Kingslayer
As Geralt, you'll often face insurmountable odds.
I hate the word "epic". Like most things it gets it's hands on, the internet has all but ruined this word, turning into a shambling, stupid, meme-spitting buzzword. I hate "epic"
But there's no other word to properly describe The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
Witcher 2 is a huge, sweeping, mature epic fantasy that demands that you take it seriously as it strings you along. Is this a journey worth taking or just idle talk by the firelight?
From Poland with Love
The Witcher 2 can be beautiful when it wants to be.
The entire franchise of The Witcher comes to use courtesy of Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. The series centers around Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, and a Witcher. Witchers are mutated monster hunters that roam the land killing for money, and Geralt is considered the best among them. The books provide an entire back story, but the games are they're own self-contained tale, and you don't really need any fore-knowledge on the character or world to get what's going on. All you need to know is that shit is almost constantly in a state of fucked up, and Geralt really doesn't care at all.
The first game opened with Geralt running through the forest, waking up with amnesia, and slowly but surely piecing together everything that's happened to him. Throughout the first game he killed monsters, killed some great evil known as the Grand Master, and saved King Foltest of Temeria from assassination. There is more to it then that, but that's all you'll need to know about The Witcher in order to player Witcher 2.
The Witcher's Path
The upgrade, simplified thanks to the amazing Combat rebalance mod.
Witcher 2 opens with Geralt in prison. He's been accused of killing Foltest and is set to hang. Throughout the tutorial it's slowly revealed that another Witcher killed Foltest and that Geralt is just taking the blame. In exchange for his freedom, Geralt promises to track down the real kingslayer and bring him to justice. This serves as the central plot point throughout the game, as you track down the killer and deal with the fallout of Foltest's death.
The plot plays out like a medieval noir story, with secrets being revealed and motivations changing as more and more details come to life. It's a great story too, taking time to develop like a constant slow burn, and giving you time to digest what's going on. There's plenty of back story to wade through, with character descriptions, a full bestiary, and plenty of lore hidden throughout. The Witcher 2's world is easily one of the most well realized and complete worlds I've ever seen.
There are also side missions throughout every level, ranging from simple Witcher's work -that is killing monsters for money- to more involved quests like locating a lost laboratory, saving researchers from a haunted mansion, and more. The more involved sidequests will create entire stories independent of the main plot, with the majority of these being worth the time, if only for the great story.
Like I mentioned, choice means everything in Witcher 2. You'll often have to make decisions, whether minor or not, and live with the consequences. Practically this usually means things like avoiding a fight, or changing your opponents, but certain choices can vary the game's progression wildly, with the entire second act hinging on a few moments. These choices feel natural, and the game's reaction reciprocates this well so the entire process seems dynamic, rather then the "choose a color" scheme some other games choose to go with.
Whirling Dervish
Monsters are often as terrifying as they are massive.
Gameplay in Witcher 2 can best be described as "tactical swordplay". Geralt, despite his abundance of badassdom, can't really take a hit that well, even with late game armor. Instead his style of fighting relies on being faster then his opponents, be they man or beast, and making sure he doesn't get hit. In this regard I often found the most useful tool in the Witcher's arsenal his ability to dodge around like a madman, rolling or pirouetting out of harm's way in a second. More importantly, dodge was one of the few animations that would trigger correctly when I try to use them.
That brings me to the heart of the issue with Witcher 2's combat, is that it's all heavily animation based. That's fine, since all games are, but there's no real physics to the animations, and they play out regardless of what's going on. It's hard to explain, but play a comparable game like Dark Souls or even Skyrim and you'll understand. There's an odd lack of weight to your hits, like they're not really connected to anything, and this makes combat feel floaty and awkward.
This is an issue for two reasons: One, when combat does work, and you kill your enemies in a flurry of blows and feel like a master swordsman, it feels great. The second issue is that combat makes up the large majority of the game between just normal monster hunting and encounters with human foes.
Combat is a mixture between using one of Geralt's swords (silver for monsters, steel for humans, despite what the novels may say), using one of the limited, but insanely useful, magical signs, and making liberal use of alchemy. This last one is particularly of interest as it reinforces Witcher 2's theme of preparation. Geralt isn't the Dragon Born, and he can't heal in the middle of a fight by eating a sandwich. Instead, you'll need to brew and quaff potions when you have a spare second, meaning that trips outside of town are limited to about as long as your potions last. It's an interesting idea in theory, and certainly makes the game more challenging, but quickly becomes annoying and tedious, not to mention aggravating when the game constantly forces you into situations where you're not given time to prepare.
Troll maiden
A moment of quiet before a battle.
There's an almost constant sense of awkwardness to Witcher 2, like it's a game that wasn't meant to be as good as it it. Dialogue interactions are strangely stitched together, and rarely flow well. Scenes don't as much bleed into one another like they should, but feel patched together, like they were constructed independently of one another and assembled after the fact. There are so many strange and unintentionally hilarious animations I lost count halfway through the second act. I've seen games that punch above their weight class and impress me by doing things I didn't expect them to do, but Witcher 2 seems like the exact opposite, making mistakes that a game of its caliber shouldn't be making.
The one area where Witcher 2 is consistently great is it's graphics. While the character models have aged a bit in the years since it's release, there's no denying that it's a great looking game. The lighting work especially sells the scenes, but overall the world looks and feels great, even when the things inhabiting it don't.
On that note, a special notice goes out to monsters. Despite the promise of monster hunting, there are only a handful of monsters to hunt throughout the game, but they all look great. Each monster looks terrifying, and really fits the dark, ugly tone of the game. Everything from the undead zombie nekkers, to the towering Kyran octopus creature looks great and fighting them is all the better for it.
On the audio side Witcher 2 once again fails to deliver. Voice acting on the main characters is great, particularly Doug Cockle as the voice of Geralt and Jaimi Barbakoff as Triss Merigold, the lead female. Voice acting on the other characters though ranges from mediocre to terrible, and the sound mixing doesn't really help. VO actors either seem to close or to far away from the mic at times, and conversations seem to happen regardless of your proximity to them in the world. I was across town from a pair of dwarves talking and yet I still heard every word of their conversation. Worse is that each location only has a small finite amount of ambient conversations that play over and over infinitely. I can completely recite one conversation from the second act because it's the only thing I ever heard whenever I was in town. Using the incredibly useful Cat potion, which grants the ability to see in the dark and sense living creatures, was always a hard choice because for ten straight minutes it would play a beating hear sound that drove me nuts.
Monster Slayer
As a Whitcher you'll often be called to deal with magical creatures like the undead.
I don't know what to make of Witcher 2. I didn't know what to make of it when it was released in 2011, I didn't know what to make of it after the enhanced upgrade release in 2012, and I still don't know what to make of it weeks before Witcher 3's release in 2015. Witcher 2 is a game that's great, even amazing, despite how terrible it is. This isn't a case of The Room where it's a bad property that's accidentally great because how bad it is, rather it's a case of a property that is so great despite it's many shortcomings.
In the end, there's nothing else quite like Witcher 2. It's a game of political intrigue, endless conversations, and brutal violence. It's a world of grey, where black and white morality simply don't exist. It's a unique experience to be sure, but I don't know if it's for everyone. Trying to recommend Witcher 2 is difficult because looking at it's individual pieces it's not that great of a game. Only when looked at as a whole does the game work, and from a distance it's a masterpiece. If your looking for an RPG that will challenge you, both in terms of gameplay and morally, then The Witcher 2 is for you, otherwise this might be a tale left unheard.
image sources:
http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/The-Witcher-2.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment