14 DAY TRIAL // What we know
The first Witcher game was a surprise, coming from a previously unknown developer and managing to take its inspiration and main character from Andrzej Sapkowski, a Polish fantasy writer with little presence in the West.
Now CD Projekt aims to deliver a double body blow to the genre of the Western role-playing game with The Witcher 2: Assassin's of Kings, a game that looks better than the first one and will apparently offer gamers unparalleled amount of freedom in tackling gameplay challenges and pursuing a narrative thread.
Hopes for the game have gone up significantly when CD Projekt showed a small piece of The Wicher 2, showing how different the paths that the gamer could take through a situation and the increased level of interaction with the game world.
Rumors are also suggesting that the developers are changing the rhythm-based mouse click combat system to make it more varied and that the new game will have no less than 16 endings.
Why it matters
It seems that even for BioWare, long seen as the champions of the genre, the traditional role-playing game is not a winning proposition anymore, with the Mass Effect series experimenting heavily with shooter elements and with a streamlined game while the very classic Dragon Age: Origins seems to be morphing into something more accessible and quick in its second installment.
So, The Witcher 2 is seen as the big hope for more traditional gameplay and storytelling, mixed with innovations linked to the freedom that the player has to shape the game world and with a narrative that can draw from the deep mythology of the book series on which it is based.
CD Projekt has delayed the game in order to polish all aspects as close to perfection as it can and players will only get to see the game in May. The Witcher 2 might well be the game which shows us how the future looks for the single character driven role-playing game.