Far too often I find myself looking forward to the next big game instead of enjoying what I have now. I read exclusive first looks at games, follow their development for two years or so while fantasizing about how truly epic it will be when I finally get to play them, and then they release. Never do those games, no matter how great, live up to the anticipation I felt while waiting for them for so long. Instead of enjoying them like I should, I end up just repeating the cycle by again looking forward to some game to be released in the distant future.

The Witcher is a shining example of a game that isn’t overhyped, a game that just appears out of nowhere and manages to be fantastic. Instead of setting itself up for my inevitable disappointment by exclaiming how awesome it is, The Witcher just shows up and says nothing because it doesn’t have to. It bares its teeth, flashes some boobs, gets drunk, and kicks some ass. This is something I know you want to hear more about.

CD Projekt was mainly only known in the Polish gaming community as the company that localized BioWare’s PC games, and The Witcher was their first internally developed computer game by their newly formed Red Studio. I’m not sure if even they expected their first game to end up as good as it did.

The Witcher released to generally favorable reviews right around this time last year. Many critics praised the content of the game, but a few sizable flaws kept it from universal acclaim. The Enhanced Edition looks to remedy that by upping the visuals, decreasing load times, and reworking some of the shitty dialogue.

The narrative itself and mature theme made me appreciate The Witcher even more. The game starts out with an opening cinematic that runs a good 10 minutes, basically displaying what a Witcher can do and why you will want to play as one.

Cinematic ends, fade to black, and the actual game begins. The opening tutorial chapter uses the tired cliché of amnesia to get around teaching you, as Geralt, how to be a badass. It takes mere minutes before you are actually hacking away at some bad dudes as Geralt “remembers how to fight”. As the tutorial progresses, you learn about one of the Witcher’s main advantages, that being the knowledge and use of alchemy.

Alchemy plays a more significant role in the gameplay depending on the difficulty level you decide to play on. Casual players will find little reason for it, while people tackling the harder difficulties will discover that they’ll actually need it to survive.

Accompanying alchemy in a Witcher’s arsenal is the ability to use magic, referred to in game as “signs”. These allow you to force push enemies (potentially stunning them for a sweet finishing blow), cast a fire blast, create a bubble shield around yourself, set proximity traps, or mind-control enemies. The signs also have secondary uses like setting things on fire or breaking through weak walls.

Rounding out a Witcher’s set of skills are the combat styles. Witchers specialize is steel and silver swords, and they have fast, heavy, and group attack styles catered to dealing with different types of enemies. Agile, hard-to-hit enemies require you to use your fast attack style to catch them, but the quickness of your attacks means they also do less damage. The opposite is true of the heavy style, and group attack, unsurprisingly, is meant to deal with multiple enemies should you find yourself outnumbered. You can use other weapons too, but you can’t use Witcher styles with anything but swords.

Attacking is quite simple — much like BioWare’s PC RPG’s, you target and attack by simply clicking on the enemy you want to destroy. Instead of continuing to auto-attack like the BioWare games, however, you need to keep clicking like you would in Diablo. Timing plays a part in The Witcher, though, as waiting for your attack icon to glow will result in a combo attack, doing a good bit more damage.

Pretty much all of this is explained in the opening tutorial chapter, the end of which gives you the option to bang your first lady friend. Say what? Yes, The Witcher is rather adult in its presentation and content, and main character Geralt is quite the man-whore. Each horizontal conquest also rewards you with a “sex card”, a reminder trophy showing the near-naked form of the woman you just made boom-boom with. You can kind of liken it to dudes going off to war with naked pictures of their girlfriends as an incentive to make it back home alive.

Unfortunately for those of us in good ol’ America, the sex cards and some character models have been censored by the ESRB. I’m not sure how Age of Conan gets around this and lets player characters go topless, but the artwork on some of the sex cards has been significantly altered, removing pretty much any depiction of female nipple. Luckily for those that want to play the game as intended, it’s fairly quick and easy to copy the files from a non-American version of the game.

In addition to the sex, you can also walk around drunk pretty much constantly. You can find and purchase alcohol, which mainly is used as a base for your alchemic formulas, but it also acts as a great tool to help loosen you up.  Your screen gets blurrier and you start to stumble around the more drunk you get, and as a nice little touch, you even wobble during cutscenes.

Here’s an good example of the drunken debauchery you can get into in The Witcher:

There are actually quite a few women that you can do the humpty hump with, some story-related and others just for fun. I believe my total number was 13, though I unfortunately had to pay for one or two of them. The fact that you have the choice to get some recreational poon-tang actually adds quite a bit to the overall feeling of freedom and non-linearity, one of the major selling-points.

The Witcher actually does what many other RPG’s have attempted to do, but The Witcher does it so much better. This is a game about choice — choice with consequences, not just between morally right and wrong, but sometimes between either bad or really bad. Often you are forced choosing between the lesser of two evils with no “good” option at all.

The choices you make don’t always have an immediate affect on the game either. You likely won’t find out what the result of your choice is until much later in the game, sometimes 20 hours or more down the road. This gives your decisions that much more weight as you can’t just do a quicksave/reload to see which outcome you prefer. I often found myself legitimately torn between the options I had available, questioning my decisions afterwards, unsure if I made the right choices. Not even Mass Effect made me deliberate back and forth as much as The Witcher.

The atmosphere in general adds to the seriousness of your decisions — this is a very dark world. Even though this is a fantasy game filled with monsters and magic, the gritty tone and grimy medieval landscape make the world seem somehow believable. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that this is really how life was 800 years ago. The Witcher is the kind of game that would make guylinered emo kids feel better about themselves.

The look of the game and the art direction itself are fantastic. The Enhanced Edition upped the visuals and changed some of the textures from the original version, making it a more complete experience. This picture perfectly illustrates the improvement, though I find slutgoth’s face to be strangely more attractive in the first picture:

Your character, Geralt, will go down in history (at least my history) as one of the most badass characters of all time. He has some rather profound dialogue — really thought-provoking stuff. The writing in general is excellent, but that’s not a huge surprise given the fact that The Witcher is based on a series of books by one of the best-known fantasy writers in Poland, Andrzej Sapkowski.

The interface has also been “Enhanced”, benefiting from a moderate overhaul — the inventory system especially. Your items are now separated between alchemy ingredients and pretty much everything else. It seems like such a minor thing, but it actually makes quite a difference in the fluidity of the game.

The Enhanced Edition also improves on the already stellar story by retranslating and rerecording some of the dialogue. One of the complaints of the original game was that there were some mistranslation issues that caused some lines to either not make sense or sound unintentionally hilarious, occasionally causing some plot development to be lost. That has mainly been fixed, though it occasionally still manages to ruin a moment or two with poor voice acting. Even so, it doesn’t detract that much from the overall experience.

The music, while not really changed, is beautifully dark and atmospheric. Part of the benefit of purchasing the boxed version is that you get the soundtrack on CD as well as an additional disc of music inspired by The Witcher, both of which are fantastic.

The Enhanced Edition box comes with a lot of little extras including an “Adventure Editor” similar to Neverwinter Nights, a “Making of” DVD, the original Witcher short story by Andrzej Sapkowski, an official game guide, map of the world (The Witcher’s world, not ours), and two extended adventures to play after you’ve finished the game.

While you won’t get any of the aforementioned extras, owners the the original version of The Witcher can download the Enhanced Edition for free. It’s just one of the ways CD Projekt is giving back in thanks to the fans who have supported the game over the past year.

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is an excellent game, and now would be the perfect time to pick it up if you’ve never experienced it before. Even if you’ve played the original, the Enhanced Edition is the perfect excuse to go back and experience it again. The Witcher stands as one of the best PC games of the year, and is easily in my top 3 RPG’s of all time. I would actually be excited to see this game make the jump to consoles and get some more exposure — anyone who misses out on this ride will certainly regret it.