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Comment by verst | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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