That's crazy, that doesn't sound like my game at all.

Ahh, I never got Sebastian because I didn't exactly pay for the game. I felt a little dirty because I never cheat Bioware like that, but I figure they'll be getting plenty of my money once TOR comes out.

Sebastian's DLC actually gives some pretty great items. His quests are pretty good too.

I didn't miss him basically because I already had an archer in Varric. He's not a bad character or anything. Although on that playthrough I was a mage, and Sebastian a member of the Chantry...

Man, I never even bothered to think what would happen if I was playing as a mage, like you said earlier, that would definitely change some things around.

I see. Maybe I read too much into that choice when I was playing The Witcher, you certainly make it sound a lot simpler than I remember it to be, lol.

That game has I think achieved a legendary status that it doesn't really deserve. It's a good game. But it's not in any way a great one or a revolutionary one. Mass Effect absolutely destroys it as far as I'm concerned. To me, The Witcher was a generic fantasy game in a generic fantasy world with one of the worst combat systems I've ever seen. Probably the biggest things in its favor was/is that there are so few fantasy games anymore and that it was from a small European development house, so it had that underdog thing going for it. (And I'm glad it succeeded in that light...)

It tried to be dark and edgy, which I do like, as opposed to happy-go-lucky epic fantasy. But I never really thought it did dark and edgy all that well. Like I said before, it seemed like "mature" if written by tweens. Out of fairness, I'm sure some of that was things being lost in translation.

Although I will admit that I'm probably biased against it now after months of seeing Witcher trolls all over the Dragon Age forums. It got so bad there (and this was loooong before release) that I'm not even sure I'm going to play TW2 now.

I'm sure I will in the end, just like I'll probably play Skyrim, too.

I payed it a long time ago and I remember enjoying it immensely. I think it was because they managed to create an extremely fleshed out world as their setting. Dragon Age feels very fragmented in the way questing and zoning is done and how the story is told. I think The Witcher almost did in a fantasy world what Mass Effect did in the Sci-Fi world. As far as writing goes, you can't really expect Bioware level of writing from an tiny studio in Poland. Bioware writers were probably doing their thing before the developers even knew what an RPG was.

The Witcher was more fragmented than you may remember. There was a linear progression from area-to-area (divided by chapter) and you had next to no control over where you could go. It was much more like Dragon Age 2 in that regard than Dragon Age: Origins, where you could do the main quest areas (each of which took hours) in basically any order you wanted.

I think, in the end, Knights of the Old Republic did a much better job in 2003 of doing the kind of things with story, world and gameplay that The Witcher was trying to do in 2007. Again, I think the only thing The Witcher really had going for it at that time was that it was a fantasy setting, and there just weren't a lot of fantasy RPGs out there.

I also think it helps that the game it was most often compared to at the time it came out was Oblivion, and when compared to that game, in my mind at least, it does seem like a much better product.

I'm probably coming off as more negative than I really am about it. I did just play the game beginning to end a few months ago. I wouldn't do that for a bad game (although I'm going to try with Oblivion this summer)...