While our own feelings about The Witcher hover around worthy-but-flawed, other folks felt it was easily last year’s best RPG. And, honestly, that’s more than enough to make it worth talking about here. Especially in light of the upcoming Enhanced Edition, which promises to redress the major complaints about the original.
I’m happily stunned that the new version’s happening, both because it proves that I’m not alone in finding that dialogue akin to chatting with a crack-addled hobo makes it hard to love the game, and because perhaps I’ll enjoy it this time around. It’s rare enough that a game’s most serious failings can be distilled into a key problem; rarer still that a game’s creators hold their hands up to it; impossibly rare that they fix it. Kieron’s take on the EE is that it’s the sort of professional perfectionism that lead to the Star Wars special editions (as in making ‘em slicker, not as in making Greedo shoot first), but I think of it more like some noisy young band taking the hipster scene by storm, then realising they need to learn to play their instruments properly if they want to make it /really/ big.
While we wait to find out what that new sound is like, we had a brief chat with CD Projekt RED’s Michal Medej, the game’s Chief Designer. Read on for his reasoning as to why the original translation fell down, how the Enhanced Edition fixes it, CD Projekt’s future, thoughts on Bioware and Bethesda and, yes, those infamous nudey collector cards.
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