click the mouse..ect ect. It ruins whatever else maybe good about it. Its a RPG for Dummies, with half baked "moral" dilemas that everyone raves about, seen them, played them in much better packages, not exactly ground breaking. If you think Fable was a great game, this one will make you happy..If you prefer games like Planescape Torment, I would avoid it.

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