The Witcher

[AggonyDuck]

The fighting actually has a lot more depth than I had initially thought. Drinking the right potions, using the correct bombs and signs and oiling your weapon with a suitable oil will make or break you. In that way it is similar to BG2, where you needed to prepare yourself for tough fight with the correct spells, tactics and equipment.

[Kekvit Irae]

The voice acting is only sub-par. One minute they talk in a frightened tone, the next they talk in a peaceful tone. It's inconsistent.

I get crashes. A lot.

Combat is again sup-par. Sometimes Geralt will just blindly stand there and not attack unless you click several times.

[TinCow]

I picked it up after reading this thread. I am enjoying it a great deal. I like the combat and am not having any technical problems at all (patched before I started). The only thing that gets to me is the dialog. I think the voice acting is relatively decent, but the writing is simply... bizarre. Clearly it has been butchered in the translation, but that knowledge doesn't make it any less distracting. It's not 'engrish' in any sense, it's just... off. That breaks the immersion for me, but it's still pretty fun. Not a must-own by any means, but if you've got money to blow and want a new RPG to play, I recommend it.

[Xiahou]

I ordered the UK version (didn't want to be left wondering what's been censored). Hopefully I'll be getting it in the next couple days. Looks like a really good game.

[AggonyDuck]

From what I've read at the Witcher forums, the translation and the english voiceovers were butchered to a shorter form from the original english translation, which was a lot closer to the Polish version.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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[OverKnight]

I picked it up a few days ago. I'm just happy that's there a decent RPG for the PC that isn't a two year old port off a console.

I'm enjoying it, good graphics, decent story line so far, and a rather "continental" approach to sex that isn't found in rather chaste RPGs like KotoR.

I'm still struggling to acclimate to the combat system, I've never been a good timing player. One of the reasons I prefer strategy games is the ability to ponder a move, build up your forces and then unleash unstoppable hell only when ready. I've bounced between the OTS and Isometric perspectives. The first doesn't show enough of the environment during combat, and the second has camera angle issues in tight quarters. The jury is still out on combat, but I think I'd prefer a click and forget method with a standard "behind the party" camera.

Another issue is load times, specifically that there are no sub levels. If you enter a house in a village, when you exit it takes the same amount of time to load the village as when you started the level. This is a detriment to immersion. On the plus side, this encouraged me to finally upgrade my PC's memory.

Cut scenes seem to afflicted with stuttering. I turned down some of my settings and turned off grass, and that seemed to solve most of the problems, or at least enough where I wasn't missing important plot developments.

Still despite these issues, the game is better than 90% of the drek out there.