The witcher basically gave me hope that a rpg can be everything that its suppose to be. Previous to the witcher, I'd been playing some unreal tournanent 3, some crysis, and some good old defense of the ancients. I'd lost faith in the Rpg market, because they the depth found in pen and paper rpg's Most people associate rpg's with stats-Any game with the development of stats=role playing game. I have a word for those games~stat oriented actions games...Even games that make an effort to be something more have there failings. Neverwinter nights, Kotor, oblivion for some recent examples....With oblivion, no connection was created between me or the silent protagonist. I felt exceedingly distant with the protagonist. I began to feel like I was playing classical silent shooter protagonist, never talking, just bashing heads. With Kotor or nwn, the game had promising gameplay and character development, but was stunted by the way the alignment system worked. Dialogue felt sporratic and unrelated. The game gave me the option of being wantonly evil one moment, and absurdly just another. Even more so, the actions had no effect on gameplay, or more importantly, they had no impact on the development of my character, save the changing a relatively meaningless alignment bar. The witcher isn't perfect-there is a lot it can improve on, but the game gave me hope that its possible for a game to have the depth found only on table top rpgs (which I never play anymore...my friends have little interest in it
), to be displayed in a game. The ending doesn't change, but all your actions well, make sense, in a way that isn't forced. In other words, you can't save triss from a band of rapelves, only to verbally abuse her in ridiculous ways the next moment. This basically makes the game easier to "role play"-If your character acts in a way that makes sense, the experience becomes overall more enjoyable. In addition, the game stays true to the witchers books overarching theme of the lack of moral absolutes...no good or bad. It could have been extremely easy to add a "goodness bar", but the developers chose not. Instead the game leaves the players to ponder the consequences and morality of there actions. For instance, the act of killing Vincent I killed him., not because I was unaware of how to break his curse, or I disliked him, but for his yummy talent potion. Even after going on massacre sprees in games like Nwn or oblivion, I felt not one pang of guilt. I actually felt guilty of killing vincent. As a result, I made myself break Ada's curse instead of going the selfish route of going for her potion. The game actually encouraged me to roleplay...while I was tasked on deciding who I would side with (another thing I like...siding with either side is a gradual process, set over 3 events, while in other rpgs, its usually done in a single dialogue.) I put into play my own moral beliefs. I sort of saw the Nonhuman-human conflict as the U.S's previous conflict of the resettling of Native Americans. One side is drastically overpowered, and outgunned, yet fought in vain for there right to live the way they want. On the other hand, that side was not afraid to use "terror tactics", and various other underhanded tactics. I couldn't directly support such things that would endanger innocent civilians, to them, to which is merely a means to an end. Nor did they believe in total equality-Given the chance, they would inflict the same means oppression that was directed to them as evident by there contemptuous remarks. On the opposing side, we had a side that essentially supports genocide. Given those to choices, I basically could only side with neutral. In other games, I can shift from evil to angelic with ease. On my second replay of the witcher on hard, I changed many things-Such as not killing vincent
. But one thing I ended up doing the same was siding with neutral. This game was far from perfect, far far from it. The games ending needed working on. The game overall stayed plot centered enough to stop it from becoming something like oblivion, in which NO connection was formed between the main character, or any other character. But remained open to allow impactful meaningful decisions. But the I was let down at the ending, with a single closed ending that remained the same no matter what your actions were. I felt that allegiances became meaningless, essentially effecting very little. It would be interesting if in the sequel, the end boss would be different depending on choices you made. But this game is really the first of its kind, at least since I've seen for a long long time.