Penny Arcade on The Witcher 2

[Wolfram23]

Yeah I thought I was tough, and started the game on Hard. Daaaaamn.

First night I didn't finish the whole tutorial (probably 2-3hrs)

Second night I barely escaped the prison.

Finally at the town, decided it's time to go down to Normal. Still fairly tough but I think this is the right setting for me. It's still hard though, I've died many many times since going to Normal.

Right now I'm just happy AMD finally released their driver hotfix (11.5b) which allowed my framerate to go from 40-50 on high to over 90 on Ultra (minus ubersampling). Yay! Although the bad news is the drivers introduced a graphical bug with regards to lighting.

EDIT: Oh and for the whole console gamer thing... I think you need to give them credit. Demon's Souls is a fantastic and difficult console game. I loved it, and so do many others. It's sales weren't exceptional, but they were good.

 

[abija]

I have a strong dislike for PA, but I agree, keep in mind many people going "It was super easy" played the first game, which I felt was so flawed as to be intolerable and left it dead in the water. I came into this and it was brutal, I died many, many times, and I am very much so a PC gaming enthusiast, I learned how to actually do most things in Flotsam when I died repeatedly to the nekkers by the waterfall.

I should have learned all of those things intuitively in the opening minutes of the game, that's where you teach them in a fluid manner, saying a game doesn't need a tutorial is like saying clay doesn't need a mold.

Fighting is different in first, it was more of an impediment cause I was assuming some things that were wrong (and the EE edition of W1 was a solid game btw).
Experimenting with the combat and how to fight different types of enemies is part of the game, you shouldn't "have learned all of those things intuitively in the opening minutes". That's just silly entitlement developed from too much hand holding.
Oh, and PC vs consoles has nothing to do with this issue, absolutely nothing. There are hard games on consoles, there's lots of "whatever we let you do in this game is right and will make you finish it" design on PC too.

 

[Dragonborne88]

My biggest mistake was choosing the Dragon section before all the others as my first playthrough. That was the only tough part of the game for me, trying to learn the controls while being set on fire and fighting 5 guys at once. Was a quick crash course in game mechanics, and once I beat it, I never died quite as much, except on bosses as I was learning the stratagems.