Last year I said in my review of The Witcher “I hope that The Witcher represents the future; it has plenty of combat, a deep skill system, nicely integrated alchemy and most importantly one of the best and deepest stories and quests ever written into a video game, as well as looking gorgeous throughout. Now that is something to strive for”. Now CDProjekt has released an ‘Enhanced Edition’ of the best RPG of 2007 that adds many small things and makes a compelling case to all those who have not yet purchased this true classic.

The Witcher, released nearly a year ago so sales of over 800,000 copies, has been heralded worldwide as a great game, rising above the hand-wringing over the erotic cards that players can collect in the game. Again from my review “amongst the great things about CDProjekt’s The Witcher are the brilliant setting based on Sapkowski’s novels; the depth, variety and novelty of the plot and quests; the wonderful variety of characters you meet around the game world and the interactions you have with them; the excellent graphics and music that terrifically convey a sense of presence in the world and the cinematics that help set the plot in motion; the exciting action-based combat that takes a bit to learn but is rewarding and satisfying once mastered; the tremendous role-playing opportunities present due to the deep skill system and character development possibilities; and finally the really great character of Geralt.”

While all of that is great stuff and really important, what continues to stick with me is the lack of a predefined ‘good’ or ‘bad’ path that is so common in role-playing games. Also, the game has an unprecedented sense of ‘choice and consequence’ – you can do what you want, but you will find yourself held to your decisions later in the game. And in The Witcher, later doesn’t just mean within five minutes like most games, or until your ‘cop meter’ runs down, but potentially dozens of hours later. It is something that is extremely rare and is just one of the great things about the game.

In my review I noted only a couple of flaws – the load times and the dialogue / voice acting. While neither were ‘deal breakers’, both could clearly have used improvements. CDProjekt listened, so among the improvements for the new edition we see ‘load times reduced by 80%’ and ‘over 5000 lines of dialogue re-translated and re-recorded’.

So what else is new?

• Collector’s Edition packaging.
• Multi-lingual DVD so you can choose any combination of voices and subtitles.
• The Witcher short story by Andrzej Sapkowski
• Official Witcher game guide
• Map of The Witcher’s world
• D’jinii Adventure Editor included – Now players are able to create their own, epic adventures in the Witcher’s world, using the powerful game editor created by our team. Make your mods, take part in our contests and show your ideas to the world.
• Two new adventures in the world of The Witcher that will give you more than 5 hours of additional gameplay. Fully voiced by the same actors acted in ‘The Witcher’. (these are named “The price of neutrality” and “Side effects”)
• New, totally remastered ‘Making of’ The Witcher DVD, with fresh content, videos and interviews. More than 180 minutes of movies with multilingual subtitles and redesigned menu. Now you can learn everything about how our game was produced.
• ‘The Witcher: Music inspired by the game’ is a set of 15 tracks that use a main music motive from The Witcher. It’s a long journey beginning with movie orchestrations, through Celtic music, hard rock and metal, vocal experiments, to reggae/dub and electronic music. Listen to it and find out, how powerful human imagination is.
• ‘The Witcher OST’ Music CD – Audio CD with the music from the game (by Adam Skorupa), contains 29 tracks that have been used in The Witcher.
• more than 200 new dialogue animations
• a new character differentiation system for NPCs resulting is many more appearances.
• NPC’s are more responsive to Geralt resulting in more immersive feeling.
• an enhanced inventory with improved alchemy
• improved combat responsiveness and much more.

Even better, if you were one of the many who bought this game already, you can download it all for FREE! Be warned, it is nearly 2GB of data between all of the options, but it is well worth it.

So how does it play? Fantastic! It is better in every way than the original – as mentioned, the load times are noticeably better, the dialogue has lost the ‘clunky’ spots, the animations and NPC appearances show more variety, and so on.

However, this game made no pretense that it was anything but a ‘mature’ game in every sense of the word. Your choices as Geralt included things such as morality – do you pursue relationships or just ‘women as trophies’. There are all of the hallmarks of a real society here – depravity, poverty, greed, sex and violence, and so on. The original game wasn’t for kids, and there is nothing that has changed to make this Enhanced Edition any different.

Tags: Game Reviews