The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Preview
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History is littered with great games that lacked convincing and consistent voice-acting, and it's not just lowerbudget titles that suffer. Oblivion's NPCs were railing in stentorian tones about the end of the world one minute, and blathering about mud-crabs the next sometimes in a different actor's voice. It's such an incredibly important element to nail if you want your game to suspend disbelief and draw players into its fantasy.
Five minutes into my guided tour of The Witcher 2, and it's plain that CD Projekt are refusing to scrimp on their voice budget. The first couple of characters I meet are a convincingly Scottish dwarf, and an imperious public-school Elf. Their dialogue isn't laboured and caricatured, as it is in so many RPGs. It sounds natural, and breathes life into the characters onscreen. As Jan Bartkowicz, the game's scriptwriter and my guide to Witcher's kingdom of Temeria, confirms: (It's an international effort. There's a British voice studio we're working with who are very good, and we moved part of our localisation team there to make sure they get it right.)
Beautiful people
It helps, of course, when the characters themselves look the part. And in The Witcher 2: Assasssins of Kings, they very much do. A lot of care has been lavished on designing Temeria, along with the various denizens that inhabit it. My hour-long exploration of the Dwarven city of Vergan and the forest surrounding it clearly demonstrated that CD Projekt want their game to look as good as they can possibly make it. The wooded scenes are stunning, especially at sunset, when the sun's dying rays filter through the branches in a honey-rich display of specular lighting.
Check the screenshots. These aren't doctored images, the game really does look this good. When quizzed about whether they'd consider porting Witcher 2 to console, the answer was pretty resolute: (We're making a PC game. We're making the best PC game we can.)
