I got room for a new game and I’ve been hunting through game of the year lists and both of these come up reguarly. I love turn based strategy and I love good RPGs (bioshock, fallout 3, etc). I suspect either of these would be enjoyable, but of the two, which strikes people as the more absorbing game?
I’m not a big fan of later incarnations of HoMM, though I liked the Warlords series and early HoMM. King’s Bounty I’m slightly leary of just because I’ve heard it’s HoMM-ish and that’s a mixed blessing of a comparison in my mind.
The Witcher is RPG mixed in with action, and is a must-play RPG if you’re a fan of either genre (though RPG fare is what you’ll mostly be doing). You have a very defined role, and it makes no apologies for its morally ambiguous nature, yet you still feel like the world around you is reacting to the decisions that you’ve made with the choices you had. There’s also a ton of pretty good voicework and the game is polished as all hell, and the graphics are great. There is a demo which I highly recommend trying, and if you like it (like I did) do not hesitate to purchase it.
I haven’t played King’s Bounty but it doesn’t seem like it’s the type of game that really does all that much different than the HoMM series.
If you are a heterosexual woman and you don’t care about the tits is there any other reason to buy Witcher? I keep wanting to try it but it’s still relatively expensive for something that may be mostly a lot of boobs.
It’s a misogynistic game, no doubt, but if you’re not overly sensitive, the womanizing doesn’t detract from the superb role playing experience whatsoever, and plays a pretty minor role in the grand scheme of things.
People kept mentioning going back and forth to the swamp, but I didn’t really understand what they were talking about. If you gather every quest you can before heading out, you can pretty much finish several at a time. There’s also quite a bit to do in the swamp itself while you’re completing some of the town quests. Around that time you also get that magical stone that teleports you right back into the city.
The bigger problem I have with the game is that, given the overlapping nature of the quests, things just don’t make sense.
I’m about to solve the big ‘crime’ in Vezima, and I got to a point where I couldn’t believe what they wanted me to do (it was ridiculously difficult). I turned to GameFaqs to see if I was missing anything, and it was like trying to decipher Primer trying to see exactly what leads to what.
I’ve often seen quests with overlapping outcomes and objectives in the game, but after seeing the various ways to solve the crime, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Every outcome to every choice I was making going along in the investigation was not making sense up to the point before I got put in a ridiculously difficult situation, but when I learned exactly what was going on behind the scenes it simply wasn’t logical.
I got frustrated with this and just couldn’t go back to the game afterwords. It’s one thing to have interesting and differing outcomes depending on your choices, but if you don’t test them out and polish them, you end up making an illogical mess that draws you completely out of the game.
The Witcher is a traditional narrative with character design RPG with an action-RPG combat system. You play an amensiac monster killer seeking revenge for a raid on his organizations home. The actual gameworld is far more interesting than that write up, though. The game contains themes of racism, terrorism, government corruption, and other issues still very prominent in modern society.
King’s Bounty, is more of a strategy game, sort of like Heroes of Might and Magic. You recruit soldiers of different attributes to fight in your army while your character levels up in various ways to provide bonuses for the troops he leads. Has both an openworld and light hearted feel to it, though I did not play very much of it. Narrative and world building take backseat to tactical combat. I found the combat fairly challenging.
If you get The Witcher just make sure you get the Enhanced Edition, or if not download the Enhanced Edition patch (available for all copies) because it makes the game far far better.
King’s Bounty because of the sheer amount of insanity doubled by the hex base battles which remind me of Heroes of Might and Magic 2 (no, there were no Heroes games released after the third one).
The Witcher is also nice, but too by the numbers compared to King’s Bounty.
I would say they are both great games for their genre’s. You really can’t go wrong with either.
If you get The Witcher though I would look around for a used copy of the original game. It is a lot cheaper and you can download all the things from the “enhanced edition”. Save a few bucks and maybe you could buy King’s Bounty too!
Geez, I guess I will have to try the KB demo again. Last time I was completely underwhelmed.
It played like a stripped-down HOMM (no AI opponents) and the FedEx quests made me cry.
