The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is CD Projekt RED’s sequel to The Witcher, GameBanshee’s 2007 “RPG of the Year”, both games based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels. Their first title was generally well-received even more so following the Enhanced Edition patch release and was certainly a treat for PC RPG gamers. As such, CD Projekt RED mostly opted not to mess with a winning formula in the sequel, the core strength of the game being a choice-and-consequence-heavy story set in a realistic and grim fantasy world.
It does make some major and minor changes, the most easily noticeable being a revamped combat system and much more restrictive camera. And where The Witcher ran on an aging Aurora engine, The Witcher 2 runs on the studio’s own engine, titled the RED Engine. It’s close to many of The Witcher’s core design tenets, but expands and changes a lot as well. Therefore, I’ll be digging deep in this review in order to discuss these different points effectively.
Graphics and Engine
Like its predecessor, The Witcher 2 is a great-looking game, probably the best-looking RPG I’ve played from an engine capacity standpoint. The change from Aurora to the RED Engine is noticeable not just in how good buildings and characters look, but also in the additional flexibility given to map design – The Witcher 2 offers us large and multi-leveled maps, where you can move or climb up and down. It doesn’t seem like a major advancement, but it’s a bit of a relief after The Witcher’s tendency towards flat maps and cutting you off with knee-high fences.
The Witcher’s total game world isn’t huge in square mileage, as CD Projekt RED instead spent their energy on crafting a very detailed world. As a compulsive hoarder, I spent a lot of time going in and out of random homes in the different towns, and even with homes that serve no real purpose quest-wise, every single one has a unique layout. NPCs are similarly unique, with many of Temeria’s bustling citizens having their own name, personality, and daily routines.
Like much of the game’s setting, the graphic design is all about the bleak realism of this game’s medieval fantasy setting. This design can be seen in the equipment and weaponry, which are all directly believable. Similarly, many of the monsters are close to the standards for dark high fantasy, like the drowned undead, harpies, wraiths, and even a dragon. There’s a healthy variety of monsters and the design of each of them fits into the believable and dark theme, excepting possibly the odd-looking arachas.
Each act brings you to a different area of the world, and once you press on in the game, there’s no returning to previous locations. Many monsters are tied to specific acts, and similarly the area design changes from act to act. The prologue and first act, set in a castle and riverside town, possess a kind of standard high fantasy design. It’s in the remaining two acts where CD Projekt gets more creative, when Geralt is traveling through the dwarven town of Vergen, a well-stocked Kaedweni camp, and the old semi-ruins of Loc Muinne. These areas fully utilize the engine to be spread over multiple levels and have more unique feels to them, Vergen in particular feeling like it was carved out of the mountainside.
As mentioned, the maps are fairly large and continuous, but each act is still cut into several smaller maps for loading purposes. Usually the game sends you through (a set of) doors while it quickly loads the area, and it tends to work really well, as the loading times are hardly noticeable. That said, there are a few technical niggles, not the least of which was a fairly disastrous launch, with preorder DLC not being available and the DRM activation preventing some people from even playing the game for days. But CD Projekt jumped right on it, patching the game to remove the DRM and giving everyone all of the pre-order DLC; a brute-force but effective solution. That said, as of the writing of this article the game still has some issues, including a tendency on my computer to hard crash infrequently and stutter during the animated cutscenes. Furthermore, it only supports 16:9 screen resolutions, which is a very curious design decision and leads me to wonder about how the future Xbox 360 version might have affected such a decision. And finally, in another puzzler, they once again messed up the save system. The Witcher made a new save file for every quicksave, meaning they piled up at a high rate. The Witcher 2 doesn’t do that, instead creating a new save file for every one of the frequent autosaves. Halfway during my second playthrough it would take up to 30 seconds before the loading screen popped up, and when going in to manually remove some saves, I discovered the game had stored a ridiculous 2 GB of savegame files. Save files have since been patched to take up less space, but the sheer amount is still a problem.
Character System and Interface
You always play as Geralt in The Witcher 2, a monster-hunting mutated human known as a witcher. There’s no character creation – instead, you jump right in to the game and develop Geralt as you play. The fact that he is a witcher limits your choices somewhat. Realistically you can only fight with the traditional steel and silver swords. Geralt is always capable of using magic in the form of five signs, including casting a magic shield or powerful knock-down spells.
Within those limits, there is some flexibility in how you develop and equip Geralt. You’ll run into a variety of equipment and diagrams to craft new equipment. The crafting system is pretty straightforward, once you have a diagram you can craft consumables (bombs and potions) yourself through the meditation screen, while weaponry and the different pieces of armor (body, hands, legs and feet) also need diagrams but can only be crafted by professionals you meet in every town. High-level weaponry and armor can be further customized with upgrades and runes. With the exception of junk, pretty much everything you can pick up in the game is an ingredient for crafting one item or another. It’s a joy for a hoarder like me, though it’s easy to get overloaded as The Witcher 2 does not offer relief in the way of storage points, and some of the crafting ingredients, like ore or timber, are very heavy. Of course, crafting isn’t the only way to get items, and you will find rather than create some of the best equipment. The available equipment is fairly varied, but the range of bonuses available are a bit restricted to the likes of bleeding effects, and the more unique bonuses – like causing freezing effects or providing a bonus against specific enemies – only become available near the end.
The character system consists of abilities, attributes and talents. Abilities are gained by doing specific things in the game, like carrying an NPC to safety or using the riposte move numerous times. It is a good perk system though unfortunately CD Projekt opted to put the conversation skills (using an Axii hex, intimidation and persuasion) under here. This means that if you use them a few times early on you’ll push them to their highest value and always succeed at them later. Attributes are passive stats derived from equipment, abilities and talents. The talent trees are the only ones you can upgrade during the game, which is a bit restrictive but works well.
There are four talent trees: training, alchemy, magic and swordmanship. Training is a kind of (basic) talent tree, and you have to invest six points into it before the game allows you to invest in any other tree. The other trees are specializations in the branch they’re named after, each invested point unlocking a noticeable boost to your abilities or unlocking a whole new ability like knife-throwing or riposte. The game never locks a talent tree so you can freely generalize in multiple trees. Each one branches a few times so you can opt to skip a number of talents you have less interest in while working your way up to the best talents. Geralt gains levels by accumulating experience, most of which is given to you by resolving quests (mostly main quests), while enemies give minimal XP and even nothing if they’re way below your level. This is not a game that encourages much in the way of grinding, and on my second playthrough I reached level 35 (the cap) without doing any of it.
The system is pretty flexible and specializing in any of the branches seems a pretty valid way to go, though I did not test a pure-alchemy build in my two full playthroughs, but considering the power of bombs in key fights it seems like a good way to go. In both of my full playthroughs, I supported my main specialization (swordsmanship and magic) with a choice of low-level skills from other branches, and again it works great. The game does encourage you to push at least one branch to the top, as the top abilities grant powerful adrenaline abilities. They allow Geralt to charge adrenaline by certain actions specific to their specialization (using signs, or hitting with your sword, or being poisoned by potions), which once charged up can be used for powerful moves, like instant-finishers or slowing down time, which make some of the tougher fights a lot easier. But the balance between talents isn’t great, which I’ll discuss later.
While we’re on talents and crafting, it’s worth taking a moment to talk about the game’s interface. The Witcher 2 is console-friendly relative to the first Witcher game. The camera is always stuck in an OTS view with no options to zoom out, and the interface screens for selecting signs or items to use are easily adapted to console. It’s not too blatant and still works fine on PC, though the camera is a bit of a pity, as the combat could have done with a top-down overview but the targeting system doesn’t really allow for it. One odd design decision here is that because you can only level up and drink potions outside of combat which is fine they put both actions under the meditate screen, which is a bit annoying. The frequent act of selecting and drinking potions becomes more awkward than it needs to be, as I need to perform multiple actions and watch Geralt go through repetitive motions every time I do so.
One final bit I’ll list under miscellaneous are the mini-games. There is arm wrestling, playing dice or fist-fighting, and one-off mini-games like aiming a ballista or a knife-throwing competition. These mini-games are often a part of sidequests but there is only one occasion of fist-fighting being needed in the main plot, so if you don’t enjoy them they’re easy to skip. The dice game is the same as in the last game, the AI playing pretty well so you have decent odds of winning or losing. Arm wrestling consists of you holding an emblem with a moving field with mouse movements, which is generally pretty easy. Fist-fighting is the worst of the mini-games, being a quick-time event where you press the WASD buttons when it tells you to and then watch Geralt beat up his opponent. It’s is very hard to lose these fights and the QTE system means you feel removed from the action. Nor is it the only instance of QTE in the game, as various bosses require bits of QTE to be defeated. These are mostly unfortunate and feel unnecessary, but can easily be turned down by turning off (difficult QTEs) in the options. Still, the whole QTE thing feels tacked on, like something they felt obligated to add, but which serves very little purpose in this game.
Combat and Difficulty
The combat system of The Witcher 2 is different from its predecessor, but there are certain elements that have remained the same. Like the first game, this title’s combat wants you to study monsters before you fight them, to learn what type of attack best to use, and what signs or bombs the monster will be particularly sensitive to. Additionally, timing is key, both in chaining together attacks and in determining when to strike or dodge away.
Otherwise, it’s pretty different and more focused on action. The first game had the silver and steel sword and three different stances (strong, fast and group), for a total of six styles you could upgrade and use through the game. In The Witcher 2, you draw either the steel or silver sword and can chain together fast and strong attacks by using the left and right mouse buttons. The group style is gone, which means you can no longer just jump into groups and slash away, as they will mob you to death in no time. Instead, Geralt can dodge around quickly, an essential move that you can use to jump in, chain a few attacks and quickly jump back out. It is vaguely reminiscent of though less reactive than the combat system of Arkham Asylum and similar recent action titles.
There’s a healthy variety of enemies which all have a different style of combat to them, as well as different weaknesses and immunities. For instance, harpies are sensitive to be setting alight with the igni sign, while stone gargoyles just shrug it off. Certain faster enemies can only be dealt with by fast strikes, while the insect-like endregas require strong strikes to get through their heavy armor, and others (like wraiths) require smart combinations of both. Knowledge of your enemies is key to defeating them, and trying to just attack without forethought or tactics will usually just get you killed in the early parts of the game.
In general, I prefer this to The Witcher’s click-fest of a combat system, but it is less tactical in many ways, replacing much of the need for tactical considerations by depending more on the gamer’s reflexes. Also, while what I said about tactics is true in general, the game has a number of strategies and talents that are clearly unbalanced. The worst offender is the magical sign Quen. While they attempted to balance it by making vigor not regenerate while Quen is on, it functions as an invulnerability shield that lasts for a certain time, the timer reduced by enemy damage. When Quen is on, attacks can not be interrupted, and at higher levels of the talent it actually reflects damage back to the attacker, interrupting their attack and knocking them back to make them open to your attacks. It is clearly not the game’s intention, but the result is that most fights can be won by judicial use of quen, especially the upgraded version, and if necessary simply rolling around to avoid the enemy when Geralt needs to regenerate vigor.
Quen is the worst offender, but it’s not the only one. If you’re not specialized in magic, Yrden is probably the second most powerful sign available to you (magic specialists will find uses in the Igni fireballs), as you can trap even the most powerful bosses in an Yrden trap, move around the defenseless enemy and wail on his back for double damage. Other signs, particularly Axii, are much less useful to the point of it just being bad design. Additionally, it is too easy to stockpile potions, oils and bombs, and especially if you have talents to give bonuses to the use of such items, they become too powerful while being fairly cheap to use. Several bosses can be defeated simply by throwing a series of bombs or throwing knives, and the combination of quen and bombs is the perfect cheese tactic against almost every enemy in the game. And finally, while I only tried two of the top powers, the mage’s slow-down power is ridiculously overpowered compared to the swordsman’s instant-kill power.
This lack of balance is a major part of The Witcher 2’s difficulty curve. Because contrary to first impressions, this is not a difficult game, at all. Yet the first time I played it I kept getting beaten up in the prologue and Act I, before coasting on through the final two acts. There’s two reasons for this: One, The Witcher 2 does have a reverse difficulty curve, much like the Gothic games, meaning it’s more difficult at the start as you have fewer skills and inferior equipment and gets easier as you progress. This is unusual in cRPGs, but I’m a big fan of it since it really makes you experience your character’s progress. Two, the game does a terrible job teaching you how it’s supposed to be played. The prologue acts as a tutorial of sorts but given the complexities of the combat system its short pop-up screens are simply inadequate, at best just telling you how the interface works rather than how combat works. Much of the difficulty of the early game stems from not knowing what you’re doing, and this is not a fun way to be challenged. The lack of a proper tutorial or gameplay instructions is probably the game’s biggest flaws, and inflates the difficulty artificially. On my second playthrough, I had the game on Hard all throughout, but my understanding of the system (and its imbalances) meant I could breeze through almost every fight. One exception is when the game executes one of its gimmicky “play like someone else” sequences, most of which aren’t hard, but Geralt’s skills are used to determine the character’s skill as a swordsman, which makes no narrative sense and is very annoying for non-swordsman builds.
Writing and Sound
Determined not to repeat the mistake of a butchered English script that lead to the Enhanced Edition patch for The Witcher, The Witcher 2 was written in English from the start and it shows. It has a lot of fantasy-type phrases such as using (ploughing) as an expletive but it reads like it was written in English rather than localized to English, the writing flowing naturally and being of pretty high quality.
The voice acting matched the quality of the writing, my only negative note being Geralt has the tendency to be a bit monotone, though this disinterested, abrasive attitude kind of matches his personality. The characters generally talk with vaguely British accents, and combined with the unique idioms written for the game it helps immerse the player into the fantasy world. To further improve on this, the Elves have their own ancient tongue which is occasionally used for multiple lines, with translations in the subtitles. A language that often sounds very Dutch to my ears, an effective method of crafting a fantasy language by borrowing from non-English languages. Dwarves speak with unique, Gaelic accents. The sound and music overall is strong, appropriately designed for different areas and combat situations. One oddity was the music being at such a high volume at times I had to turn it down just so it wouldn’t drown out the characters talking.
The writing of both the main quest and side quests is pretty much consistently excellent. In many cases, the game surprises you with unexpected turns as new facts come to light, in a politics-heavy rollercoaster of a plot that sees multiple factions turn on each other, and people aren’t necessarily on the side you expect them to be on. What’s more, pretty much every character, whether they take a side in the struggle or remain mostly neutral, have believable motivations, even if they’re not always what they seem at first glance.
The main plot starts with Geralt being witness to and soon accused of a successful assassination on king Foltest, and soon learning of another king’s death. Geralt’s own motivations can be whatever you pick, either he feels justice needs to be done here or he just wants to clear his own name. Regardless, the story brings you to chase the kingslayer, who is hiding out amongst Scoia’tael, chasing him through one of two army camps and finally to a high level political gathering, where the political fate of an entire region is decided, impacted by your choices. It’s a politically and morally charged story that doesn’t shy away from being complex, and lacks a clear good or bad side as both sides are populated by killers and power-mongering individuals. In all the game, there is all of one new NPC who could be called (good) without too many footnotes, Saskia, and even in her case not everything is what it seems.
That plot progresses through the main quests, presented in dialog, cutscenes and texts you find. Additionally, during the main plot and occasionally in side-quests, you will recover memories of Geralt’s, as he started the Witcher 1 with amnesia and at the beginning of the Witcher 2 still doesn’t know how much of his past leading up to the moment he lost his memory. It’s an interesting sideplot, with memories presented in a highly stylized animated side. It can be a bit jarring as they sometimes occur in the middle of conversations and the style break is noticeable, but it’s yet another interesting plot woven into the tapestry.
It’s a convoluted plot, but one that is interesting and draws the player into unraveling it. I feel one of the game’s biggest problem is assuming some familiarity with the original game or Sapkowski’s novels and some of its characters. For new players, Triss is introduced only as a naked woman lying in bed with Geralt to kick off the game. Dandelion and Zoltan Chivay, who also featured heavily in the previous game, are similarly thrown at you with little introduction. You can read up on them in your journal which somewhat mitigates the problem, but it’s a lot easier to feel connected with the game’s more interesting characters, such as Roche, Iorveth, Ves, Saskia or many others of the cast. The Witcher 2 does not feel the need to really explore the personalities and motivations of Triss, Dandelion or Zoltan, assuming you’re familiar with them already.
There are some other, more minor quibbles. The options for sexual encounters have been reduced compared to the Witcher 1, which is fine. Instead of awkward sex cards they are now handled by awkward sex scenes. The romantic encounter with Triss in Act I compares favorably to the industry standard of 3D dolls flailing at each other, but most of the sexual encounters are just there without much of an impact. The whole theme of Geralt’s sexual voraciousness is brought to a kind of unintentionally hilarious climax when you encounter a Succubus, and the weirdness of it all is highlighted as you witness her putting her hoof on Geralt’s shoulder while in the throes of passion. It’s all optional, and easy enough to ignore, but this isn’t true for every but of corniness in this game, and it can get very corny, both in easter eggs to AD&D (an elf named Drizzt) and Lord of the Rings (“a piece of lembas”), and just groan-worthy remarks, such as a dwarf going (paraphrazed) “ah, my favorite kind of magic: lesbomancy!” These type of jokes won’t appeal to everyone.
Another point of criticism is the way the game rounds up the plot. We’ll talk more about the strangeness of Act III later, but let me note here that it’s very exposition-heavy. Now personally I didn’t mind, because I wanted to find out about all this, every sordid detail of the various plots people had going against one another. But as a rule of thumb, an exposition-dump at the tail end of a videogame plot isn’t the best way to round things up. But again, if you don’t care, you’re free to skip it, as this game never forces you to sit through dialogue or cutscenes if you’ve seen it before or know it already, and you can freely pause or skip as you prefer. Finally, I want to note the game’s plot depends rather heavily on happenstance. To launch Act II, the king happens to smash a priest’s skull (for no real reason) against a rock which happens to trigger an older semi-broken curse while Geralt just happens to be arriving at that exact moment. It’s pretty standard for fantasy plots to work this way, but The Witcher 2 stretches it to the point of snapping.
Quest Design and Choice & Consequence
So far, I’ve described a game that is primarily an action RPG, though story-driven and with solid crafting and character development. And while you do spend quite a lot of time in combat, I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the game’s main draw. Instead, I’d say that on top of a good setting and solid story, the game offers a rich set of quests with a variety in designs, and all but the most minor quests (of the type (beat the best dice poker players)) can be approached in different ways and/or offer different choices to make during the quest.
A number of side quests deal with issues and conflicts within the towns you’re in and thus do not have violent solutions. Instead, you are offered different options on mediating, deciding in favor of one of the two sides, or using one of the dialog skills (Axii sign, persuasion or intimidation) to resolve the situation. One of the best examples is in the Scoia’tael path of Act II, where a prince is accused of poisoning the beloved leader of the rebellion. Geralt is tasked with resolving this heated situation, and he has to hurry as the peasants are set to riot. And when this game tells you to hurry it means it, albeit in an odd way as the (you must decide now) event is triggered by how many people you talked to rather than how long you took about it. Regardless, this is a quest that tasks you with talking to the various people present right there, but you can also try to reach the prince to question him, or follow one of various clues offered to you. One bit of knowledge is actually only available if you resolved another quest earlier. And in the end, Geralt sums up what you’ve discovered while talking to the nobles and peasants. The player must then decide what he believes happened based on what you’ve learned, a choice that in turn impacts other main quests. The information you gather can offer a fairly complete picture, but the game is pretty ambiguous about the guilt of the prince, so it’s a tough decision to make.
It’s all about choices offered and the consequences they have. Most of them are minor, for instance opting not to take a dive in a fistfight means a few goons are sent to teach you a lesson. The main choice is between siding with the leader of the slain king’s special agents, Vernon Roche, or one of the leaders of the Scoia’tael, an elf named Iorveth. This choice is offered in Act I, and siding with either one locks you in for the rest of the game.
Two things really impressed me here. One, the choice is significant, Act II plays out completely differently based on who you sided with, as you play most of the act in Vergen for the Socia’tael path or in the Kaedweni army camp with Vernon Roche. While in both cases your main task is to lift the curse laid on the land, all the sidequests are different, and it only two of the tasks in the main quest are the same. While you do get to visit the other side, a lot of areas are shut off for Geralt at the enemy’s map, and sidequests are certainly not available. Act III is also impacted but only in its main quests, not in the sidequests. Secondly, on my first playthrough I got the impression that Vernon Roche was clearly the good guy while Iorveth simply a terrorist. And while it turned out I was correct and Iorveth remains a pretty extreme character, the path you follow with him is not an insane, evil path where you are forced to side with a clearly evil side. Instead, you find yourself in a rebellion that may be manned by extremists like Iorveth, but has the highest and noblest ideals. In fact, the path he took me to lead to more favorable results than following Vernon Roche, which has unfortunate consequences. To put it shortly, what impressed me was that neither option was clearly good, nor did they lead to where they can be expected to go.
Obviously, this is the biggest consequences get in the game, as it’s the main choice you’re asked to make. It does mean this is a game that warrants at least two playthroughs, which is exactly what makes choice & consequence mechanics so wonderful in RPG games. And it’s not just that you get to explore different areas, CD Projekt is not afraid of putting certain facts concerning the main plot in only one of two paths. Much of what motivates Henselt is only available in Roche’s path, and only in that path can you decide how to deal with him. On the other hand, a key and very surprising fact about one of the main characters is only available in Iorveth’s path, and at best vaguely hinted at in the other path. Without wanting to sound too preachy, this is a delightful counter to the industry trend where developers worry about gamers not seeing every bit of their great game, and force them into linear path and cutscene expositions. CD Projekt gets the value of C&C, and offers a game that’s great the first time you play it through, but offers a dollop of extra value on the second time.
Given a limited budget and an expensive game in graphics and voice acting, it’s not really possible to offer such a wide-sweeping consequence for every choice. Some consequences are limited as CD Projekt wanted to keep specific NPCs alive no matter what choice you make, which means certain “rescue NPC” choices are dulled in impact. Furthermore, many choices have minor consequences, like minor monetary rewards or either preventing or causing a fight. Not exciting, but better than nothing at all. But despite having no sweeping consequences, these choices still feel important thanks to the good writing of the game. Where most other games offer binary good or evil choices where the consequences are easy to foresee, the Witcher 2 is what you would call genuinely mature. Not in that it has swearing, violence and nudity, though it does have all of those, and in particular gets really gory at times. But its mature stems from the fact that people aren’t always what they seem, and most people in this harsh unremittingly bleak world are bastards, either because they have to be bastards to survive or because they just like being bastards. The Witcher 2 delights in having you decide before every single fact is known to you, and in offering you to choose between two things you don’t want to do or two things you want to do, a hard choice in both cases. Do I chase down the bastard commander who trapped elven women inside a burning building, or do I save the elven women? I want to do both, but I can’t, which is typical of this game.
So, Act I is about making a big choice, and Act II plays out completely differently depending on your choice. You may have noticed I haven’t talked much about Act III much, and that’s because it is a bit of an odd duck. The side-quests play out the same regardless of the main path you followed, though some are dependent on you finding certain objects in earlier acts. The map is smaller and the act is shorter than the two proceeding ones, with the side-quest activities essentially consisting of (get the best gear in the game), which you then get to utilize in the final hour or so of the game. Now this final hour or so is really good as an ending area, and has about five significantly different ways in which it will play out depending on choices you made before and the choices you make in this Act, before culminating in an appropriately (epic) if somewhat ridiculous fight with a boss monster.
Thing is, the Act should either have been focused more on that ending sequence, or have some significant meat to its sidequests. It doesn’t exactly feel rushed, but coming out of Act I and II it feels very abrupt by comparison. The structure is unsatisfying too, as you don’t have to do very much to get the best equipment, and even on Hard the final fights are really much too easy for your high-level character though the chapter also contains an optional puzzle sequence and a fight that is the hardest in the game, reminiscent of Baldur’s Gate II’s Twisted Rune fight. The low challenge level is fine for the most part, as the enemy sends in mobs to kill you that you can now easily despatch, a way to highlight how strong our hero has become, but when I am going up close and personal with the final boss monster, I’m expecting at least some challenge. The combination of this odd gameplay design (largely caused by the lack of balance in the character system), the lack of it tying up a few loose ends satisfactorily, and the use of dialogue exposition dumps make the final act slightly unsatisfying. It’s not bad by any measure, and it’s very satisfying as a narrative ending especially with the epilogue that follows, but it is just disappointing compares to the first two acts.
Conclusion
Honestly, what more can I say? The Witcher 2 is a lovingly crafted, beautiful, and detailed RPG, with a riveting and genuinely mature story. Many of my points of criticism were minor, though some are potentially bothersome, including the odd decisions with the game’s interface, camera angle, and aspect ratio, as well as a semi-flawed combat system. And, sure, I would have liked to see more complexity and more balance in the character system. But that doesn’t take away quite how strong the core the game is, the choice and consequence playing off against the realistic setting brilliantly, while the level of care having gone into the game helps give weight to the choices offered by making the fleshed-out world feel real.
Considering where mainstream RPGs have been trending towards lately, the Witcher 2 is a great step in the right direction. I don’t feel the combat segment of RPGs has to be action-based, quite the opposite, nor do I understand the need to add gimmicks like QTEs to the RPG genre. Yet, if someone wants to craft an (evolved) RPG with action-based combat, this is what it should be. It is about gaining complexity and becoming more mature, instead of simplifying and schlock stories. Leaving aside the debate on combat and camera angles, the core mistake of where the RPG genre is thundering to is that developers do not respect players. The Witcher 2 isn’t unremittingly hard, nor will it win awards for complexity in its combat or RPG systems, but what sets it apart from the Dragon Age IIs of the world is both the enormous amount of work put into its every detail, and in not being afraid to challenge the player and offer him or her real and mature choices. It is for those reasons that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is easily our early frontrunner for “RPG of the Year”, with no title released so far this year even coming close.
