Erkki

The Witcher

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Indeed, it's a terrible cliché, I agree. Sometimes it fits and in this game I thought it fit, is wut m sayink. :grin:

Fit or not, it's lazy.

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The stupid thing is that it was completely unnecessary. His amnesia is only ever referenced at the beginning of the game to explain his lack of skills, and as a hook to insert the back story of new characters that he supposedly knew in the past. Literally no other significance. It's completely unrelated to the main plot.

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Fit or not, it's lazy.

I'm willing to let a first-time developer off with a warning when the rest of the game was as good as it ended up being.

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The stupid thing is that it was completely unnecessary. His amnesia is only ever referenced at the beginning of the game to explain his lack of skills, and as a hook to insert the back story of new characters that he supposedly knew in the past. Literally no other significance. It's completely unrelated to the main plot.

Did I play a different game to everyone else? There were plenty of characters in Geralt's past that were important to the game.

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Did I play a different game to everyone else? There were plenty of characters in Geralt's past that were important to the game.

They were important, but the amnesia wasn't.

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Given the clicheness, I actually appreciated that they just dropped it after the beginning of the game, since it was clearly just a device to start you as a weakling and have everyone explain to you who they were. I'm don't think it was the best strategy, certainly (either the PC is a world-renowned badass or he's not please), but after I groaned in the introduction I pretty much forgot about it (since the game seemed to too).

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Ok let me put it differently. The game is the successor to the novels, Geralt is a highly established character with specific politics. His interactions with both those known previously and those entirely unknown to him would have had to been scripted, entirely, to make it believable. Yet with the solution of amnesia it is highly possible for Geralt's perception to have changed through alteration of his politics related to the amnesia.

The Witcher deals with amnesia in a much better way than any other game I have played has. Unlike in something like KotOR (which I love) where it was the big twist.

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Yes, I pretty much agree.

It was also easier for me to place myself into Geralt when he ran into someone he was supposed to know. I could play more as myself, rather then have all kinds of things forced upon me by a predefined character.

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Ok let me put it differently. The game is the successor to the novels, Geralt is a highly established character with specific politics. His interactions with both those known previously and those entirely unknown to him would have had to been scripted, entirely, to make it believable. Yet with the solution of amnesia it is highly possible for Geralt's perception to have changed through alteration of his politics related to the amnesia.

If it's not going to make you play as Geralt, then you shouldn't be playing as Geralt. :tdown:

The Witcher deals with amnesia in a much better way than any other game I have played has. Unlike in something like KotOR (which I love) where it was the big twist.

(KOTOR isn't about amnesia, it's about brainwashing.)

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If it's not going to make you play as Geralt

But it does? :mock:

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You remember how Manny Calavera doesn't really know much about the backstory? He says something like, "I want to punch you in the mouth." And Domino replies, "Oh no, not the Christmas party all over again." And then the player can click, "What happened at the Christmas party?" to which Domino replies, "Still blanked out on the whole thing are you?"

This kind of dealio establishes quite nicely a bit of backstory that is really not all that complicated but it fills you in on quite a lot of vague things with not that many words. Plus, as the player is looking for information in the world, clicking on random things, the game gives them an option of asking a question that is really asked through the fourth wall; Manny ought to have learned by then about what happened at the Christmas party, and maybe have gotten bitter about it all, what with the party needing to have happened more than ten months previously. The game then refuses to allow the fourth wall to be messed with, by attributing Manny's amnesia to a big night of drinking.

Granted, Grim Fandango is more about atmosphere than plot. The Witcher, I would imagine, is the opposite. And Manny fills the player in a lot of the time too. Just saying that characters can happen to not remember. It can be done less conspicuously than pulling out a full-on amnesia plot point which allows the creators to use every single NPC to funnel tomes and tomes of encyclopedic backstory upon the player at the slightest provocation.

As far as the weakness of the starting character as a necessary evil, the starting enemies don't always have to be rats and dogs and grunt-level troops. All the enemies could be portrayed as badasses from the getgo, why not? Or the player character could be suffering from malaria or some physical ailment like that that they have to overcome. Amnesia is always unnecessary, always too convenient and tidy.

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Thinking about starting this up. Are there any acclaimed mods that you should use? I vaguely remember hearing about something akin to the Stalker complete mods for the Witcher.

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Well it's not a mod but you should definitely download the Enhanced Edition patch from the developers if you have a retail copy. If you have a Steam copy or something along those lines it should theoretically already be Enhanced Edition, but I'd check anyway. It makes a big difference.

There are also two content packs that put in quest lines that were intended to be in the main game but had to be cut. They're called the Price of Neutrality and Side Effects. Again, I don't know whether they'll already be in a digital edition, but for retail they're in the updates for the Enhanced Edition, along with the update itself and the language pack for whichever language you wish to play in.

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Sorry, should have mentioned that I have the Steam Enhanced Edition.

If you have the North American version, is it the Director's Cut? That makes the NA version the same as the European one. Not sure if the two additional stories are in the Steam Enhanced Edition already.

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If you have the North American version, is it the Director's Cut? That makes the NA version the same as the European one. Not sure if the two additional stories are in the Steam Enhanced Edition already.

The Steam version is the good version.

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Ah, fuck it. I'm going to replay this again, to prepare for Witcher 2. If I already have the normal European Enhanced Edition, there's no point in getting the Steam Director's Cut version, right?

[edit] Argh, my Enhanced Edition installers are corrupted. Have to redownload. However, I can't find the two additional stories any more: "Side Effects" and "The Price of Neutrality". Does anyone know where they can be downloaded from?

[edit2] Aha, found them by searching by the file name. Linky

Edited by Erkki

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Just bought this on sale at GOG, been getting some pro tips from others who have played it, but do you gents have any advice for a first playthrough?

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Does the writing, especially dialogue, get any better after the tutorial? I've tried it on 3 different languages (English, Polish, and Russian) and it's equally awful on all of them. It's as if the voice actors recorded their lines in different planes of existence. Still, the promise of future awesomeness would have compelled me to keep playing had my graphics card not died.

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been getting some pro tips from others who have played it, but do you gents have any advice for a first playthrough?

play on Hard difficulty, it'll be more interesting and actually require the use of potions (or m4d c0m6at skillz). In the lower difficulties you can get by with less alchemy. Of course, that may be how you want it.

Don't trust the

scoiateel. Well actually I used to side with them mostly, but I think this time I'm going to be against them. Or maybe not, maybe it'll take The Witcher 2 story in a direction I don't want...

Does the writing, especially dialogue, get any better after the tutorial?

A tiny bit better maybe. But I had no real problem with it so I'm not sure.

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Does the writing, especially dialogue, get any better after the tutorial? I've tried it on 3 different languages (English, Polish, and Russian) and it's equally awful on all of them. It's as if the voice actors recorded their lines in different planes of existence.

It varies. Some of the voice acting is surprisingly good, some of it is impressively bad. Dandelion's voice drives me nuts, for example, but now and then Geralt does a completely straight voice-and-face aside joke and the other characters don't react but it's comedy genius.

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Just bought this on sale at GOG, been getting some pro tips from others who have played it, but do you gents have any advice for a first playthrough?

Oh, another tip if you haven't made it into Vizima: don't do things out of sequence too much. If the game hints that you should go somewhere specific when you enter the Vizima streets for the first time, just go there. I did that before, but this time I ignored the suggestion and some quests started having strange dialogs and at least one broke.

On the other hand, when you get to the swamps for the first time, it's probably smart to tell someone to piss off (at least save after entering the swamps).

I'm actually noticing for the first time all the little changes when you decide something differently, as it's the first time I'm replaying with mostly different choices. And this playthrough confirmed to me that there are probably very few 'wrong' choices in Witcher. They just have different results, one result doesn't feel much better than the other -- and I mean better in the sense that one would give better content, not the good/evil thing.

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Does the writing, especially dialogue, get any better after the tutorial? I've tried it on 3 different languages (English, Polish, and Russian) and it's equally awful on all of them. It's as if the voice actors recorded their lines in different planes of existence. Still, the promise of future awesomeness would have compelled me to keep playing had my graphics card not died.

i don't know if it gets better or not really, but you'll actually start to care somewhat in act II. act III is where it starts to get really good. it's pretty well acknowledged by everyone at this point that the first few hours are really lame

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Looky, they updated the website and made it easier to find downloads for the patches for Witcher 1 (seems still in progress though as there's nothing but download links for W1).

---

I just got my alchemy bags filled with stuff and started selling some of that off. I didn't find mention of this in the wiki, but is there any difference of potion quality between the ingredients? Some of them are expensive and sell for a lot, while some are cheap but actually seem better because they contain additional substances.

If I want to make money I should actually probably sell the most expensive ones and use the cheapest ones for potions if there's no difference.

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