If you were to search for the best games of 2007, you probably won’t find The Witcher on many lists. This is partly due to the fact that 2007 was an unusually good year for gaming, with beloved series such as BioShock, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted, Rock Band, and Portal making their debut. But it’s also because The Witcher – if we’re brutally honest – wasn’t the first strongest show for the series. That’s why CD Projekt Red’s top-to-bottom remake of The Witcher seems like a good idea.
Earlier this week, CD Projekt Red, who developed the three Witcher games and released the last two, announced that “the original Witcher game has been remade from scratch.” There is no timeline for The Witcher Remake project, but the company is working alongside developer Fool’s Theory, which employs team members from The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In other words, The Witcher Remake’s pedigree looks solid; the only question is whether this game, which is perfectly playable on modern PCs, needs a full remake treatment.
I would say it is, especially when you consider how much The Witcher 2 and 3 have evolved the ambitious but twisted mechanics of the first game. However, as with any remake, there is a chance that some of the creative aspects that made The Witcher a cult classic in the first place are lost along the way.
A world without The Witcher
(Credito immagine: CD Project Red)
In case you’ve never played the first Witcher game (and based on Steam Graphics, there are many of you), it’s a PC-exclusive RPG where you play as the traveling monster hunter Geralt of Rivia. Acting as a non-canonical sequel to Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels, The Witcher included many of the same elements that made the books work, including a morally drab story, a sharp script, and a dry sense of humor. It also introduced an indefinite character progression system, inventive swordplay, and a number of interesting levels to explore.
When The Witcher came out, fans and critics received it politely, but not exuberantly. Following Metacritic’s ratings (which are not the essential, the end of all game reviews, but still a useful starting point), The Sorcerer was the 126th highest-scoring game of 2007, well behind. Contra 4 on DS, WarioWare: Smooth Moves on Wii and Jeanne d’Arc on PSP. Contemporary reviews of The Witcher praised the game’s tough moral choices, idiosyncratic setting, and strong level design, while criticizing its Finnish combat, repetitive dialogue and buggy presentation. It is worth noting that all of these observations are correct, even in hindsight.
However, it is important to remember that players entered The Witcher, on the whole, without preconceptions. While The Witcher today has half a dozen best-selling games, a beloved Netflix adaptation, and a complete series of translated books, the cultural prestige of the series in 2007 looked very different. Before CD Projekt’s game came out, the only exposure English-speaking audiences had on The Witcher was a single translation of a short story in 2000 (opens in a new tab). Not that players would necessarily recognize the connection; in its initial translation, the story used the word “Hexer” rather than “Witcher”.
It’s also worth mentioning that PC-style RPGs were far less universally accessible in 2007 than they are today. Although series like Dragon Age, Pillars of Eternity, Diablo and Fallout are widely available on consoles today, they required fairly powerful gaming platforms, not to mention a player base willing to tolerate both a steep learning curve and a bevy of technical glitches. . There is actually quite a legendary history of “Eurojank” games like The Witcher, ambitious cult classics from Eastern European developers, which nevertheless require a lot of patience to fully appreciate them.
To put it another way, you can enter The Witcher 3 and start enjoying it within the first 10 minutes. The original Witcher makes you work for your enjoyment. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but The Witcher 2 and 3 have shown us that the series can be accessible without losing the story or depth of gameplay in the process.
What should stay and what should go
(Credito immagine: CD Project Red)
To start with a caveat, we have hardly any information on The Witcher Remake. When CD Projekt Red says it intends to remake the game “from scratch,” we don’t know if it will be a hit-by-hit remake, like Demon’s Souls, or a more open-minded remake, like the Final Fantasy VII Remake. For the sake of argument though, let’s pretend that CD Projekt Red wants to take the latter route, since The Witcher has a lot of edges that might need some sanding.
Graphics
We can safely assume that the remake will have brand new graphics. The voice acting of the original game was a bit rough, and I doubt many players would complain if CD Projekt Red had taken The Witcher 3 voice back for the remake instead. (Doug Cockleche voiced Geralt flawlessly in all three games, obviously non-negotiable.)
Beyond that, however, CD Projekt has a lot of leeway, depending on whether the company wants to keep the game intact or make it more of a gaming experience. To that end, I think the company will have to make two big choices: what to do for combat and whether to change the mission design.
Fight
First of all, the combat system in The Witcher could probably be an entire article in its own right, but it’s not your typical action / RPG fare. Instead of the standard light attacks, heavy attacks, parries and dodges, The Witcher’s combat feels more like a rhythm game. In addition to steel swords for human enemies and silver swords for monstrous enemies, you can alternate between three fighting positions: strong style, fast style and group style. Each style has a completely different cadence and you have to click the left mouse button in time with the instructions, otherwise you will lose your combo. The instructions also get longer and more complex as you level up your skills.
I personally loved the combat of the game simply because it’s so different and I’m not alone. But even a cursory reading of contemporary The Witcher reviews reveals that many players would have preferred a simpler system, which ultimately went with The Witcher 2 and 3. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but I wonder if CD Projekt Red will eventually go for historical preservation or ease of use.
Research design
The mission design in The Witcher is also much more complex than modern gamers might be used to. The mission prompts don’t tell you exactly where to go or what prerequisites are needed to complete them correctly. It’s entirely possible to go wrong on a mission, get your rewards, and find out hours later that you’ve failed everything. Even something as simple as “killing X number of monsters” can be a convoluted process, as you will need to purchase expensive research books on each type of monster before your kills “matter”. The last two Witcher games make it a lot easier to know where you’re going and a lot harder to get it wrong.
This is probably also obvious minigame where you picked up naked women figurines after sleeping with them (opens in new tab) must go.
Whatever CD Projekt Red decides, The Witcher Remake sounds like a timely project that could introduce a whole new audience to an underrated RPG. And if you simply can’t wait that long, you can always play The Witcher: Advanced Edition on Steam – provided you’re okay with some dated and clunky elements. There is still a good story underneath.
