The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Review
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CD Projekt Red released The Witcher in October of 2007. The game received many fine reviews, including a 9.0 from GameBanshee. Now a year later, CD Projekt Red has created an Enhanced Edition of the game. This edition sports the original script (as opposed to the pared down version in the North American release), new voice acting for all of the additional lines, improved mechanics and visuals, numerous bug fixes, and more. Better yet, CD Projekt Red has released all of this content as a patch, and so if you purchased The Witcher before, you can download the Enhanced Edition for free.
Now, it's a rare patch that doesn't improve a game (although Obsidian Entertainment is trying their darndest with Neverwinter Nights 2), and so I'm not going to review the Enhanced Edition of The Witcher. It was a good game before, it's a better game now, and you don't need to read a review to understand that. What I'm going to do instead is talk about the patch itself -- what it adds, what it improves, and, most importantly, whether you should care. Since our rating system doesn't really apply to patches, I'm not going to give it a score, but if you read the text of this review you'll get a pretty good idea of what I think about it.
The Dialogue
When The Witcher was released in North America, it rather famously appeared in an edited and censored fashion. Most of the media and fan scrutiny fell upon the removal of all of the nudity from the game, but the script was also hacked up and sanitized, to the point where some of the dialogue didn't make any sense (a conversation with Thaler in Chapter III comes to mind here). Well, the Enhanced Edition doesn't change anything about the nudity, but it fixes the dialogue, to the point where the game now sports the complete original script.
I know there are some players out there who would prefer scripts and scripted events to be as terse as possible so they can concentrate on killing things, but the changes to The Witcher's script are actually more subtle than I expected them to be. Conversations flow better, NPCs are more conscientious about telling you where they'll be and what you'll need to do to complete their quests, and all of the nonsensical comments have been removed. Better yet, CD Projekt Red achieved this without the script seeming much (wordier.) I don't know if anybody released any actual numbers for this, but the script doesn't feel like it's any more than 10-20% larger, and the bonuses far outweigh the minuses (assuming you even think a larger script is a minus). About the only downside to the script is that the profanity quotient way up (Thaler in particular swears with every other word), but then The Witcher wasn't exactly a family-friendly game to start with.
Because of the new script, of course, there is also a bunch of new voice acting. From what I can tell, almost all of the actors from The Witcher reprised their roles in the Enhanced Edition, including Doug Cockle's excellent work as Geralt. Better yet, the mixing of the new lines with the old is pretty seamless. There are a couple of places where the volume changes or the actor sounds like he's in a different room all of a sudden, but I'm guessing most people won't be able to tell that a significant portion of the dialogue was recorded at different times. The only downside to the voice acting is that the actor for Dandelion changed, and the new guy is way more flat and monotone than the original guy, and he seems ill-suited as the roguish musician.
The Visuals
The graphical changes in the Enhanced Edition are probably the only disappointing part of the patch, just because they're so minimal. One of the changes that we were supposed to see was the inclusion of a bunch of new character models, to prevent named NPCs from looking just like random peasants and merchants, but this didn't really come to light. Instead of whole new faces, CD Projekt Red only made minor changes, like adding scars or blemishes to the faces, and so people still look like each other. About the only NPC who really got a facelift is Carmen (leave it to CD Projekt Red to concentrate on the appearance of a prostitute), and that's mostly because her hair turned brown.
The only other thing I noticed is that if you cast the Igni sign on an enemy, and if you ignite it, then it will catch on fire and show a burning animation. I don't remember that happening before, so it's probably new. Otherwise, the Enhanced Edition looks almost identical to the original version, and so the graphical changes give little reason to try out the game again.
Other Improvements
In addition to the more publicized changes, CD Projekt Red has made other improvements. First and foremost, they upgraded the inventory system. When The Witcher first came out, the inventory was divided between quest items and other items, and it was often tough to tell what you had and what you needed (among other things, ingredients tended to look like potions). But now the inventory has been divided into three areas -- quest items, regular items, and ingredients -- and CD Projekt Red added sorting and filtering buttons, making it easier to keep track of your stuff. Better yet, the changes actually added more inventory space, and so now you don't need to constantly run back and forth to shopkeepers to sell items and clear space, and you don't often need to visit inns to shuffle items between your inventory and your storage space.
Another nice change is that CD Projekt Red improved dice poker. When the game was initially released, the dice poker opponents were monumentally dumb, and they'd often roll dice at random, without any regard to whether they were helping their hand or actually hurting it. But now the opponents are both smarter and luckier, and so it's much tougher to get through the dice poker quest in the game. It also means that you can no longer use dice poker as a source for easy money. But on the downside, dice poker also isn't as much fun to play any more. Opponents constantly roll full houses and six-high straights, and you're now much more likely to lose than to win (I lost to Dandelion 10 times in a row before I finally beat him).
Finally, CD Projekt made a couple of claims that don't exactly seem to be true, or perhaps are a matter of semantics. First, they claimed that they reduced the loading times in the Enhanced Edition, but I couldn't tell the difference. When the game first came out the loading times were terrible for me (going in and out of a shop took about five minutes round trip), but these times were knocked way down in the 1.2 patch, and they seem to be about the same now. CD Projekt Red also claimed that they improved (combat responsiveness,) but this also seemed about the same. I noticed that Geralt will actually advance and start fighting plants on his own now, but at other times he just refuses to fight, especially when you try to use the group fighting style.
Conclusion
Just to be clear, The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is a patch rather than any sort of expansion pack. It doesn't add any new quests or locations or characters, and the new script just expands upon existing conversations rather than adding new ones. So if you've already played The Witcher, then there isn't really anything new here. It's just that all of the things you saw before are a little bit better. If you haven't played The Witcher yet, then the Enhanced Edition gives you even fewer excuses to avoid it than you might have had before, and you'd be doing yourself a favor by playing it.
As patches go, the Enhanced Edition is about as good as it gets. Only once before have I seen a game get a major overhaul to its script and voice acting, and that game, Gorasul, desperately needed it (let's just say that it was poorly translated). The Witcher didn't really need to improve its script, but CD Projekt Red spruced it up anyway, and they made a lot of other nice changes as well, making the game even better than it was before. Just be warned, though, that if you're downloading the Enhanced Edition as a patch, it's 1.5 GB in size, and since it touches so many files, it takes upwards of 2 hours to update your game. But that's a small enough downside given all of the improvements that you're getting for free.
