The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition Previews

Should you be interested in reading some hands-on impressions of the enhanced edition of The Witcher 2, coming to Xbox 360 and PC this month, both The Guardian and GameZone have you served.

Here’s a snippet from the first:

One thing all paths have in common is that they’re hard. In fact, even on the normal difficulty, I lost count of the number of times I ended up at the “Game Over” screen just playing through the game’s short prologue. First, I died about eight times, in one of the very first fights because I attacked a group of soldiers head-on, which in The Witcher 2 is nothing short of suicide. Then I died because I didn’t run fast enough from a dragon. Moments later, a prison guard punched my lights out in a fist-fight. And finally I died a good five more times to a group of armoured soldiers, before eventually defeating them with the classic roll-around-them-in-circles-firing-tiny-fireballs tactic. Which, while effective, is a style of combat suited more to magical clowns than monster slayers.

And the latter:

What’s really surprising is how much work CD Projekt is putting into the presentation. While the game runs much smoother on a high-end PC, the Xbox 360 edition is no slouch. The environments are absolutely stunning, from roaming around through underground caves with lights streaming in, to a huge tower, one you’re forced to climb up as you face a rogue and his army of soldiers. Both are streamlined with barely any hiccups in frame rate, and the detail is staggering. What’s more, when you’re fighting in combat, the camera doesn’t get in its own way, meaning you can watch carefully for enemies coming from behind and roll out of the way accordingly, plotting your next course of attack.

While Strategy Informer has some some thoughts from level artist Mark Ziemak on next-generation consoles and multiplatform development:

“I guess once you get some experience with consoles, with Xbox 360, then we are hoping that this experience in the future will help us in developing games for a next gen,” said artist Mark Ziemak.

“If next gen is around the corner pretty soon, then we are hoping the experience that we got at this moment will actually help us in creating the games for other consoles. I don’t think they’ll be so much different. I hope they won’t be so much different that we have to totally change our controls and stuff like that.”

The RPG studio wants “totally parallel” development across future releases on multiple platforms.