The Witcher Review

Game Over Online reviewed the Witcher and they’re less positive than many others, giving it 78%.

But here’s the big problem. The loading, saving, and transition times are abysmally long. When I said that the Witcher has a 50+ hour campaign, I think that translates to about a 40 hour campaign with 10 hours of staring at loading screens. Worse, the game uses a dopey autosaving strategy, where instead of autosaving every X minutes, or right before something important is about the happen, it autosaves every other time you change your map location. That means when you’re wandering around a town, the game autosaves all the time (because entering a house or a shop triggers the autosaves), but when you’re in the wilderness killing creatures, there aren’t any autosaves at all. That makes the town sequences a real chore, which is unfortunate because there are a lot of town sequences (the Witcher has a fairly even balance between talking and fighting), but it has its effect on the fighting sequences, too, since if you die you have to load your game, and so you have to save frequently. The loading times really sap the fun out of the game, but supposedly the next patch (due out any day now) is going to address this.

Hopefully the first part of the review hasn’t scared you off, because the Witcher has some good stuff to it, too. First and foremost is the campaign. Instead of following the BioWare mold where you’re always given (good) and (evil) ways to solve quests, the Witcher swims in murkier waters. One of the themes of the Witcher books is having to choose (the lesser evil,) where you’re presented with a pair of options and neither one is right or wrong; they just have different shades of gray.