DelightfulMcCoy said:
10. The one negative thought I want to add is that I would've liked to encounter more monsters. If you don't rush through the adventure, you go long spaces without any enemies and that feels a bit too less witcher-y.
You're going to have the same negative reaction to ours, and there's a reason.Think about the ecosystem within which these monsters exist. For example, the Vizima cemetery. - or either of the swamps - or the sewers - in the main game. You go in there, you encounter lots of monsters. Where is the food source for all these monsters? The cemetery isn't very big, there can't be many burials there every day - indeed, we never see a funeral happening- so there isn't much fresh food in there. Fresh food would support at most a population of two or three ghouls. Of course, it may be that for the last ten years there have been no ghouls there, and a wandering population has just moved in (indeed, that's sort of hinted at in the plot), in which case they could be subsisting on several years worth of corpses. So I'm going to give CDPR a bye on the number of necrophages you encounter first time you go in there. Anyway, you kill them all, and the next night you go back...And the place is hoaching with necrophages again!Where the &%$! did they all come from? How fast do these things breed? You can't do that! The intelligent player is bound to find that willing suspension of disbelief just doesn't work under this assault. It's bad story telling.Considering the world of The Witcher more widely,
- In Chapter One the monsters are mainly ghost dogs, which presumably don't need a lot of sustenance; and there are plenty of travellers wandering the roads at night (why?!?), so that there is probably enough meat for them even if they do. There are drowners on the river, but not many, and the river could well be quite a productive ecosystem. Pass.
- Chapter Two, the population density of monsters in the swamp, the sewers, and the cemetery is just too high to high to be credible. And it's unnecessary, given the number of human villains you encounter. Furthermore, in the swamp, the brickmakers, the druids and the woodcutters all live in close proximity to monster populations without significant conflict. Fail.
- Chapter Three is much like Chapter Two. Fail.
- In Chapter Four, the noonwraiths and nightwraiths presumably don't need much sustenance, so aren't a problem. The large area of grassland would easily support a population of grazing animals (though we never see any) so there's a credible food source for the devourers. And the lake is large and may host large fish populations, so the vodyanoi are not really a problem. Pass.
- The swamp in Chapter Five... Come on, guys, is this some kind of joke? Fail.
Of course, part of the problem is the relatively compact game area. Put all these monsters in a game area as large as Oblivion, and they make more sense, because although the population remains the same, the population density is lower. And, of course, the reason the game area is small is a constraint of the Aurora engine. And, again to be fair, there are relatively fewer random monsters per unit area than in most BioWare games, and BioWare are also great storytellers.However, if you read Sapkowski's stories, there's typically one monster to a short story covering three or four days of Geralt's life. If you read his novels, there are relatively even fewer. And there's a reason for that. When monsters come at you in waves, they lose dramatic impact. Also, from a game perspective, they become boring.The narrative benefit of having lots of relatively weak monsters in chapters one and two is that the player learns to use Geralt's fighting skills, and that's good. They're also a useful source of alchemic components. But by chapters four and five, even on your first run through the game, you know how to defeat all the drowners, bloodzuigers and drowned dead easily and quickly. And your Geralt has been enhanced with abilities and equipment to the extent they can barely touch him. They aren't a threat any more. They're just a nuisance, slowing you down. The interesting fights in Chapter Five are those in Old Vizima and in the Old Manor, and by and large they aren't against monsters.Obviously, there's more than one audience for a game, but The Witcher's great strength is in story telling, and all the hack-n-slash stuff gets in the way of story telling both by slowing the narrative down and by interfering with willing suspension of disbelief.So, while I continue to rate The Witcher as the best computer game, the best computer-mediated narrative, I've ever experienced, I think the hack-n-slash actually detracts from it; and in so far as what I'm trying to do is write narratives which are even better than the Witcher, you won't find hack-n-slash in stories I've worked on except where it's either plot-driven or justified by the environment.Which is a very long winded way of saying I think Raven has the balance right, here.
Uuups, Corylea, please tell me what system you are running (Win Vista? maybe), the installer does work on Win XP correctly when the old version was installed and then updated. We couldn't test with other Win versions and we also couldn't test the installer when only the EE was installed from the later release-package.Would be nice if you can tell me exactly what Win and what EE version you did install, that I can change my readmes and add a note there. Your Golem problem: The questgiver told you, that only strong golems are dropping such special potions. 