The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Previews

Two more hands-on previews of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings surfaced on the web earlier today, and they’re both quite favorable (for good reason, I might add). Eurogamer kicks things off for us:

A huge step upwards in terms of presentation, writing and roleplaying complexity, The Witcher 2 takes the RPG fight right to the big boys. Assassins of Kings? If the kings are BioWare and Bethesda, that sounds about right.

While commenting on a game’s graphics can become a one-way ticket to dreary SuperlativeVille, it would be a critical disservice not to nod at just how great The Witcher 2 looks. Sporting the developers’ custom engine, it’s one of those now all-too-rare games that are designed explicitly for those honking great graphics cards inside a gaming PC.

Arrestingly good-looking even at the lower settings, when whacked up all the way to Ultra it’s an explosion of detail and colour, a long way distant from the blurry textures and depressing browns we’ve perhaps come to expect of late.

Characters are robust and distinctive, high-tech and careful design working in harmony. If you’ve thought, even for a second, that ‘Polish’ must mean ‘cheap’, you’ve got it all wrong. This looks nothing short of spectacular, whether it’s facing off against vast monsters such as dragons and kraken or simply wandering a forest at sunset and cooing at the pretty lighting.

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It’s a thoughtful and evolved RPG first and foremost, from the sprawl of interesting and layered quests to the vast skill tree, so dense in swordfighting, magic and alchemy upgrade options that it seems impossible anyone could ever have the same Geralt.

On top of this is a meaty weapon and armour crafting system, which often involves a hunt for rare materials with the promise of tangibly effective reward, and the remarkably subtle use of quick-time events for occasional fist-fighting sequences and evasion from certain death in a couple of set-piece encounters.

Aside from making the rookie error of presuming every player will be so familiar with the original game that they can plunge right into what’s immediately a too-complex back-story (really, it needs an additional intro sequence to clear things up for newbies), it’s clever and subtle yet big and brash a breath of fresh air in an age where other role-players are obsessed with accessibility first and foremost.

And then there’s this three-minute video preview on GameTrailers, which falls a bit flat in comparison to Eurogamer’s article.