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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

As someone who played a few hours of the 1st Witcher Game... Good.

No one seems to care about Witcher 1's engine, because it was hot garbage. Any engine (even an off-the-shelf one like Unreal5) will be grossly superior to the trash that the original game was.

This remake can have slow, barely workable controls and pretty bad graphics and still be far better than the original game.

They really just need the Witcher 1 remade so that people have an entry point into the story. The actual "gameplay" from the original will _NOT_ be missed. IMO anyway.

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I played the Witcher 1 when it came out and thought it was a brilliant game. I haven't tried going back to it ever. It felt quite polished to me then. I'm curious what people feel isn't approachable for today's audiences. Is is merely that we are used to different visuals now?

What are these engine issues in Witcher 1 you speak of? As a player I did not notice them back in the day.

Its not the polish that was bad.

I've played many 3d action-RPG games. Zelda, Monster Hunter, Dynasty Warriors, etc. etc. Witcher1's combat is by far the worst of the series.

Just... laggy, non-responsive controls. But in a bad way (ex: Monster Hunter is also laggy/non-responsive, but in a way that's "obvious" that the slowdown is purposeful and tactical. You need to be very careful about when you attack or not attack vs various monsters in that game).

Witcher 1's combat in contrast, has a lot of repetition and not a lot of depth IMO. At least, from what I remember. Witcher2 onwards had much better ideas of "fun combat" experiences.

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I can still go back to old PS2 era Dynasty Warriors, mash square and have fun. Its not about "dated graphics". I admit dynasty warriors is a mashy-heavy game with a casual mindset, but I think Witcher couldn't really decide if it wanted to be a punishing slow game (like Monster Hunter/Souls series), or a faster twitch game, and just weirdly plays in this unfun position between the two extremes.

Its fine to have a slow punishing game (Monster Hunter / Souls / etc. etc.), but you need a huge variety of bosses to keep interest. Witcher 1 felt pretty stale after a short time, since there's just not as much variety.

Somehow, I don't find Dynasty Warriors gameplay stale (despite being a square-mash simulator). I don't fully understand why however. I guess DW is more about positioning of the player-character (the enemy army is always winning where you are _not_ located, so Dynasty Warriors feels more like a firefighter simulator, where you're running around the battlefield trying to fix issues in the army... rather than really being a combat game?)

I think a big problem with Witcher 1 is that its vision for combat was relatively novel and not well presented. In the lore it's emphasized that fighting is supposed to be a sort of graceful dance and so the combat tries to mimic that. The combat is much more like a bemani (beat/music type game) game than an action RPG, even though it looks nothing like the former and everything like the latter.

Once you 'get' this, everything makes way more sense, the game flows, and it becomes really quite fun. I played it when it first came out. I didn't get it, and quit before beating the first chapter. I later replayed it, got it, and ended up playing through it multiple times on max difficulty.

> But in a bad way (ex: Monster Hunter is also laggy/non-responsive, but in a way that's "obvious" that the slowdown is purposeful and tactical. You need to be very careful about when you attack or not attack vs various monsters in that game).

That's actually why I stopped playing Monster Hunter: I really hate the non-responsiveness, it feels like wading through molasses.

You're super slow because you need to predict things like 2... 3... maybe even 5 seconds+ in advance.

Monster Hunter basically forces you to memorize the way the monsters move. Its not for everyone, but its in the title. "Monster Hunter". You gotta keep practicing vs the same monster over-and-over until you memorize its patterns before you really get the joy of success in that game.

When you're finally cool with one monster, you move on to learn the patterns of the next, etc. etc. Its a "take it at your own pace" kinda game. No story, just hunting.

Honestly, to me it feels more like Monster Hunter is just a rhythm game dressed up in a fighting system. It's almost like a dance with the monster.

But that's not what I'm looking for in a game, I generally want the agility of e.g. Mirror's Edge ^^

> It's not the polish that was bad.

Indeed, it would be weird if CDPR had trouble with Polish.

Not the person you're replying to, but the original Witcher felt fine to me too, but I'm a lifelong PC gamer and the interface/controls reminded me of older PC-only CRPGs like Summoner or even Neverwinter Nights. I love those games, but in terms of their control schemes they do feel clunky compared to the more visceral controller-optimized and streamlined Action RPG controls of The Witcher 2 and 3.

In other words, the first Witcher game is in more of a niche genre with significantly less mainstream appeal in terms of gameplay and UI.

It was based on the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, so the similarities to NWN are expected. Actually, from my perspective, combat in W1 was a big improvement over the turn based click and pray combat of NWN.

I liked Neverwinter Nights 2 -- so no wonder I liked playing The Witcher 1. I think I played on a very underpowered laptop back then (as a college student), so if the engine was sluggish I probably attributed that to gaming on a laptop :D

I loved the game and beat it twice (maybe 3 times? not sure) but the engine performs like dogshit for the level of graphical quality it delivers.

It was very good for the time the game was launched, but it is quite outdated. I loved the game, but it is in the category of games I would love to play again, I install it, then the graphics looks so bad it turns me down. Believe me, I started playing computer games ~ 1986, so I know what bad graphics is, but Witcher 1 is a lot more recent than that and the expectations are a lot higher.

My first attempt didn't go well either but I am glad I gave it a second chance. Once it starts winning you over, it is really good.

The fighting system is pretty old-school but once you get used to it, it is quite fun. It is very authentic to how Geralt is fighting in the Witcher books. It is simply more about rhythm and tactics than one might be used to.

Just because Witcher 1 is kind of hard to recommend for a casual gamer in 2022, does not mean it is garbage. It is just different. It has more of a niche appeal.

I am absolutely glad I got to play the original and some of its charm are the things are probably going to be modernized away in the remake.

The engine was fine, it was a square peg / round hole situation.

They picked an off-the-shelf engine that was designed to simulate tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons in 3D. Maybe they got a good deal on it.

The bird's-eye click-to-move camera mode is what the engine was designed for, but the developers kludged in some keyboard controls because they were making an action game.

The odd timing-based fighting styles sort of make sense, because the engine wanted to handle combat with dice rolls on a mostly-fixed interval.

It could have turned out a lot worse, when you consider what they were working with. I hope they keep some of the weird quirks, like the rhythm swordplay.

The Witcher ran on a heavily modified version of the Aurora engine, which was used for the Bioware Neverwinter Nights.

W1 and W2 barely make any splashes in the story department when W3 is in the picture. You might as well just spend a weekend to read through Sapkowski's six novels instead, W3 takes over from the point where his last novel ends.

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