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The Witcher

Not "next gen" but so much better for it

CDProjekt wisely chose to not jump on the DirectX 10 bandwagon for The Witcher; instead they took a rusty old BioWare engine and hammered it into a solid DirectX 9 beauty. To be honest, I'm somewhat confused about it being the Aurora engine: it plays like it's Odyssey from KOTOR and looks like Eclipse from the forthcoming Dragon Age. Either CDProjekt are total coding gurus (just look at the differences between Neverwinter Nights and this game!) or BioWare gave them a serious helping hand, using The Witcher as a test bed for their own, future, ideas.

The scenery is, of course, detailed and life-like.

No DX10 trickery but the game somehow more than gets by without it.

No matter - what it lacks in technical flag-waving, it more than makes up for it in artistic style and detail. Yes, there's post-processing, day and night cycles, and shaders (it's all there if you want it) but The Witcher just oozes elements of classic design and a strong understanding of what draws a player into a game. Let's take some examples: it rains. Big deal, so what; it rains in puzzle games now. But here, the world and its people react to the rain - they run for cover, bunching together under bridges, and then moan about the weather to people that they're otherwise ignored.

The NPCs follow a proper cycle of sleeping at home during the night (assuming they have one) and going out to work, beg or fight during the day. Bloom is over-done, naturally, but the best effect has to be the use of depth of field; it only appears during character interactions, keeping the key objects in focus, and the rest all soft and hazy. The errant camera occasionally messes things up but it's not a major issue. Second only to the DoF effect is when you're drunk: wonderful staggered motion and double-blurred vision.

Stomping through the swamps feels like it should... all wet and swampy.

Depth of field done just right - keep the important stuff in focus and the rest in a soft haze.

Naturally, there's always one party pooper and for me, it's that ever-present BioWare "feature" of feet spot-welded to the floor. As with KOTOR, one cannot jump over objects and all too often one can get slightly caught on the edge of a hidden path. It's not like The Witcher needs this level of freedom but when so much of the game is all about open choice and decisions, it just feels wrong to be unable to climb over a 1 metre wooden fence. You can fell huge beasts with one sweep of your sword but scaling anything more than a pimple is beyond your drug-fuelled powers.

But here's something that CDProjekt (and Atari) do deserve praise for: realistic hardware requirements. For once, the minimum is a genuine minimum (i.e. you can honestly play it on such a PC) and the recommended is for near-max graphics and effects. The engine doesn't seem to need anything more than a fast single core CPU but it loves system RAM. Gamers using Windows Vista who hope to play at high resolutions and on maximum detail settings may be alarmed to note that the total system memory usage frequently went over 2.5GB but that's probably a caching issue, specific to the operating system.

How the graphics look on a PC equivalent to the publisher's minimum.

This is The Witcher on a YouGamers minimum system: more video RAM makes a big difference.

The Witcher on a recommended setup - a good mixture of high, medium and low settings.

The best possible visuals in The Witcher needs a modern, good gaming PC.

The only tweaks we recommend for our YouGamers system requirements are the graphics cards and the amount of memory they have; it's just a better experience (less stuttering, faster loading) with more RAM in general, no matter where it is in the PC.

Page 1: Introduction & BackgroundPage 2: Characters and QuestsPage 3: Combat and SkillsPage 4: Getting Around & Mini-gamesPage 5: Graphics and Hardware RequirementsPage 6: Final Thoughts & Scores

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