The Witcher has immersion it has context, you may be doing boring quests collecting animal parts. But it has a good reason, everything in the world fits together. Monsters dont just pop up out of nowhere to attack the player because the designers think it might be fun to have an encounter every 1.03 minutes.

You can easily avoid monsters if wish and you can easily find ones that you might want because they have a reality and a behaviour which causes carrion monsters to be found near corpses, etc.

Building a world takes more than just plonking down randomnly towns, creatures, and items.

Even the older RPGs had the conceit to pretend to be something more than a game by keeping things as contexual and consistent as possible, and by always obeying their own internal rules.

With Oblivion and Morrowind I always knew it was a game when I tried certain things, which is ok, but thats not really what RPGs are about.

However, the entire Vault section was a little embarassingly lame. Sluggish combat, although VATS is fun (but also a bit random when playing from a first person perspective). Their attempts to do a proper FPS right-click-zoom thing are rather sad due to the weapons failing to go to proper ‘iron-sights’ – what exactly is the point otherwise? It just becomes a strange zoom lens. Voice acting so far is adequate – Neeson is good – but the animation and behaviour of characters is staggeringly awful. The crazy zoom/pan thing on dialogue actually seems more intrusive than it was in Oblivion. Graphics don’t seem to have moved on since Oblivion either, so seem rather limited compared to, say, Bioshock (which had a generally similar setting to the Vault), Call of Duty 4 (which had great animation) or Half Life 2 (which had mostly convincing characters).

The entire Vault section feels like a first draft. There are great ideas in there, and structurally it’s very clever. But there’s absolutely zero polish – this is the kind of state it should be in early in development. That it’s been released and is still this clunky really confuses me – it’s not like Bethesda have a lack of cash.

Odd.

I got mine today also.

P.

“stick in with your English lessons”. Classic!

Installation was a snap. I didn’t even have to give it a serial, which I found odd. And I never got bugged about WFGL at all.

I managed to not kill the Overseer. And managed to get a little questing in before I turned in.

Sadly, Bloody Mess wasn’t available at the first couple of levels. But I did manage to cheat (a leetle bit) and build the Rock-It Launcher (woot!).

A few minor issues I’ve found…
- I didn’t see an option to adjust resolution, but all the pretties were turned to 11 on my machine and ran just fine.
- Like in Oblivion, it’s really easy to accidentally ’steal’ something and get the snot beaten out of you when trying to sit down.

But it’s been fun so far.

Actually quite apt.

For me, Bethesda’s typical level of polish is exemplified at the very beginning of FO3, when the Overseer presents you with your PipBoy – and rather than you reaching out and accepting it, the PipBoy simply vanishes into thin air. HL2 and even earlier games “solved” this “problem” years ago, and it seems particularly outdated in the age of first-person animation like that in Far Cry 2. Bethesda is such a weird mix of clunky old-school amateurishness and top-dollar mainstream pretension, with a good dollop of Hollywood shallowness thrown in.