I am a big fan of this game and am currently enjoying so much that I've held off buying Hellgate for the moment.

All that said though I am curious if any of the rest of you have discovered "The Wicher" yet?

I haven't played The Witcher myself, but have checked it out and done a lot of reading. The game looks more apealing to me than Hellgate Londen.

I'm actually damn interested in The Witcher. Almost bought it, but I took Hellgate: London instead.

The gameplay and story looks good, and I'm happy that they made a REAL and REALISTIC RPG, with both extreme violence and nudity (atleast according to forums and reviews...).

How is do you think Witcher is better than Hellgate now that you've played Hellgate?

I never said The Witcher was better than Hellgate, I'm simply saying that it was a tough choice between them when I bought Hellgate, as I was kinda interested in The Wticher at the same time.

Don't regret buying Hellgate though, it's fun!

I always read many reviews before getting a game... overall the game scored pretty high and most consider the game's dark atmosphere (no black and white decisions... a lot of gray areas in your choices) to be pretty decent. There are some problems with the inventory (poorly organised) and the some animations (especially the lip sync)
But I do intend to get it!

Quick review.

It's very good, with a good story line, more mature style then any other fantasy RPG, sexist even though there are strong female characters with brains, entertaining mini games, sound alchemical system, that actually encourages one to go looking for certain ingrediants, and a few bad points.

The bad points are, long loading times when you have too many saves, too many generic looking NPCs though they do blend into the game without detracting from it, and many players have a tempermental desktop icon issue which is easily resolved by just restarting your PC (really does not like starting the game twice, e.g. playing, coming out of it and then going back into it).

Having played this game and the Hellgate demo, must say these are 2 totally different styles of game.

Of course they are... and that's a good thing

Some screenies..

Finished this game on Sunday; bloody brilliant!!

Going to take a rest for a while then play again on the hard level.

That third picture looks like a screen from Oblivion. The resemblance to Skingrad is uncanny.

I tested it last weekend at a friend of mine, and I can say that I'm glad I bought Hellgate.

First off:

1. The loading times on his computer were OVER 8 minutes. I have slightly better stuff than he has, but not much.

2. It uses the Aurora Engine (I.... HATE.... AURORA.... ENGINE.....).

3. WAAAAY too large for my hard drive.

My load times for Oblivion were far worse untile I upgraded from 512 MB of RAM to 1 GB...

First off: 2 GB Ram are keenly suggested today.. and not just for The Witcher
Then you need a regular defragmentation of your hard drive, at least monthly, better weekly. And run Scandisk or something sometimes.. Not mentioning any virus scanning..
Third: you need at least 4 GB of virtual memory and contiguous.. not fragmented!
Fourth: yes, you need a good, fast, reliable hd today. Better if the WD Caviar 10.000 rpm, but it costs! However with my 300 gb Maxtor (price around 100$, I think) I can load the Witcher in about 20 seconds. The worst is 30 seconds, I think..
Fifth: I own a nVidia 7600 256mb agp GA.. nothing excellent. And I think its cost doesn't go over 50$ atm.
Sixth: Don't exceed with the number of the savegame, please.
And you're ok!


Methink.. too! It's the same of NWN but CDProjekt guys have done a good work around. Well, you don't have 1st person view but something very close yes.. so.

So, believe me, despite the 6gb of the dvd and the huge installation and use of hw resources The Witcher runs very well on my PC (not a workstation, it's almost 4 years old atm with some upgrades). Much better than my Oblivion of the last days, overcharged by a lot of mods..

Perfect game review

The Witcher is like a good book. I can't stop reading.

I had no problems with loading times but heared about it quite often. Seems not loading but auto save causes trouble. Think you will have an option to turn auto saves off with the next patch (announced before christmas).