Witcher 2

men I am really frustrated now. I want to update The Witcher 1 with the 900 mb patch to 1.4. For that I need to "register" the game. But I can't register because their FUCKING servers are down for who knows how long. Awesomesoze. An offline game I bought. Fucking servers down. Cant patch even though the patch is on my computer.

When will people realize that this is a FUCKED up evolution that you need to register every crap and where you require everywhere an account just to play a fucking single player game. Sure I could play without patches. But deal with the ton of bugs ? Better not ...
 
Yeah, that's extremely stupid. Especially because Skidrowers and other "cracking" teams don't have real problems with those stupid piracy protection mechanisms. If they want to crack it, they'll do it, so it's a pain only for legal customers. :?
 
PainlessDocM said:
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I won't run this game in a million years.
 
^You do realize that's a benchmark with all gfx options maxed out. The min. requirements are much lower - still pretty high for an RPG, but nowhere near what the "high-end" games would demand today.


Buy it. I hate the new combat system (Twitcher indeed), but the story looks great, as expected.
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Well, fuck. When TW1 was out everyone was whining how the combat sucks, now they improve it and everyone's crying that the old one was better :roll:
 
this is just an opinion as I do NOT know how the combat in Witcher 2 plays. But anyway

Maybe COMPARED to the combat of Witcher 1 the Witcher 2 is worse. Not that I can really understand why people thought it was "bad". Not outstanding yes. But seriously. When did we had AWESOME combat. It is all only decent. Depending on what you are looking for anyway. Neither the way Fallout did combat was THAT awesome. Just "decent". And more is not needed in my eyes anyway because most game make shit combat AND shit story (Oblivion ... Fallout 3 ...). That way we get at least good story and mediocre combat.


- Also. What I dont undstand is this: They currently are doing some kind of maintenance on their Servers for the Witcher 2 so says their website. Why is that even affecting the registration of the Witcher 1 in any way ? Oh do I want those old times back when you would only install the game. And nothing else. No Third party we-fuck-your-pc-up-windos-life crap or with the need to register at -we-suck-your-cock-EA.com or such stuff.
 
Maybe I'm alone here, but personally I like the combat in Witcher 2(more than first game combat system) 8-)
It's pretty nice and not that easy at first. And well, it looks very good. Lets be honest - none of modern games would go for something more complicated than mainstream MMO "action bars". What really matters for me now is the story and overall immersion given by the game world.
 
The combat is very different from the first Witcher ( which can be a HUGE pain in the ass as soon as you're surrounded ) but it's nowhere near as bad as, say, Fable 3, or Fallout 3. It's feels a bit like Mass Effect but more difficult.

Other than that, I'm amazed. Never found what was so special about Witcher 1 but I'm in love with Witcher 2 right now. Great writing, choices and consequences, deep characters, immersing world and atmosphere and interesting story.

That's quite refreshing after the disappointment that Crysis 2 was.

Btw, for those who have shitty performances on powerful Nvidia cards : try downgrading to 266.58 drivers AND UNINSTALL THE 3D VISION DRIVERS because there is a compatibility problem with them.

I used to get 7fps with a 580 gtx and now everything runs great in Ultra mode with Ubersampling and everything.
 
As a point of comparison, I can run Crysis 2 at High (Gamer? the lowest one anyway) settings but at x1600 resolution rather than x1920 at 20ish FPS. My graphics card is shoddy as hell (ATI HD 5450, I know, but I would need to replace both the card and the power supply to change it, 300$ is lotsa dinero), but my CPU is 3.2 GHz dual core. Do you guys think I can run TW2 at all, it seems even more beautiful than Crysis 2.

Well, system requirements labs say I can run it fine, but I am always wary of those.
 
I'm nearly done with Chapter 1 and the game is absolutely stunning, both in visuals and rpg gameplay. Story is really well written. RPG of the Year.
 
Other than that, I'm amazed. Never found what was so special about Witcher 1 but I'm in love with Witcher 2 right now. Great writing, choices and consequences, deep characters, immersing world and atmosphere and interesting story.
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That's pretty much what was good about TW1 as well, minus the shiney graphics, and I'm not really sure how you managed to miss that :?

This game's taking forever to install.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
That's pretty much what was good about TW1 as well, minus the shiney graphics, and I'm not really sure how you managed to miss that :?
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I didn't miss that but I really think all the walking around from point A to point B and back again, the long ass loading times and the universe itself ( darker than Witcher 2 ) turned me away from the game. Sure it was the RPG of the year at the time, but I couldn't get into it ( while I'm in love with this one ).
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I didn't like the bigger part of the prologue much, especially the [spoiler:1339b09157] battle and running from the dragon. The "save-the-king-from-the-dragon" event reminded me of Sonic games. [/spoiler:1339b09157] But the first chapter is really good. Just finished it and began the second one. Side quests are very nice. You have to be attentive and do research to solve some of them. As well as for the main quest.

It's a pity the game is quite short (prologue+3 chapters), but the cool thing is that you actually have to replay the last two chapters to see everything.

Combat is quite a mess. Still can't get used to it. And it's really challenging in medium. Also, the lack of proper pause makes it even more hard for me.

Drinking potions before the battle sounded like a good idea, but turned out to be quite annoying. Firstly, you have to guess when you will be attacked by a strong opponent, and this often happens unexpectedly. Secondly, the process for drinking potions is very slow. You have to meditate, then select an option for potions (which I often confuse with alchemy), then select the potions, then press okay, then you have to quit meditation. Ouch.

Don't like regular QTE's. Don't like the controls overall. The controls (one-button-for-everything) as well as the interface look as they were designed for gamepads/consoles (and I'm sure they were). Which is quite a shame for the game released primarily on PCs. The lack of the cursor or at least fixed cursor point on the screen turns interaction and looting into pain in the ass.

Also, the game sometimes switches you onto the other character, which you have to control. Well, it's done for the interactivity of what could be shown as the movie, but all the times it happened it was quite confusing.

The last thing I didn't like is the comic style of the flashbacks/memories. I really liked the "concept art" style of those in the first game. And here it's like "WTF? What is THIS THING doing in this game?"

The music varies from great (the pieces still made by Adam Skorupa) to okay and ugly pretentious pieces by the new composer.

So, overall, the game's pretty strong in writing, choices and consequences, but they've added some "new-gen improvements" to the gameplay, which tend to be annoying, and lost some of the atmosphere of the first game.
 
Well, got my hands on it early on after all, thank you sudden influx of $.

I was happy to see I can run it at x1600 res, low-medium settings at mostly acceptable FPS, and the game is still very pretty. The writing, voice acting and especially the general flow of conversations (one of my main gripe with the first game, NPCs were too damn robotic) seem very much improved from the first game, and the atmosphere is top-notch (the army camp at the beginning stands out).

That said, the combat leaves me doubtful. It's pretty chaotic, which would be fine if it wasn't so damn hard. Easy is such a walk in the park I won't bother, However, at Normal, being hit 4 times is enough to push you to 25% health, and signs seem very weak indeed (Igni does like 10% of an HP bar's worth of damage, Aard stuns for a couple seconds at most, the shielding and trap ones seem like the best so far). What's more, parrying seems to only work sometimes or take way too long to activate, even if I grabbed the talent making it possible to parry everywhere. Dodging only works sometimes, if you are already close you will take the blow. Last but not least, enemies have incredible amounts of HP, it's like the Arishok duel in Dragon Age 2 all over again. So, the only working strategy I found is to strike once, roll, strike, roll, and so forth, which gets old even faster than just clicking on people over and over again. While I can appreciate that they wanted the game to be harder, imo Normal should have been toned down a bit, it's like they want to compete with Demon's Soul or something. And I can't even begin to imagine the suffering that is Insane mode; one slip-up and there goes hours of gameplay.

A shame, I really want to dive into the game, but it's a bit off-putting to repeatedly die and only win because of cheap-ass tactics (such as running in circles while Swallow regens me, yeah real badass there Geralt).
 
I might be little masochistic there, but I like that "realism" or whatever we can call it in combat. You know, 4-5 blows and you're going down. Not some random DA2 bullshit where you had to slash a guy like 20-40times before he died >.> I found it challenging.
Furthermore, it works perfectly fine with dark/low fantasy setting The Witcher is placed in. The only "flaw" of combat for me is that console feel. I bet it's way easier to play with a pad.


Hm. I'm freakin' curious about those modding tools they were talking about. Making another story on this engine might be very funny indeed!:P I would love to make a module with my PnP character. He wasn't Witcher at all, more like thug/rogue - but fit perfectly into that world.
 
No need to slash a guy 20 times? Yeah, the LaValette prince took even more than that, I admit. Strong attacks were virtually useless, he almost always retaliated, so it was scratch damage and rolling galore.

That's my biggest gripe so far; Geralt, master Witcher, slayer of Azar Javed, the Grand Master of the Order, and countless assorted monsters, human or not, and he can very easily gets his ass kicked by some random lordling if he doesn't dance around him for 10 minutes, exactly like some DA2 fights. Or that one nest of monster below a certain city. Or those obnoxious QTE scenes when fleeing the Dragon.

It does force you to use your full arsenal, unlike the first game, so I imagine that's a plus (the new potion drinking method is tedious, however, and in some places you can't even drink em, I mean, it's a damn liquid, can't you just drink it on the fly Geralt?). Still, I feel like they could have relied less on giving enemies huge HP bars/armor and making Geralt such a squishy when he is supposed to be superhuman.
 
Ilosar said:
No need to slash a guy 20 times? Yeah, the LaValette prince took even more than that, I admit. Strong attacks were virtually useless, he almost always retaliated, so it was scratch damage and rolling galore.

That's my biggest gripe so far; Geralt, master Witcher, slayer of Azar Javed, the Grand Master of the Order, and countless assorted monsters, human or not, and he can very easily gets his ass kicked by some random lordling if he doesn't dance around him for 10 minutes, exactly like some DA2 fights. Or that one nest of monster below a certain city. Or those obnoxious QTE scenes when fleeing the Dragon.

It does force you to use your full arsenal, unlike the first game, so I imagine that's a plus (the new potion drinking method is tedious, however, and in some places you can't even drink em, I mean, it's a damn liquid, can't you just drink it on the fly Geralt?). Still, I feel like they could have relied less on giving enemies huge HP bars/armor and making Geralt such a squishy when he is supposed to be superhuman.
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Ok, tbh I had on mind something else. Look how almost every hit looks in DA2 and how it looks in TW2. In TW2 it looks more realistic, like those hits did not hit him/scratched him/were absorbed by his armor or whatever. "Boss" is a boss, so it always take a while longer. I believe it was done mostly for gameplay purposes.

In DA2 almost(If not every, can't really remember) hit was ending with big splatter of blood landing all over ye and enviroment. That looked far from realistic. Little more ridiculous, I would say :P
But yeah, looking for realism in games is a bad thing. Still, I enjoy TW2 fights.
 
DA2 was only brought up as a comparison (because TW2 combat reminds me alot of a stupendously long duel in that game where you basically run around in circles waiting for your cooldowns to finish, because the boss has a huge HP pool and hits like a truck) not to prove a point. of course TW2 combat looks more realistic (I do like that armor seems to actually stop blows, pity Geralt doesn't wear any at that point) hell even Devil May Cry looks realistic compared to Awesome!!! Age 2.

My main point is that the difficulty is all over the place; Easy is a piece of cake where you can simply click on everything in sight and win most fights, then you go on Normal and suddendly you die in 6 blows (and I won't even try Hard at this point) with foes having seemingly more than two times more HP. Such a vast gap is very perplexing to me, why is the curve so harsh? Also, game balance may trump story but Geralt should not have to run in circles like a little girl to win fights against groups (I guess bosses are fine after all), he is a Witcher dammit.

And all this angers me because, apart from the combat balance, the game is very good, much improved from the first in all regards, but the badly balanced difficulty makes it harder to get in.
 
Did they at least managed so far to repair their fucking authentication servers ? No? Awesome ...

You know what would be cool ? Every time when those servers are down a developer/publisher gets kicked in the nuts for each day they do not work. No seriously. Then I would not care about them being down.
 
No need to slash a guy 20 times? Yeah, the LaValette prince took even more than that, I admit. Strong attacks were virtually useless, he almost always retaliated, so it was scratch damage and rolling galore.
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Maybe you were doing it wrong... He takes a lot less than that - especially if you also use signs, and prepare for battle beforehand, like the game suggests you do.

The difficulty is a bit overly challenging (though nowhere near as ridiculous as Risen), but I expect that to change once you actually get to develop the character. The battle system is actually great and makes a ton of sense once you get used to it. Light slashes do little to armored enemies, and you need to bash off shield defense with signs, etc.

Oh, and I got a bunch of swords and Raven's armor at the siege. Is that for everyone, or is it because I imported my TW1 save?
 
Risen was difficult? Not for me then, I'll guess. :>


After the prologue, combat in Witcher 2 gets easier. And yeah, in most cases, you need to prepare for a combat- just running up to the foes, attacking randomly will not be helpful.
 
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