be-witcher-ing

I must admit I had pretty much written The Witcher off. Not only did it seem like a lower budget product (engine, animation in particular, possibly not so great audio…) but besides forcing me to play through the point&click interface of PC RPGing when I have grown to like so much playing with a gamepad it committed what to me is one of the worst sins ever: yet another "been there done that" medieval world with the promisses of lots of hack and slashing. Why can’t people make a non-standard medieval world? I mean, town, inn, swords, outlands of the city infested with monsters… it’s been soooooo done. And then some. I don’t expect all the games to be as original as placing the setting in the Planescape universe, or constructing something as intricate as the Legacy of Kain mythology, but even other cliches would be better. Or a White Wolf setting? Vampire The Masquerade anybody… Or even better… something new, something creative. Or at a least something with a different aestethic feel. Morrowind for example managed to make a medieval setting feel somewhat fresh with interesting architecture types. The Witcher in the meanwhile besides putting me off with the promise of a combat oriented game showed me standard out of the box medieval houses. And inns!!!
So why I am writing about it? I certanly don’t like bashing things or being all critical like… The reason I’m writing this is because there’s new hope: this video… well, i had seen other videos that hinted the game might have a bit of that grey morality that would be so fresh given all the "be super good"/"be cruel evil" choice games… but this video promissed a lot more… it promissed options. Branches. They don’t even try to kid us with "there’ll be a kazillion gameplay modes"… but they do say 3 completelly different ones, and they do say something that I’ve dreamed of for so long: choices that matter. Choices who’s consequences show up hours after the decision sounds VEEERYYY goood. Then again my heart has been broken before by games which promissed choices and moral depth only to discouver that they were only for marketing or amazingly shallow… but if this is true, well, then all other faults of the game I may be able to forgive, I might even play it on the PC (should i one day get one that will play it well and be able to configure my gamepad to fake a mouse)… That makes 3 games I can dare hope will create choice rich experiences: Fallout 3, Mass Effect & Witcher. Now chances are (from past heart breaks and realizing what an incredible expense and unreasonable thing it is to create a choice oriented game) that 2 out of 3 will barely touch meaningful choices… but that still leaves 1 game i may hope will encourage self-expressing immersive gameplay in the next 2 years. Yeayyy!!!!
PS: I know the chances are slim, but wouldn’t it be cool if Final Fantasy XIII decided to so embrace western approaches that it offered choices or GTA 4 ended up having so much content that it pretty much turned into a self-expressing rpg type experience?