The Witcher is trying something different in the action-RPG genre for its combat. While it occurs in real time you can pause the action to set up both offensive and defensive combos against your enemies. You also earn more experience if you accomplish these combo effectively. The combos are all mouse driven so there is no need to use keyboard short cuts to accomplish them.

While the game uses the Aurora engine, The Witcher doesn't look at all like Neverwinter Nights. The game is a full third person action-RPG rather than a top down RPG with some excellent looking level design, character models, lighting, water and shadow effects and more that rivals those of the top PC games, RPG or otherwise. The CDProjekt development team told us that the Aurora engine is easy to use and even with the advanced graphics features it would be difficult to make the game without BioWare's engine as its basis.