I intended to make another short video showcasing a montage of the most outstanding moments of the first few hours of the Witcher for this update, but I found it surprisingly difficult to get myself to play any more of the thing. More than once I sat down to play the Witcher, hovered my cursor over the button, and then... you know, games of Blood Bowl need playing, and probably I could catch up on Parks and Recreation, and really I ought to update my blog but wait first I'd have to play the Witcher CRAP BACKPEDAL MAYBE I SHOULD GO FOR A RUN. (If you know me, you know that the very idea of me choosing to run on purpose is a sign of some serious extinction-level desperation.)
So why?
Clearly I think that the game is pretty crummy. More specifically, I have a particular affinity for presentation and writing, and this game... well, I heard that the developers had released an update for the game with an improved script and voice acting and I thought "Oh, that'll help me get through it!" Imagine my disappointment when it turned out that that's the version I was playing already.
But that's a pretty vague and shallow reaction, so I sat and had a good hard think about why, exactly, this game is so repugnant to me. The first thing that came to mind was that it overreaches, by which I mean that it tries too hard to deliver things of which it is incapable. There's tons of dialogue, but the writing is significantly subpar, and the plot as far as I've gotten is pretty weak. The game has cinematic pretenses, but its "actors" lack the articulation (both vocal and generally in the face region) to deliver performances sufficient to make the camera work anything but distracting. In addition, it follows the regrettably common trend of video game graphics in an attempt to make things look as realistic as possible, which always ends up looking bad a few years hence. The game tries and tries and tries, but it doesn't seem to have the resources to accomplish even one of the things it's attempting. So is that it? Am I driven back by all the unfulfilled ambition?
My regular readers (both of them!) will remember that I actually rather like overambitious games. There's obviously a difference between the two, though: the unfulfilled ambition of Apocalypse really has more to do with its technical execution--a lack of polish in the implementation of ambitious ideas--while the failures of the Witcher are of a decidedly more mundane sort. Really, the things I've been talking about at which the Witcher fails are perfectly ordinary: have your voice actors speak in the way that primary speakers of the language speak, write a script that doesn't make the reader groan audibly more than once a minute, design a control scheme that doesn't make it feel like your character is fighting while immersed in cold peanut butter, etc. The failures of the Witcher are less in the camp of "failing to execute grand ideas" and much more in the neighborhood of "basic incompetence". We've all seen basic incompetence before, though. Hell, I'd say that X-Com Enforcer is worse than this game in every way, and I still managed to compel myself to boot that up more than a couple of times.
I wish I had a good answer. Frankly, I just don't know exactly what it is about the Witcher that repels me so. Honestly, there may even be a perfectly good game in there somewhere, but if not even one element of it is going to show up within the first hour, then I simply haven't got the time for it, certainly not with well over a hundred games left in the queue.
And so it is that I say a fond and eager farewell to Geralt of Rivia and his world of combat pirouettes and steely-eyed female cyborgs longing to be human. Hopefully I'll have a better experience with the next game, which is... oh, hell.
