Exploring Moral Consequences, the Obvious and the Unintended

Atari

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings In a game from CD Projekt RED in Poland, humans dominate elves and dwarfs against the backdrop of power politics.

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Atari

In The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, the lead character is a mystical warrior.

But every once in a while a game arrives out of the blue that redefines expectations for an entire genre. A game like The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. If you enjoy single-player role-playing games on PC, you simply must play The Witcher 2. Innovative, unflinchingly mature and richly imagined, it is driven by fascinating, finely nuanced characters navigating a fantasy world of dark political intrigue and ambiguous morals.

The world of The Witcher is gothic, soulful and intelligent, yet mercilessly brutal. Innocent people die, and still almost all the characters consider themselves perfectly justified in their actions. After all, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, and which you consider noble depends on your personal circumstances. As the Witcher, an independent, mystical warrior set amid warring medieval kingdoms, you will have to decide what justice means to you.

In the real world, many nations know about being riven by powerful external forces, about genocide, the death of innocents and the choices people must make in the face of soul-shaking horror — not least Poland. So as you become enveloped in the world of The Witcher 2, it gradually comes to make sense that it is based on the work of the Polish novelist Andrzej Sapkowski and was created by the Warsaw developer and publisher CD Projekt RED. In Poland it is considered a leader in digital entertainment; the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, gave President Obama a copy of The Witcher 2 during Mr. Obama’s visit there in May. (The game is being published in North America by Atari.)

I deeply regret not writing about the original Witcher game back when it was released in 2007. It was always sitting on the shelf, but sadly, I didn’t get around to playing it until this year. The first was a cult hit. But this sequel deserves mass recognition. (An Xbox 360 version is scheduled later this year.)

As for CD Projekt, it is both clear and heartening to see how it got to the point of being able to make a game of such narrative sophistication. It turns out that the studio actually found its first major success handling the Polish versions of some of the best single-player role-playing games of all time, including Baldur’s Gate (originally released in 1998) and Planescape: Torment (1999).

Each of those, particularly Torment, was important in moving fantasy role-playing games away from la-la-land pixies and elves and into a grittier, more adult mode propelled by careful writing and textured characters. All these years later, The Witcher 2 joins them among my favorite role-playing games ever.

And that is because The Witcher 2 fully realizes the power of the concept of choice. It is a tenet of role-playing games that players must feel as if they were having an effect on the game world, and The Witcher 2 provides that feeling both more vividly and subtly than any other game. It immediately throws you into a story in which your decisions have far-reaching implications that are usually not obvious when you make them. Those results may be unintentionally catastrophic, but they never feel arbitrary. They make sense within the logic of the game world, and you may kick yourself for not foreseeing them.

In this world dwarfs and elves are a persecuted minority treated not entirely unlike Jews in Eastern Europe 100 years ago. While a few nonhuman merchants and craftsmen are tolerated, pogroms are common, and a few human radicals wouldn’t mind getting rid of the nonhumans altogether. In this universe human children are basically taught that elves want to eat them, and battles rage in the woods between men and elves. The elves say all they want is an independent homeland and to be left alone, but if they have to kill human civilians to accomplish that, they will.

You, the player, will be thrust into this conflict, as well as into the political machinations among no fewer than five human kingdoms jockeying for influence in the strategically vital Pontar Valley. It all evokes Europe on the brink of World War I, with you, the Witcher, a force that can tip the balance of history.

For all that, the game’s technical interface could use some serious sprucing up. I shouldn’t have to spend several hours installing third-party modifications to do simple things like figure out which way is north. But a few rough edges can’t obscure the brilliance and importance of The Witcher 2.