Remaster and expansion of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt

The Witcher: a game of imagination

The original role-playing game set in the world of the Witcher, released in 2001 in Poland.

It is the first role-playing game I have ever played, and the one that sparked the flame of passion for the hobby for me.

That is not to say I consider it a good game. The strong influence of the Polish school of role-playing games can definitely be felt when reading the rules and the suggestions of how the game was supposed to be played. Suffice to say, the authors and I have a drastically different idea of what a role-playing game is about, and the original Witcher RPG is more of a collection of suggestions for how a session of improvised theatre in the world of Mr Sapkowski's stories might be run. I prefer more a mechanical approach.

After the Witcher, I played D&D 3.5e. I only had the starter set that my parents bought me, with four or five 10x10 dungeon boards, a dozen figures, and the Player's Handbook. At the time, the books were too expensive for me to buy, so I started writing my own adventures, developing my own mechanics, and pretty soon the curse of the Forever Game Master has fallen on me.

However, the atmosphere, the tone, and the themes of the setting Mr Sapkowski created have forever remained close to my heart. The image of a cold, bleak, unforgiving world, above whose lands hangs a sky covered with rain-bearing clouds... that are nevertheless on occassion pierced by a stray ray of sunlight, a fleeting feeling of warmth, happiness, safety, maybe even love, only to be suddenly taken away. The gears of the world have turned, the millstone spinned a bit more, and ground you to a finer ash than you have already been ground to.

That is what set me up on the path to discovering grimdark, with Glen Cook's The Black Company being one of my all-time favourite series of book. The image of a lone-wolf reluctant hero, who embraces their shadows must have been imprinted hard on my young brain, because when I later discovered Peter V. Brett's The Painted Man I immediately felt that it was the book for me. (The Painted Man has aspects similar to the Witcher: a man posessing extraordinry powers for which he paid a great price, a world ravaged by monsters, a threatening foreign political power.)

The Witcher

Then came the first The Witcher video game.

I know people criticised the combat, but I loved the rhythm of it, and the feeling of dancing around the enemies while cutting them down. I know people criticised the locations, but to me it felt incredible how well they showed the ever-present dirt of the world.

Not only was the game fun to play mechanically, with satisfying skill and power progression, the story was also terrifyingly good and, for lack of a better word, appropriate for the Witcher's world. There was no out-of-this-world power hell-bent on destroying the whole planet, there were no ridiculously overpowered super-villains. It was all distinctly Witcher. There was a child, there monsters, there were corrupt people, there power-hungry maniacs, there was evil, and there were morally grey choices. And it was all washed-out grey, dark green, and mud brown, with moments of the gold and blue you see in the spring.

The second Witcher game, I could not quite get into. It was too colourful, too full of kings and nobles. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there was something missing, and the game felt wrong — as if it were not a Witcher game. Maybe if I played through more than the first two chapters it would have gotten better, but I never managed to do that.

Now, with the new expansion to the third game, I will try the second one again to get the whole story. Who knows, maybe it will work this time.

The hall of fame

There a few games I enjoy to a similar degree as the first Witcher.