[STEAM] I played The Witcher 1 as a kid and bounced off—turns out I just needed a fully developed frontal lobe

[Steam 0]

In mid-June 2015, I happened to start my first playthrough of The Witcher 3 using nothing more than an AMD HD 6670, 6 gigs of DDR3 RAM, and a Pentium G2030 dual-core CPU, all the while running the game itself on a hard drive.

That never stopped me, and neither did the 12 fps cutscenes where the dialogue sped ahead of the animations and forced me to skip a lot of them once conversations concluded. What followed were hundreds of hours of mindless fun and enjoyment, which only got better once I had a stronger PC. But having discovered that love for The Witcher‘s third entry, I had to go back, and thankfully, GOG was selling copies of The Witcher 1 for pennies.

I remember vaguely playing through that first area where you fight the spectral green dogs, the Barghest, as well as reaching either the late stage of that level or somewhere up in the swamps. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going, and using any proper mods to make my experience better never seemed to cross my mind.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

While the plots and stories weren’t the best, every piece of dialogue and writing was just pure peak. Screenshot by Destructoid However, everything you did in the game echoed somewhere down the line. All choices had severe consequences, either on Geralt, the characters involved, or even third parties in the area where the choices were made. And the game practiced this design philosophy of “every choice is wrong,” giving the world a much darker tone than would appear in later installments.

This is to be expected given that Witcher 1 was built on BioWare’s engine, the same one used in another choice-and-consequence RPG, Neverwinter Nights. A lot of old-school RPG inspirations exist in this game, and everything you do carries deep meaning. The backtracking and having to go on foot across huge areas are quite a drawback, but since you’re doing it for good reasons, the tediousness often disappears.

I would even go on to say that The Witcher 1 is, in many ways, the best game in the series. It has the worst plot and the worst “canonical” feel of the three games, but its RPG side is by far the most polished and meaningful. I felt sad when I realized that many of the choices you make in the first game don’t even matter in the second (the Shani romance, for example) and that a lot of the first game is essentially annulled by the sequels.

Now that I’ve mentioned it, Shani’s romance is truly the best romance path in the trilogy. It gets a lot of cool cutscenes and Geralt ruminating about his position in the world as a witcher, juxtaposed between the Path and settling down with the person he loves. Shani loves Geralt, and he loves her back, the lost memories notwithstanding, and there’s a real philosophical conundrum the character goes through during just this one sequence.

So, yeah, I was very, truly, really wrong about The Witcher 1. Playing it as an adult with a lot more experience on my shoulders really gave me a different

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

on the game, both from a design and a gameplay standpoint. And many of the aspects found here need to make a comeback, especially when it comes to every choice hitting you in the face either immediately or hours down the line.

The Witcher 4 stands to learn a lot from this game, and I can’t wait to see if CDPR went back to its beginnings to figure out what went so well.

/wp-content/themes/destructoid2025/assets/img/icons/likes-off.png0 The post

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

appeared first on

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up