This is the third or fourth time I’m giving this game a shot and I have no idea why that is.
Don’t get me wrong. It looks and feels like an amazing game, so I definitely know why I keep going back to it. What I don’t understand is, why do I give up on it? For some reason, I get through the first few areas and then I just forget about it, usually around the time when I get to the swamp area. This time, I decided to go through it all the way, and I’ll use the blog as a tool to make myself do this.
Amnesia is a trope, but tropes aren’t always bad.
After a while recovering, the castle gets attacked by some bandits led by a guy they call The Professor and a couple of sorcerers. The witchers soon realize the attackers are after their mutagens. The witcher mutagens are extremely powerful potions that allow witchers to do their work, which is mostly contract work involving disposal of various magic related issues.Again, I started out on the middle difficulty and started with the tutorial area. The basic story is that you’re the legendary witcher Geralt, the White Wolf. You were missing for a while and somehow stumbled back to the castle your fellow witchers control. However, you have amnesia, so you have no idea what happened or where you were.
The first two big baddies.
During the battle, one of the younger witchers gets killed, the attackers manage to get away and Triss Merirgold, a sorceress working with the witchers, gets hurt. After she recovers, the whole group decided to leave the castle in search for bandits, since there was nothing really keeping them there anymore. Each of them chooses a direction to go to and Geralt decided to go south.
Well, that’s the story so far. The gameplay, on the other hand, was mostly a tutorial. I was taught (for the fourth time now) how to use my sword, how to switch fighting styles, make potions, get stronger, etc. The game sort of plays like an action RPG, but it’s far more complex than that. During fights, you have to switch between three different fighting styles on the fly. One is suited for faster opponents, the other for strong, slow opponents, while the third is well suited for fighting larger groups.
Outside of that, alchemy is extremely important in this game. The potions you can make have effects that last for quite a long time and the game actually encourages you to use them often enough. Some parts are actually quite hard or even impossible to do without the potions.
Leveling works via skill points you distribute among various skills. Each skill adds different bonuses to both attack and defense, adds new moves and abilities, or just unlocks features in the game, such as better material gathering or foraging.
Your equipment is basic, but still quite complex. You get to carry several different weapons with you. First of all, there’s the steel and silver sword. These are your main weapons and the weapons your whole move set revolves around. Steel is used in fights against other humans, while silver works better on monsters. Other than these two, you can also carry a few other weapons, but they are mostly situational and aren’t really used that often.
Overall, it’s a nice, complex RPG with plenty of things you can do and deep gameplay. I hope to enjoy it fully this time and will do all I can to do so.
