One theme which has repeated across entire decades of the story of the UK’s My entry point for plenty of game series has come with a number 2 on the end, for Super Chart Island and elsewhere. Usually there’s a clear intent to give a gentle introduction to new players, sometimes even at the expense of ongoing storytelling. The Witcher 2, from Polish developers CD Projekt Red, opens with a visually stunning cutscene full of ice magic, archery and beheading, which turns out not to feature any of its main characters. Then it proceeds to a confusing mishmash of in-media-res events and flashbacks which don’t clear up much of anything, including many of the game’s mechanics. It makes for a daunting prospect, but it turns out to be rooted in its standout strength: a sense of its own identity.
The mainstream fantasy action RPG standard circa 2012 was nicely summarised by Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, shamelessly combining as it did all the other leading series made by western developers. That standard was for the player character to be a blank slate, their pliability their raison d’être. They might be allowed to speak, and even to have an inkling of personality like the sardonic lead of Dragon Age II, but their morals and approach were to be a matter of choice, with a lot of the fine detail left to the imagination. Depending on your approach, you could end up as a very different person on multiple levels. The world would shape itself around that, generally to end up at much the same outcome with some differing wrinkles.
The Witcher 2 hands over some big decisions that take you on drastically different tracks through its story, depending on whether you side with its morally grey humans or morally grey non-humans. This choice makes sense for Geralt of Rivia, the witcher living in human society but called freak and mutant wherever he goes. Crucially, though, it’s not a matter of choosing who he is. He doesn’t revise everything to fit in with whichever side you do choose. He just maintains an uneasy alliance either way which makes sense with his character, just as his character makes sense in the world it comes from. In that sense, in terms familiar to the UK mainstream, he is more like a Final Fantasy lead. You can change his actions, but you aren’t changing who he is.
“You’re a witcher, you’d endure much” he is told at one point, and that stoicism is a big part of his character. We meet him chained up, scarred and gruff. He has depths that we gradually learn about, some of it through the time-honoured plot mechanic of reversible amnesia. At least it has the good grace to come through literal fantasy means and to have some neat animated sequences. The Witcher is one of quite few game series to be adapted from books, and there is definitely a confidence that this is taking place within a more detailed world which exists with a firm level of detail, firm enough not to need to all be explained to the player at once.
Geralt is thoughtful, considered, unflinching and methodical. That comes through in the game’s mechanics. He moves with a stiff sort of power. His magic is highly effective, but only usable in short strategic bursts. At points he needs to drink a potion to get a sort of combined night vision and detective vision, to do things like follow blood trails. The first big monster boss is a typical exercise in hacking off tentacles via glowing weak spots, but the need to lay magical traps lends it a welcome extra strategic element. Being resourceful and smart is a fun experience. At some level he is basically Solid Snake in a fantasy setting, and the game even has a similar line in legends to Metal Gear Solid 2: “Legends are almost always beautiful […] the reality often leaves a lot to be desired”.
He’s much less emotionally closed off than Snake, though. There is an urgency he brings to protecting the vulnerable when people turn “drunk on blood” that makes it a sweet relief to be able to use flashes of mind control to reintroduce reason. He can also have a romance with some real feeling with sorceress Triss Merrigold, something not possible with any of the other women you can opt in to identikit explicit sex scenes with. The openly, sometimes literally, transactional nature of those feels quite different and more honest compared to games where characters’ feelings all warp around player choices.
The confronting kind of fantasy world of The Witcher 2, with blood and flesh and vulgarity everywhere, is not even particularly my thing. Yet its confidence in taking the choice-based framework of American RPGs and using it to tell its own story with its own character felt refreshing enough to make me take to it more than more superficially appealing worlds. Being lent control to direct a charismatic and powerful character who remains their own person is a different prospect than being told that you are the all-powerful one.
Top of the charts for week ending 21 April 2012:
