The Witcher: not that exciting

I installed the Witcher: Enhanced Edition about 6 months ago, and it’s been the primary game I have played on my PC since then. I’ve gotten roughly 3/4 of the way through the story, and I’ve decided it’s just not worth my time to complete.

The standard claim about the game is that, although it is misogynous, it’s worth it because the story is so great and there are some really tough choices to make. But in fact, I think it does none of these very well. The misogyny is there, but it’s not very interesting. It mostly consists in some characters (who we certainly aren’t supposed to be looking up to) saying various derogatory things about women, which is somewhat shocking in its vulgarity. But this kind of talk dies off quickly (I don’t remember coming across it after a chapter or two), and again, it’s put in the mouths of not-very-admirable people, which is hardly an endorsement of the misogynist views.

The other source of misogyny is the “sex cards”. Basically, if your character manages to have sex with someone in the game, you get a sexual (usually nude) picture of that character. The pictures are not exciting. Actually, the worst part of that process is that usually the way to get women in the game to have sex with the witcher is to give them some item, often an annoyingly specific one. “No, I wanted an amber and silver ring, not a ruby and silver ring!” So it’s just another fetch quest.

The story is fine as it goes, but there’s so much running back and forth (through hordes of annoying monsters to fight) that it takes a long time to get the story to progress. And when it does, it often doesn’t make that much sense. For example, the game informed me that I “knew” various characters were not a suspect because of various pieces of evidence that I don’t remember getting, and which hardly qualified as a convincing case. I think maybe there was a decent story there, but too much boring fights got in the way of me being able to appreciate it.

But the main draw for me had been the choices. There was all this talk of how you’d get to make really interesting choices, even those the morality of which was very grey. As with most (all?) games that make this promise, the result was pretty underwhelming. And there are definitely some, but again, there is so much boring fighting that you have to do in between making those choices, so they are unable to save the game from being boring.

As you can tell, the main complaint I had with the game was how much running around back and forth through the same areas over and over you have to do. It takes a lot of time, it’s not fun, and the fights are all pretty much the same. Upgrading your character doesn’t change the way battle happens much, it mostly just changes how strong you are. And since they make you run through monster-infested areas over and over, the majority of my playing time was spent in something that is not at all fun to me.

If there were a quick-travel system, or just something to make me not have to constantly fight, I would have liked the game well enough to continue through and finish the story. But there’s just too much not-fun work to do to get that next chunk of story, so it’s not worth the bother.