Stirring Up My Witcher's Brew
Potions and night vision? This is another pretty major part of the game: alchemy. Throughout the game, you will learn about new potions you can make by talking to people or reading books and scrolls. You'll also learn about various plants you can harvest for use in potions, and many of the monsters you slay will provide you with ingredients. With the appropriate recipe, take a strong alcohol and add in the necessary ingredients while resting and you create a potion. The quality of alcohol determines how many ingredients you can use — depending on the potion, you may need three (strong), four (high-quality), or five (top-quality) ingredients — the more ingredients, the higher the alcohol quality (i.e. the more expensive the alcohol). Luckily, you may use any strong alcohol with three ingredients to create a White Gull potion that can function as a top-quality (five ingredients allowed) alcohol. (Weak and moderate alcohol serves no use other than a way to get Geralt drunk.)
 Not as good as a crock pot, but it will do. |
Effects of potions vary, providing you with the ability to see in the dark (Cat), improved offense at the expense of your defense of abilities (Thunderbolt), accelerated speed and attack abilities (Blizzard), increased endurance regeneration (Tawny Owl), accelerated healing (Swallow), and dozens of others. The effects can also last for anywhere from 30 minutes of game time to as long as half a day. The catch with potions is that they all increase your body's toxicity — your mother warned you about drinking too much alcohol, right? The result is that you usually can't have more than about three to five (depending on level and attributes) active potion effects running at the same time. There's also one potion (White Honey) that will reduce your toxicity to zero, but it will also remove any other potion effects. Determining which potion to drink for certain battles can be critical to your success.
The game suggests that the necessity of using alchemy varies by difficulty level, and as I only beat the game on medium difficulty I can't fully confirm this. What I can say is that on medium difficulty, certain battles — especially boss battles — are nearly impossible to beat without using several potions. There were plenty of potion types that I almost never used, like the one that allows you to see invisible creatures and the one that turns your blood to poison, harming any bloodsucking creatures that attack you. Since I never encountered an invisible creature in medium difficulty mode and had few problems with bloodsuckers, these two potions were essentially useless. With a few tweaks to the difficulty level of the monsters, however, I could see alchemy becoming far more useful.
 'Ware the Striga! |
Besides potions, there are two other types of objects you can create using alchemy. The first of these is blade coatings. These appear similar to a potion in your inventory, but instead of drinking then you apply them to one of your swords. They can increase the effectiveness of your weapon against certain types of monsters, improve the chance of causing bleeding or pain, poison your enemies, and a few other effects. Basically, blade coatings make your weapons do more damage. They last 24 hours, but you can't stack effects. There are also a few miscellaneous objects you can find throughout the game that will enhance your weapons for 24 hours — grind stones, diamond dust, and rune stones to name a few. Blade coatings use grease as the base of the potion rather than alcohol, again with different grease qualities allowing you to use three, four, or five ingredients.
 The slowest level of the game — fire's bad, m'kay? |
The final use for alchemy is creating bombs — which requires a level 3 intelligence perk. Once more, there are three categories of powder that will allow you to add three to five ingredients. Bombs create an area effect "spell" around Geralt that will temporarily stun, damage, poison, ignite, or scare your nearby foes — certain creatures of course being less susceptible to the bomb effects. While I used plenty of potions and the occasional blade coating, bombs were generally not required. When completely surrounded, a bomb that would stun/blind/ignite five or six enemies was somewhat useful, but almost never required. At the highest difficulty setting, this very likely would not be the case and bombs would be more important.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
39 Comments
View All Comments
haplo602 - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
Nice review, I skipped the garbage at the beginning :) but rest is fine.I was quite interested in the game until the problems page. My old PC won't handle this game it seems (1GB ram, x1650XT, athlon 64).
Anyway I read some of the Witcher books and I can only highly recommend them. If the story in the game is only half as good, it's a great game.
sjaxkingpin - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
Nice to see a review of one of the best games in a long time. Seems like the Eastern Block is responsible for alot of good games recently, with Crytek, Stalker and now the witcher. Too much corporate influence over here, I suppose.BTW, to the earlier poster who linked to the Zero Punctuation stuff, I'd never seen em before and I think I watched every one back to back... HILARIOUS!!!
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/edit...">http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/edit...
saiga6360 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Bar none.WorldMus - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
this game is total garbage. A grindfest centered around collecting nuke cards. Oblivion makes this look like trash, not to mention the horrible interface, ridiculous bugs and loading times, and the overall boring storyline and poor npc coding. Two thumbs downstick to hardware jarred - you don't know gaming
hekuball - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Couldn't agree more - this game is total garbage. I have never seen so many cut scenes in my entire life!Every single tiny scrap of dialogue is done via lengthy cut scenes. Basically it gores something like this....
Walk to top of stairs, meet npc (cutscene dialogue), go through door (loading time), walk through for 5 yards (another 30 second cut scene telling you what you have to do for next 60 seconds), engage bad guys in short pointless combat involving choice of stance followed by repeated left clicking with a modicum of basic timing that a 2 year old could master, thrown in.
Kill enemies, cut scene, followed by another cutscene carrying on from the last one, run for 5 seconds til go through door (long load time), followed by cutscene...aaarrrggghhhhhhhh!
I got so fed up after a few hours, I rebooted and swore never to touch this amateurish excuse for a linear piece of crap rpg again.
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
There are plenty of "cut scenes" at the beginning, presumably to introduce you to the game world. All of them can be skipped by pressing ESC. I guess you played the first part of the Prologue and called it quits. Me, I enjoyed the background information, dialog, etc. To call all conversations "cut scenes" is ludicrous, though. I guess we're having a cut scene right now?To the earlier poster, having played RPGs since I was under the age of 10. Akalabeth, Wizardry, Ultima, Might and Magic, SSI's Gold Box D&D games... I remember playing all of those as a kid. Granted, it wasn't until around the time of Bard's Tale III that I began *finishing* games, but I'm quite sure I've spent more than enough time with computer games to know what I like and what I don't like.
Now, to the point of whether or not this game is "garbage": As evidenced by the comments (and other reviews around the net), there are MANY people that really enjoy(ed) this game. Obviously, not everyone is going to like it. Lots of people hated Baldur's Gate (and Dungeons & Dragons games in general); if you don't like PC RPGs, I'm *sure* you won't like this game. Even if you do enjoy games like Oblivion, there's no guarantee you'll like The Witcher. I'd wager that with the latest patch, however, most people that like RPG-ish games will enjoy The Witcher.
kilkennycat - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Er, I am enjoying The Witcher. Best story-based PC RPG since VTM:B (with Werner's patches, of course...). Great fun. And the V1.2 patch has significantly improved the load times. The Witcher also happens to have the most-polished (and story-relevant ) introduction of all the PC games in my collection. That short sample should be very tempting to any movie producer... The fact that The Witcher is based on an excellent story-line should make it even more tempting. If drek like movies based on Doom, Resident Evil, AvP can command an audience, what about a monster-movie based on a powerful core character and a great story-line?karioskasra - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Portrayed as food, unintelligent creatures, and cannon fodder, the animals in most RPGs are mere objects; treated reprehensibly and, even worse, ignored most times, by all their games' characters, including the main protagonist. The underlying theme of these games is the slaying of innocent helpless creatures for a pittance of experience points and "Raw Hide", clearly shown by its market value at your nearest vendor. RPGs' objectification of animals is sickening.Jarred, as an owner of a kitten, do you find this aspect of RPGs offensive? I demand that somebody call PETA post-haste.
strikeback03 - Friday, January 25, 2008 - link
bwahaha!Foxy1 - Thursday, January 24, 2008 - link
Portrayed as vile temptresses, witches and whores, the women in this game are mere objects; treated reprehensibly by all the game’s male characters, including Geralt. The underlying theme of the game is the sexual conquest of women, clearly shown by the pin-up cards given as rewards. The Witcher’s objectification of women is sickening.Jarred, as a father of a young daughter, did you find this aspect of the game offensive?