I've now played through the 1st chapter of this game and I wanted to take a moment to jot down some of the mental notes I've been accumulating so far. The Witcher has been pleasure to play and happily, has exceeded my expectations.
You play as Geralt, an albino, sword-swinging, Clint Eastwood who fights monsters for profit as a Witcher. (No choices here, you are very white male. Fortunately that means no wasting time during pre-game stat building.) Because of your genetics, you're nearly immune to disease and have strength and reflexes beyond normal humans. You have been brought back from death and although it is clichй, you have a amnesia. You've been reunited with a couple fellow Witchers, though you normally work alone.
Each attribute (Str, Sta, Dex, Int), each Sign (ie. the five different spells), and each sword style (3 styles for steel, 3 styles for silver) has a skill tree. When you gain a level, you gain talent points that you can spend in the various skill trees. Talent points come in Bronze, Silver, or Gold with the latter being required to unlock the highest level of skill. This forces the player to develop his foundation skills horizontally rather than becoming of one thing right at the beginning of the game. I this as a plus for realism.
Your steel and silver swords are your primary weapons which you specialize in though you can also carry an additional light weapon and heavy weapon on your person. In keeping with the original vision of Andrzej Sapkowski (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrzej_Sapkowski) you do not use ranged weapons. I can't say that missed them, but it is a limitation of the game. As for inventory, I was quite happy to see no encumbrance listed anywhere. :D (I hate that.) Instead you have a fixed number of inventory slots and you can't carry more weapons than weapon slots. For other items, the stack size seems reasonable: I can stack about 20 herbs in one slot of the same type. For more room, you can store items at the inns. Unfortunately, the inventory icons are tiny and take some time to recognize. I found myself cursoring over each of them looking for a particular potion I just made.
The alchemy system is reminiscent of Morrowing/Oblivion which, as a sucker for crafting, I liked a lot. You can collect different ingredients from plants and corpses only after you've gained knowledge about them. While the names of the ingredients are esoteric, the names of the items you create are more ordinary with names like "Cat" or "Tawny Owl". Personally, I like that nicknaming better than "Nightvision" or "Increase Endurance".
The character models and textures are well done. Thank goodness for that because there are a number close-up cutscenes where you get to stare them in the face. :) That's a benefit of having only a single PC model I suppose. All the dialog is spoken including your own. The dialog trees are a bit rough sometimes. I noticed this especially when returning to the main dialog branch. I would say something long-winded and then hear the NPC abruptly say "Witcher!" instead of "Was there anything else?"
CD Projekt did a much better job implementing the camera controls that Obsidian did NWN2. You can use either over-the-shoulder or isometric viewpoints and can toggle between the two with F1/F2. Sometimes it's a little slow panning, but that can be fixed by holding down the middle mouse button.
Throughout the game I was just enjoying all the characteristics at the same time. Animations like seeing a guy straddle over the top of a crate and sit down by a campfire, good mood-setting music, seeing people run for shelter during a storm, attending a funeral in a cutscene (don't see that very often in RPGs), clever camera angles like panning the camera right through a cell door while keeping a closeup on the faces speaking to each other. And the cursing! Call me a gutter-mouth, but I found the occasional cursing adds greatly to the realism (and humor). It's not overly done, but it still snaps you right back into the mood of the game when you hear it.
Alcohol use is featured prominently if not blatantly throughout the game. Intoxication animations and visual effects present when Geralt is drunk. The designers depicted stumbling and blurry vision quite well. :p You are typically rewarded for outdrinking another person.
The sex, well I've got mixed emotions about it. I think the sex card-collecting is a bit tacky, but the idea of collecting cards in your journal is actually a pretty good one IMO. I think a great mod for this game would be to expand the card collecting to other highpoints in your quests as a visual record. I will say, it does encourage a collector's mentality which itself isn't a bad thing, but focusing it solely on seduction is a bit questionable.
The minigames I've seen so far (brawling, dice poker, and drinking contests) have been fun and helped fatten the purse at the beginning of the game.
What else... oh yes, the load times are long. I have defragged drive and 2GB of RAM and it still is easily 20-30 seconds between area and it seems like there a lot of areas. Fortunately the load screen artwork is evocative when coupled with the music so I can tolerate it. Unfortunately, at least with the v1.1 patch, the autosave is something you cannot turn off so after loading you will occasionally get another 20 seconds of autosaving whether you like it or not. I believe the next patch will address this.
I mentioned the overall rendering is very good. With an ATI x1600 Pro, I had knock back the settings to medium textures, anti-aliasing x2, anisotropic filtering x1, and 1024x768 resolution and it's still eye candy to me.
That's about all I can think of at the moment. Back to game! :D