Preview @RPGFan

Jun 30, 2010

Bad news first: Unfortunately, the preview does not reveal any new facts given that CD Projekt RED was literally hiding their booth at E3 and only showing their game to a selected few. Now the good news: Nevertheless, it’s always nice to hear more praise, isn’t it? RPGFan.com’s preview once again proves that we can expect a hot RPG summer in 2011 with The Witcher 2 — in all terms.

It was incredibly good to hear from Tomasz Gop, Producer at CD Projekt RED, that The Witcher has sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide. He said that it proved that the RPG on the PC was alive and kicking in a market now dominated with MMORPGs. The original title provided gamers with a mature story, where mature didn’t mean, “there’s swearing and gore in this game.” It provided a fun – if flawed – combat system, and it provided a game where choices were just as they appeared to be. There was no light side or dark side, renegade or paragon, there was simply the way the player chose to do things. So with that, CD Projekt RED has returned, and with what? A brand new engine for their game, new combat, more dialogue, and it’s all simply better.

Fans of The Witcher will be happy to know that the story follows directly after the first game and continues straight apace. While we weren’t able to see any in-depth plot devices, it was clear that the second game will have the same fantastic ‘grey’ dialogue that the first game had. For those who are fans of BioWare titles, you may know that the choices in those games seem to be very black and white; it’s either give the orphan some food or murder him. Geralt is a “hero” in the vaguest sense of the term, and players are given choice in that fashion – there are no “paragon” or “renegade” choices, there are simply a multitude of choices that have different consequences. That is the major thing that made The Witcher stand out from other games, and The Witcher 2 carries that torch well. No longer using BioWare’s Aurora engine (the engine from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic), but their own new in-house engine, CD Projekt RED is able to add and remove characters to conversations on the fly, making dialogue much more realistic and dynamic. No longer are you constrained to just talking to one person in any given dialogue. With this, CD Projekt RED can add events into dialogue, allowing characters to take action that wouldn’t be otherwise available in a one-on-one dialogue.

Click here to read the full preview on RPGFan.com.