There are very few cases of sword-and-sorcery characters being officially licensed for video games. Conan is the big one who gets a new game every few years, and there have been some odd cases such as the text adventure based on Roger Zelazny's Amber novels. Some aborted attempts at making an Elric game over the years. Betrayal at Krondor is a classic RPG based on Raymond Feist's Riftwar books, but that's more in the epic fantasy category. It's significant that CD Projekt Red not only made a game based on Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher stories but they made a big splash while doing so.
The game opens with a well-rendered CGI adaptation of the very first Witcher story, in which Geralt of Rivia cures a young princess of a curse causing her to transform into a monster. Upon starting a new game, the player sees Geralt, the witcher nicknamed "White Wolf," being transported to the witcher stronghold of Kaer Morhen. It's made clear that Geralt, who was in no shape to be having adventures at the end of Sapkowski's novels, is an amnesiac, a common device in RPGs to justify why an otherwise capable hero needs tutorials on how to fight and navigate the game world. During the opening tutorial section, Kaer Morhen is invaded by mysterious assassins who steal secrets on how witchers are created, and the resident witchers are ordered to the four corners of the world in pursuit. Since it's Geralt's game, he's obviously the one who finds the right lead and finds himself untangling a deadly conspiracy.
CDPR originally started with the idea of making a roleplaying game set in Sapkowski's world that would allow the player to create his own witcher, but later chose to center the game on Geralt. This seems to have somewhat disrupted the development of the game's story, which involves the hero meeting various people from the original stories for the first time and getting involved in a story that is broadly reminiscent of how Geralt became a father figure to a mystical child of destiny. The player is allowed to romance either Triss Merigold the sorceress or Shani the nurse, two relatively minor characters from the books. It's similar to how the Blade Runner game creates a story very similar to and overlapping yet distinctly different from the movie's story. The developers use the amnesia concept to smooth over how Geralt could be involved with this stuff but it generally would have worked better with an original character. It would be like making a Conan game that ends with Conan as king of Vendhya with Yasmina as his queen - the names and lore would be recognizable but readers would be distracted by how it violates canon. On the other hand, Geralt made for a more marketable hook and CDPR obviously did something right because the game was a big enough hit to pave the way for even more successful sequels.
On a limited budget, CDPR licensed Bioware's Aurora engine and then heavily reworked it to suit the game's needs. Instead of a simple combat system of clicking on enemies to strike them until dead, they tried a timing-based system in which the player has to click again at critical moments to continue combos. The player can assume one of three stances (strong, fast, or group-focused) and perform dodges. Although they deserve credit for going with something a bit different, the system isn't very engaging. They also tried to adapt the witchers' elegant fighting techniques in the game as more advanced combinations. It's easy to imagine Sapkowski's pirouette-filled descriptions as something like Hollywood swordfighting made practical through the witchers' superhuman reflexes and balance, but the gratuitous backflips Geralt does in the game while fighting just look hilarious. Also, despite the occasional incline or decline in elevation, the settings suffer from the sort of flatness often seen in RPGs of the period. And there are a couple of cases of what should have been major setpieces that simply don't work because of the engine's limitations; e.g., a recreation of Geralt's battle to cure the princess of the striga curse can easily devolve into a comical scene of Geralt and the monster simply running in circles around the monster's sarcophagus until morning. Finally, the game suffers from a problem common in RPGs in that a lot of quests involve running across large expanses to speak to someone, deliver something, or kill something, then running off to the opposite side of the world to do much the same, which creates the sense that Geralt is the world's toughest errand boy rather than an intrepid adventurer.
What the game does do well in terms of visuals is that the depiction of the City of Vizima and its outskirts, which comprise nearly the entirety of the game, have exceptional atmosphere and a sense of authenticity rarely seen in western fantasy games. Perhaps it's because Polish developers will understandably have a more intimate familiarity with the types of architecture the setting calls for. The city has a used, lived-in look without being overly fixated on griminess or dishevelment, the swamps are so oppressively murky that it's easy to imagine flies or mosquitoes everywhere even though the game can't render them, and the forests are verdant while still housing many hidden dangers. There are also nice touches such as dynamic weather changes and the way people run for cover during rain storms, how birds soar across the sky, and how the characters all obey simple schedules, going to work during the day and then turning in to bed at home at night.
The game's biggest triumph is in simply adapting Sapkowski's concepts relatively faithfully. The writing is cynical but doesn't cave in to adolescent overcompensation. Geralt is constantly faced with problems that seem to demand that the player choose a lesser evil, but there's usually enough nuance that the choice can be made according to a player's particular views without feeling bad about it (at least assuming the player isn't expecting a perfect world to arise from his choices). Many video games attempt this sort of writing but fail badly at it, including so many tradeoffs and so much moral ambiguity on all sides that every choice flattens out into being equally unsatisfying. The sense of scale probably helps in that despite the implications of the game's story, Geralt is ultimately just a man, not a prophesied world-savior. He's a blue collar figure who just wants to do his job with as little fuss as necessary (it's hard not to notice that some variation of "Got any work for a witcher?" is usually one of Geralt's first dialogue options). For all his fame and accomplishments, he's ultimately part of a dying tradition of dedicated monster hunters and he just doesn't matter very much in the scheme of things, so his choices won't necessarily have earth-shaking impact. He might save or condemn an individual or a few people, not entire nations. And the game loves to record the choices made and belatedly indicate consequences of those choices, even if the overall plot of the game never changes much (e.g., the identity of the villain is always the same, but his stated motives might shift slightly).
The monsters are mostly drawn from the books. Drowners, kikimores, giant centipedes, bruxae, ghouls, wyverns, demon dogs, etc., in addition to various types of human enemies. The game ties the vodyanoi from Slavic folklore in with Lovecraftian horror through a connection with Dagon. The general setting is basically Tolkien-esque fantasy with a cynical slant. Among the backstory is the idea that a cosmic event called the Conjunction of the Spheres caused the inhabitants of various overlapping dimensions to be deposited on a single planet, causing long-lasting ethnic strife as elves and dwarves see their lands encroached on by surging human populations, with monsters also causing significant ecological damage because they're transplanted to a world on which they didn't originally evolve.
Much as in the books, gathering information on how to kill monsters and then mixing potions and blade oils specifically suited to the tasks are important. Crafting systems have become a tedious feature in many games today, but The Witcher is one of the very few games in which gathering wild ingredients and using them in a crafting system is genuinely consistent with the source material. Geralt can also use limited forms of magic such as telekinetic or pyrokinetic "signs" to get an edge during combat. The game isn't particularly difficult at the medium setting, but the use of the potions, oils, bombs, and magic can make things go quite a bit faster and easier, and they're recommended at the harder setting.
Sapkowski's books, at least in English-translated form, are entertaining enough reads, although not necessarily among the best of S&S (it's been said that he has some very clever wordplay in the original Polish editions that is difficult to translate), but even if The Witcher game had never received any sequels, it would still rank as among the better licensed games ever done in terms of respecting and capturing the flavor of the source material while still being an enjoyable gaming experience, and depending on one's preferences it might even be an improvement. It's certainly more action-packed compared to the somewhat languorously plotted and dialogue/exposition-heavy novels.
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