Review The Witcher is slow and the dialogue sucks

[WhiskeyWolf]

Why the fuck do I always get the "403" while trying to enter www.shamusyoung.com ?

Same here. Can't access it at work, but not at home.

Anonymouse.org opens it for me.

Thanks man.

 

[DraQ]

Jesus fucking Christ!
This guy is genuinely retarded. He is so retarded, that even if aliens (of the good, benevolent, gift-bringing variety) appeared and pushed our medical technology a millennium or so forward, he'd still be beyond all help. Screw his whining about TW's interface, or the game in general, click this link instead. Yes, he's this dumb.

Oh, he also mentions in another of his tardticles that Oblivion's character system is a more polished version of the one in Morrowind. Alas, you'll have to find it yourself, as I urgently need to regain my sanity as immersion in the foetid pool of author's stupidity has left my mental facilities in shambles and their foundations crumbling.

 

[JarlFrank]

Jesus fucking Christ!
This guy is genuinely retarded. He is so retarded, that even if aliens (of the good, gift-bringing variety) appeared and pushed our medical technology a millennium or so forward, he'd still be beyond all help. Screw his whining about TW's interface, or the game in general, click this link instead. Yes, he's this dumb.

The thieving in this game is in some ways better than in the game Thief, because there is a real running day / night cycle.

What? Yes, he is.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Hunt animals in the wilderness for their meat and pelts, or just for sport.

I do believe he played Gothic but someone told him it's Oblivion.

there are locks you cannot open until you have enough skill.

No, really, he couldn't have played the game he says he's played.

Unlike in Theif, these places are highly, highly detailed. There are a lot of barrels, bags, boxes, chests, desks, bookshelves, cupboards, dressers, tables and cabinets to search.

Yup, and all of them contain bricks, spoons and cabbage. I also like how he misspells Thief as Theif all the time.

 

[DraQ]

Dear codexers, codexians, codexites and codices, 403 is there to protect *you*.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Yes, no wonder access to this site is forbidden.

 

[1eyedking]

Yet despite the complexity I never felt like I had access to the information I needed. What the heck is Toxicity? There is a bar for it right under the health meter. The tooltip explains that “Excessive Toxicity adversely affects Geralt”, which I managed to deduce all by myself. But how does it affect him? What makes Toxicity go up and how do I decrease it? Rest? A potion? A tryst with a bored housewife? More questions come to mind: Do I earn XP for killing monsters? How much damage am I doing? How can I tell if I’m using the right fighting style for the given monster? Despite all the screens and tutorial messages in the game I never felt like I knew how things worked.

I take it he's stupid and blind.

Remember Fallout's message box? It gave you a lot of useful information; but God forbid a tiny box with...ugh...text get in the way of displaying The Witcher's über grass texture.

Like it or not, the guy's right in this respect. If The Witcher is indeed the future of RPG, you better start making lots of money.

 

[1eyedking]

Like it or not, the guy's right in this respect. If The Witcher is indeed the future of RPG, we better start making lots of money.

Yet despite the complexity I never felt like I had access to the information I needed. What the heck is Toxicity? There is a bar for it right under the health meter. The tooltip explains that “Excessive Toxicity adversely affects Geralt”, which I managed to deduce all by myself. But how does it affect him? What makes Toxicity go up and how do I decrease it? Rest? A potion? A tryst with a bored housewife? More questions come to mind: Do I earn XP for killing monsters? How much damage am I doing? How can I tell if I’m using the right fighting style for the given monster? Despite all the screens and tutorial messages in the game I never felt like I knew how things worked.

I take it he's stupid and blind.

Remember Fallout's message box? It gave you a lot of useful information; but God forbid a tiny box with ...ugh... text get in the way of displaying The Witcher's über grass texture.

Yup, and all of them contain bricks, spoons and cabbage. I also like how he misspells Thief as Theif all the time.

Random bricks, spoons and cabbage. Yes, his Oblivion review is devoid of intelligence. Must've been the RPG drought of year 2000.

 

[someone else]

Same guy who wrote DM Of The Rings?

 

[Fosse]

Same guy, yes.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

Retard or no, it was technical issues which ruined TW for me, too (memory leaks crash the game every 0,5-1h and back then people advised me to wait for patch. Well, I've waited since last christmas and now I'm waiting for the EE since what would be the point of playing the game slighly before dialogues are improved etc.?). Otherwise, though, the game performed well.

Performance and stability issues are two of the most severe problems of modern pc gaming, anyway. Not being able to play games because they must have better graphics than they had 3 months ago, or not wanting to buy them because it's impropable they'd work adequately until a full year of patching. I don't want to buy new graphics cards every now and then just to be able to play games which only have better graphics technology than before, something which I don't care about in the slighest. Who the hell wants, don't those people just buy consoles instead?

 

[Dandelion]

<a href="http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1793#more-1793">According to Twenty-Sided, The Witcher</a>:
<blockquote>... runs like an inebriated John Madden trying to run in the Boston marathon while pulling a busload of other John Maddens. The game is unplayable at the default settings. If I turn everything down I can get the game to look very terrible and still stutter quite a bit. Let me make this clear: At these settings the game looks far worse than Oblivion and yet still somehow runs slower. Considering that Oblivion was an appalling glutton when it came to GPU cycles, that’s really saying something. What is the game doing with my processor? Building fractals? Trying to find the last digit of Pi?

...

Which brings me to the sometimes off-kilter rhythm of the dialog, which I’m assuming is an unfortunate artifact of the translation from Polish. You click on someone. Then the screen fades out as it enters “dialog” mode. Then it fades in on the person you’re talking to. Then there’s this pause of a half second while they stare at you blankly. Then they speak, “Hi there.” Then there’s another pause. Then they wave. Then the view cuts to Geralt. Pause. “Hello to you as well.” Pause. Change view back to the NPC. Pause. “What can I do for you?” Pause. Back to Geralt. Then the dialog menu appears. It’s like seeing a power point presentation of the conversation. Lots of people complain about the voice acting in the game, but I think the voice acting is probably fine, it’s just that the delivery is sometimes borked. You could have Ian McKellen and Judy Dench doing the vocals and they would still sound like a couple of retarded androids with their voices coming out of these blank-faced people and with little pauses added in to make it sound like they forgot their lines. It doesn’t always do this, but it happens often enough to hurt the storytelling.</blockquote>

This is the most idiotic review of TW I’ve seen to date.

Half of the complaints he made are totally nonsense, and the other half do not exist anymore since the 1.2 patch.

Jesus fucking Christ!
This guy is genuinely retarded. He is so retarded, that even if aliens (of the good, benevolent, gift-bringing variety) appeared and pushed our medical technology a millennium or so forward, he'd still be beyond all help. Screw his whining about TW's interface, or the game in general, click this link instead. Yes, he's this dumb.

Can Codex afford hitmen?

One should be sent after the moron who wrote this, the other after people responsible for butchering the dialogues in English version.

 

[Ausir]

IMHO it doesn't make much sense to review the game now, 10 months after the release and 1 month before the premiere of the Enhanced Edition. He should've either reviewed it faster or waited for EE.

 

[Crolug]

IMHO it doesn't make much sense to review the game now, 10 months after the release and 1 month before the premiere of the Enhanced Edition. He should've either reviewed it faster or waited for EE.

Another proof he's a moron

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

In before everyone's a Polish Fanboy.

Oh fuck, I one of them.

 

[J1M]

How does the codex rationalize liking the clickfest of Witcher's combat? That was a huge roadblock for me while playing it.

 

[Jasede]

The general consensus seems to be that the choices and consequences in the game make up for the stark lack of traditional CRPG features. This might be true from what I heard about it. I suppose it's like the Polish Gothic.

Of course Gothic was much better; but this statement is born from pride rather than empirical evidence.

 

[JarlFrank]

Jasede, you need to play Witcher. Now that Drakensang is out you might have reason enough to buy a new graphics card, so Witcher will work on your PC too.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

How does the codex rationalize liking the clickfest of Witcher's combat? That was a huge roadblock for me while playing it.

Fail.

 

[Volourn]

"Another proof he's a moron"

L0L


P.S. The Witcher is overrated.

 

[bobisimo]

To clarify...

The guy doesn't post game reviews in a traditional sense. He starts playing a game and writes his thoughts as he goes. So a game review might cover 4 or 5 posts of random thoughts about the title. He also just started playing World of Warcraft within the last month and did a bunch of similar write-ups on that title:

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1725
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1736
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1742
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1741
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1745
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1740
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1761

To be honest, I kind of like the approach. It's a lot more "this is how the average person might initially react" to a title, instead of the more traditional-n-summarized "the game has quirks but you'll get used to them."

 

[Deleted member 7219]

P.S. The Witcher is overrated.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong. You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.

 

[J1M]

How does the codex rationalize liking the clickfest of Witcher's combat? That was a huge roadblock for me while playing it.

Fail.

Yeah, who needs combat, the thing that occupies half your time with the game, to be worthwhile? Rediculous.

 

[Jedi_Learner]

Posting the same word won't change the truth.

 

[Lingwe]

This guy is genuinely retarded. He is so retarded, that even if aliens (of the good, benevolent, gift-bringing variety) appeared and pushed our medical technology a millennium or so forward, he'd still be beyond all help. Screw his whining about TW's interface, or the game in general, click this link instead. Yes, he's this dumb.

Note, link leads to his first impressions of Oblivion (dated 30th June 2006) which seened fairly positive.

Now try clicking this link.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1425

Time for some controversy!

Here is a short list of games which I have played that were sold as the greatest thing, like, EVER and which not only failed to ascend the Ziggurat of Excellence, but just barely managed to reach the top of the Staircase of Mundane and Pedestrian.

4. Oblivion
For a long time I thought the problem with Oblivion was that it was just unfinished, and that if they had bothered to kill the bugs and make the graphics engine work as advertised the game would have been great. Looking back, I see that the game was broken at a more fundamental level. It’s just that the bugs and graphical problems masked the deep, underlying design flaws.

Auto-leveling loot and monsters neutered the level-building aspects of the game. The voice acting (instead of text-based interactions) limited the depth of dialog, and made sure you heard the same handful of voices no matter were you went or who you spoke to. The main plot was so bland someone actually introduced a mod to get rid of it. The one strong point of the game - a huge, sprawling sandbox world - was glossed over by letting the player teleport around the map via the auto-travel.

Bugs aside, this game was not awful, but it also wasn’t the ground-breaking Game of the Year everyone made it out to be. If it hadn’t been a descendant of the beloved Morrowwind and a benefactor of a good bit of hype, I think it would have gotten the treatment it deserved: A nice effort that failed to meet the standards set by earlier titles.

Dated 19th November 2007. Just he because he doesn't like a game that you like doesn't mean that you are able to call him a moron. That makes you a fanboy.