The Witcher, is, indeed, in my opinion also, the best RPG to come out since 2002(?) with the Neverwinter Nights/Gothic II/Morrowind triad. Drakensang came close, but it's kind of a different animal, that caters to different tastes, I think. I think Drakensang appeals more to hardcore roleplayers, while the Witcher offers up a much better story, realism and dialogue.
The Witcher, however, also has its flaws:
- Awful engine. Really, how good does your PC have to be to play a game? It's out two years ago, I have a PC and a laptop with good specs and graphics cards and I still can't play fluidly enough despite all the updates and the Enhanced Edition.
- Its stability and compatibility was horrid at first. Patches fixed this for the most part.
- lack of character creation & development. Sure, it's a tradeoff for an in-depth story with a great character, but it's still something I find quite important.
- Combat system. It was like a different take on Diablo. The combo's are nice, but it's still click for an attack. I wish they had made available a Legacy of Kain-type autoface all-keyboard OTS mode, because I really dislike the spot-hunting with mouse cursors, especially in my preferred OTS mode. Pause, scroll camera, wait for it, wait for it... click. That's very annoying.
I'm sure i'm forgetting a few minor gripes, but these were all very important things to me. In all honesty, The Witcher is still one of the titles I'd never want to get rid of, it is one of my favorite roleplaying games, but it's not the end-all to roleplaying games, it's not perfect, and it can be much improved upon.
In all honesty, while I usually dislike console games, I'm really curious about the console version of The Witcher... While they keep saying it's not an upgraded Witcher, I'm starting to believe that it really is.
