Yeah, it's better.tippy2k2 said:1. Is the combat better? I thought the combat and whatnot was just awful in the W2 and it confused me how people loved it. Geralt would take a year to get his sword out, you had to use potions and whatnot to fight certain creatures but couldn't use them mid-battle and the only way to know what was coming was to get into battle, and much of the fighting was less "badass action sword fight" and more "I walk over, I stab you, then I roll away. Repeat until dead".
I didn't hate TW2's combat, I was merely ambivalent. But I still regard this as a distinct improvement.
You can slurp down potions mid-fight now. Although there's a limit to how many you can drink at once. Each one has a 'toxicity' value. Raise your toxicity too high and you poison yourself. I actually rather like this mechanic. Plus you can combat-scoff food to regenerate health, which has no toxicity effect.
The dodge controls are much more responsive. None of that nonsense in Witcher 2 where you press the dodge button, then wait for Geralt to fill out a permission form in triplicate and wait 3-5 business days for a response before he considers avoiding that incoming halberd. Now you press dodge, dude fucking dodges.
The engage-strike-strike-roll-away pattern is still very relevant though. Especially when fighting multiple enemies. However this time there's both a dodge button and a roll button. Use the dodge button to sidestep a single attack when you want to retaliate immediately, use the roll when you want to create space to do something else, like use a spell.
Yes and no.2. Will I understand the story without having to read five Bible's worth of material? That's one thing that bugged me with critiquing the W2's story; people said how much it made sense if you read all the stuff and studied up on what was going on. I'm here to play a video game; I'm not interested in reading the history of the land to find out why I should care about this king and that king...some people eat that stuff up; I'm not one of them.
3. Speaking of story, will I know what's going on without the other two games? I never played the first one (console gamer FTW) and as I have implied, I hated the second one and did not get all that far before I stopped playing.
The main story thread is tied to a character who is a major part of the books but has previously had nothing to do with the games. Every so often the characters will refer to past events or start chatting it up about how King So-and-So did such-and-such.
However, the game does a decent job of establishing what you need to know and you can figure out most of the rest from context. I haven't read the books, nor did I get far on the first game, and I'm doing fine. (The events of the second game have thus far proven almost entirely irrelevant.)
Hell, I can sum up everything you really need to know in a couple of sentances: Geralt is hired to look for his surrogate daughter, who is Super Special and being hunted by damn near everyone who knows she exists. Meanwhile the Nilfguardians (aka 'The Black Ones', aka 'The Kinda Evil Empire') are waging war on the Northern Kingdoms (aka 'The Reds', think pre-unification Germanic states) and shit is getting messy.