14 DAY TRIAL // The Witcher 2 is a great, great game and most of my reasons can be found in this Softpedia review of the game, but I wonder whether its main ideas and mechanics are the ones that will be able to push the computer role-playing genre into the future.
This game impressed almost everybody that played it with the mix between a truly expressive and beautiful style, a new game engine that taxes hardware but delivers very nice graphics, a narrative that mixes political and moral concepts with humor and some pretty over the top elements and a combat mechanics that can take some time to get, but develop well as the game progresses.
But the things that make The Witcher 2 great also make it, almost by design, a niche game in the long term, one that cannot break out of the computer role-playing game district (think non-human populated neighborhoods in the game) into the wider mainstream city (think the bustling, whore infested and sunny places where humans live).
The combat is too hard for the vast majority to spent the time and discover its beauty and ability to engage.
The story is hard to follow at times and a huge number of players will never go to the trouble of reading all the lore minded entries in the Journal section of the game (it took me one Prologue and the First Chapter to get the courage to read it all).
The mix of high-minded concepts, like all the moral questions that go mostly unanswered, and the low, like the abundance of misogyny and the casual racism towards non humans, will be unpalatable to the mainstream.
This does not mean that there shouldn't be a Witcher 3 from CD Projekt RED or that the very good ideas from this game should not be adopted by other developers working in the same space.
But if computer role-playing games want to get out of their ghetto and assault the mainstream, they might need to let The Witcher be the game of the hardcore and re-imagine mechanics and concepts to appeal to a wider base.