The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Review

[Moffman]

...trying to read comments... can't.... stay.... awake... so.... bored of..... whining zzzzzzz

 

[sindremaster]

The complex combat system

This made me laugh, thank you

Its more complex than any recent RPG to be released.

Because there haven't been any complex RPG's released in a while. That doesn't make the The Witcher's one button for strong attack and one button for fast attack any more complex though.

 

[RoyalWelsh]

Unless the reviewer said the game was absolutely perfect in every single way imaginable, he didn't really stand a chance with you guys did he? :/ That's what it seems like to me anyway reading some of these comments.

Given the praise he gave DA2 which come on why not up to biowares normal standards, and given that the witcher has provided challenging experience, with an in depth story line and interesting characters. He doesn't have to say the game is perfect, but he was going to say it was not perfect he should justify it with more than a review that amounts to:
This game is lame because its hard and I cant read the manual or the quest description or the in game monster descriptions. Therefore the game is broken as I actually died.

It just reflects badly on him.

He never said the game was lame, he actually said, in the first line of his review, that he loves the game. Maybe he just likes DA2 more instead of The Witcher 2, some people do y'know.

 

[Azaraxzealot]

que all the PC, hardcore elitists Q.Q'ing over the review that doesn't praise it up the ass and throw roses at it like a famous bullfighter

(reads first 10 comments)
ninja'd.

obviously we live in an age where people need to be told how to play the game, and if the controls are designed fucking awkwardly compared to regular RPG games then that's a fundamental design flaw.

No sense in designing a game completely different for nothing but the sake of difficulty. Good review.

 

[abija]

No matter how hardcore a game pretends to be, there is a world of difference between being difficult and making a game difficult by having a screwed up user interface. Making a crappy interface has nothing to do with making a challenging game

The combat interface is really good, shows all needed information and is not intrusive.
The crafting, trading and inventory could be certainly improved, but are far from crappy and certainly it doesn't affect the difficulty of the game. Also, it features the best journal in a RPG by far.
Other issues the reviewer has with it (like potions not being used in combat) are design decisions (in the potion case even requested on their community forums).

So basically you made a totally wrong assumption that game difficulty is screwed up by the interface. And that's my main problem with these kind of reviews. He focuses so much on the negative things and makes such a big case about difficulty and his shocking experience that a lot of his readers will just stay away from the game afraid of some atrocious interface and insane difficulty.
Rating might be irrelevant and will certainly be affected by his experiences, that's perfectly fine. Barely scratching the surface of the game in the review outside of the most obvious flaws is a big issue and has nothing to do with the review being objective or not.

obviously we live in an age where people need to be told how to play the game, and if the controls are designed fucking awkwardly compared to regular RPG games then that's a fundamental design flaw.

No sense in designing a game completely different for nothing but the sake of difficulty. Good review.

Controls are fine, nothing awkward about them. Hell, playing DA2 like an action game felt a lot more awkward.
The problem is the character doesn't take care of everything when you press a button to turn it into something awesome.

Oh, and calling this game hardcore is a pretty big joke. Even more of a joke adding PC into the denigrating phrase.

 

[Bostur]

I personally found TW2 to be a beautiful experience, but I agree with Greg's criticism and it annoyed me as well.

One of the problems with the difficulty isn't so much that it's hard, I personally found that refreshing, but that the difficulty curve is upside down. As a new player with little experience and few in-game tools, the prologue is brutal. The first chapter felt well balanced. At this point I had picked up the basics of how to play and had a few talents to help, but still got punished if I rushed into battle without thought or planning. Unfortunately later in the game most fights get very easy and that is a shame.

The controls are sluggish seemingly because animations block all input except for parrying. In a game that focuses on accurate combat maneuvers the controls really need to be more precise. In spite of the sluggishness I found combat playable and enjoyable, but it could have been much better with some some fine-tuning.

It's a beautiful, funny and most important different game and I love it for that reason. This is truly a labor of love and it shows in many ways. Unfortunately it's also deeply flawed in some areas. Lately many games seems to skip on the all important minor details and thats a shame.

 

[Ascarus]

i don't see why people seem so bent out of shape over this review. he is absolutely correct in saying that while the game shines in a great many ways, there are some truly glaring and unforgivable problems.

and while i agree that a 7 out of 10 is a bit low (i reviewed the game at a 9 out of 10), his problems with the game are spot on.

 

[Mangue Surfer]

"One particular moment stuck out: when Geralt openly mocks the plot of The Lord of the Rings as a frivolous fairy tale, it feels like such parody is beneath the integrity the game achieves the rest of the time."

But LOTR is a frivolous Fairy Tail.It doesn't even hold a candle for The Witcher or the Game of Thrones series.LOTR is just another overblown thing that I'll never understand.

Is hard to compare. LOTR was written in an age that husband and wife make sex with their pajamas in a totally dark room. Things were innocent because they had to be. Thinking, The Mists of Avalon is a much more visceral reading than the A Song of Ice and Fire(still very good). BUT, because of the time in it was written and because was wrote by a woman, its never got the deserved credit.

Just wanna say that you can't decontextualize.

It's not that.In LOTR there are no shades of grey.There are no changes of heart apart some things that were caused by corruption of evil.There's a stark contrast between the warring factions.It's a lot more akin to a fairy tail.There's good guys with a clear goal and the book just describes reaching it,while bad guys try to foil everything.While it may have sparked the whole genre when compared to the Witcher it really is a fairy tail.

...and everybody with dark skin is automatically evil, I know, I know. It's exactly what I'm saying. To the standards of the time LOTR do a pretty good job. Obvious, things evolve but I just think it's not fair to make comparisons with books that couldn't be written at the time.

 

[rsvp42]

snip

I see so in front of the court and jury are you going to say W2 is worse then DA2?

What? No, I think I've said multiple times that I like TW2. It looks a lot nicer than DA2 and feels better crafted overall. I do like the companions in DA2 better though, so far. But I like them both. What part of my post said that TW2 was worse and why am I in a court metaphor?

So can you understand peoples problems with DA2 getting 5/5 and W2 getting 3.5?

Of course I understand. It's a bunch of fans putting way too much stock into one guy's arbitrary review score and then giving him crap for it, They can make up whatever they want about "journalistic integrity" or whatever makes them feel better about complaining, but that's what it boils down to: a guy who reviews games didn't conform to their tastes and preferences and now he's getting attacked for it.

It's not that I think DA2 was better (I don't) or that TW2 deserves a 3.5 (it deserves at least a 4), I just think that people shouldn't care what one reviewer thinks if they don't agree with it and it upsets them.

 

[Hristo Tzonkov]

"One particular moment stuck out: when Geralt openly mocks the plot of The Lord of the Rings as a frivolous fairy tale, it feels like such parody is beneath the integrity the game achieves the rest of the time."

But LOTR is a frivolous Fairy Tail.It doesn't even hold a candle for The Witcher or the Game of Thrones series.LOTR is just another overblown thing that I'll never understand.

Is hard to compare. LOTR was written in an age that husband and wife make sex with their pajamas in a totally dark room. Things were innocent because they had to be. Thinking, The Mists of Avalon is a much more visceral reading than the A Song of Ice and Fire(still very good). BUT, because of the time in it was written and because was wrote by a woman, its never got the deserved credit.

Just wanna say that you can't decontextualize.

It's not that.In LOTR there are no shades of grey.There are no changes of heart apart some things that were caused by corruption of evil.There's a stark contrast between the warring factions.It's a lot more akin to a fairy tail.There's good guys with a clear goal and the book just describes reaching it,while bad guys try to foil everything.While it may have sparked the whole genre when compared to the Witcher it really is a fairy tail.

...and everybody with dark skin is automatically evil, I know, I know. It's exactly what I'm saying. To the standards of the time LOTR do a pretty good job. Obvious, things evolve but I just think it's not fair to make comparisons with books that couldn't be written at the time.

But it's okay to make fun of right?I mean I take Geralt's joke as a sign the genre's grown.

 

[cynicalsaint1]

The review is pretty spot on. Its a great damn game, but it suffers from many flaws.

The fact that they put the difficulty curve on backwards for some reason. The complete lack of any sort of worthwhile tutorial. The fact combat isn't as responsive as it should be. The fact that maxing out your Quen rune pretty much breaks the game's balance (note: the abilities are pretty much at the beginning of the Rune ability tree). The fact that the UI is worse than even ME1's - I mean seriously no sort? No junk tab? Don't get me started on the alchemy - if you want to switch out ingredients so you don't end up using the troll's tongue (which you only get one of, and is needed for a quest, yet can still be used up in alchemy for some stupid reason) as soon as you make one potion it switches back to whatever ingredient it was originally defaulting to instead of keeping whatever you wanted to use in the slot you keep having to swap it out - so you have to keep swapping them, very tedious if you're trying to make a batch of 10 Swallows.

And people - the game isn't hard its just hard to figure out how to play it. Once you know what you're doing the actual execution part really isn't that difficult - really the main thing is to not let yourself get surrounded, and keep Quen up if you're fighting multiple enemies.

Anyone deluding themselves into thinking that the game doesn't have serious design flaws need a healthy dose of Extra Credits [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2454-Easy-Games]

 

[RedDeadFred]

I read the whole review, than said to myself without checking the mark: "This is a 7 from a lotr/dragon age fanboy". And than I smiled.

Yes the ui is kinda bad, but the rest of the stuff like "I died there, I died here" is just funny. I can understand Dragon Age 2 dragging ou by the hand with it's pathetic difficulty level, but come on! How lazy can You get?

And You didn't mention so many things in the review, which are good sides of The Witcher 2. Dude, being objective is a must for a reviever, the game is a 9 not a 7.

Lol, I find it hilarious how you say that a reviewer must be objective before offering your 'subjective' belief that the game should be objectively rated a 9.

It's an opinion, reviews are always going to be subjective, and everyone is different.

This exactly. You don't like this person's opinion? Tough. You don't have to agree with it.

 

[Waaghpowa]

To make matters worse, after I finally made it past that section of the prologue - on normal difficulty, damn you, I'm nothing if not stubborn - the game brought me back to the first four dialogue choices. Clicking a different one sent me to the first part of the prologue, which calmly introduced that Geralt has amnesia and has thrown in his lot with the King of Temeria in a little civil war. It's not necessary to have played the first game because this section deftly explains the opening plot without the constant threat of death. Why on Earth would CD Projekt allow me to play the prologue out of order?

Guess they wanted to trap all these people:

I usually start reading a book from the beginning

It's a good thing the landscape looks so awesome, because you will be wandering around those woods for a long time. Finding quest-specific locations is usually easy, but simple navigation is tough because there is no indication of which direction is north. The map looks pretty, but uses the Cyrillic alphabet so that kind of sucks for us Anglos. Plus, finding some of the objectives of the side-quests is nearly impossible because they blend in with the background. The main quests also have you going back and forth to the same location often which made me wonder why they spent so much time building the rest of the place.

From your DA2 review:

Like many people, I moved to a new place after college. I didn't know a soul in New York City or how to get around, and just buying groceries was an impossible task. By the time I left ten years later, I knew that town like nobody's business. I wasn't anyone special, but if you dropped me anywhere in the five boroughs, I could tell you a memory, which corner to avoid, and where to get a slice - the kind of familiarity you only get after exploring a location until it feels like home. That's what Kirkwall will feel like after playing Dragon Age II.

So, basically wandering around through "beautiful, lush woods" = bad; but wandering through a rather ugly realized excuse of a city till it "feels like home" = good?

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By this time, the combat feels like a snap as long as you've drunk the right potions and stopped spamming the Igni sign (fireball.) Effective fighting involves creative use of the Control menu, which slows time and allows you to switch signs and secondary weapons like bombs and throwing daggers. Parrying attacks and countering can feel a lot like dueling and that's when the combat of The Witcher really sings. But there is sometimes a terrible lag between pressing a button and witnessing Geralt respond, which encourages a weird constant tapping of the keys to make sure the command goes through. For combat whose fun depends on flow, this is a monstrous error.

There's nothing "clunky" about the combat and it reacts perfectly fine, here for instance is a video of someone playing one part of the Prologue on the "Hard" difficulty without getting hit even once by effectively using all possibilities and understanding the mechanics:
The most likely reason why some button might not have responded might be that you didn't get a specific game mechanic... like Parrying blows using Vigor or similar.
I guess you're just a friend of the "Button --> Awesome" mechanic:

The party-based combat is frenetic, with no auto-attack making you feel in the thick of it with constant button-pressing. I enjoyed taking a more active role and not being forced to pause after every spell or special move goes off to give more orders - although you can micro-manage the tactics if you're OCD about it.

Bottom Line: A pinnacle of role-playing games with well-designed mechanics and excellent story-telling, Dragon Age II is what videogames are meant to be.

Giving Dragon Age 2 5 stars and Witcher 2 3 1/2 when the world of DA2 is a bland cesspit thrown together in one and a half years of development time for the entire game, devoid of any life, change over a time span of 10 years or character and the story especially in Act1 amounts to "Collect as much money as you can doing MMO-quests" (which as every single quest in the entire game end with your group killing other groups of enemies spawning 5 meters in the air) is a travesty and an insult to the RPG genre in general.

The Witcher 2 might have its flaws and I don't want to deny that but it just oozes developer love throughout every single crevice it has, love towards the game, love towards the players, love towards the lore and reviews like this really do the inherent qualities of the game (I regard as highly as what Batman: Arkham Asylum did) a disservice. It literally is the best RPG I have played in the last 5 or so years and outshines the likes of DA:O, not to speak of Dragon Age 2 again...

Spoiler: Bravo sir, bravo

 

[dantoddd]

"One particular moment stuck out: when Geralt openly mocks the plot of The Lord of the Rings as a frivolous fairy tale, it feels like such parody is beneath the integrity the game achieves the rest of the time."

But LOTR is a frivolous Fairy Tail.It doesn't even hold a candle for The Witcher or the Game of Thrones series.LOTR is just another overblown thing that I'll never understand.

Is hard to compare. LOTR was written in an age that husband and wife make sex with their pajamas in a totally dark room. Things were innocent because they had to be. Thinking, The Mists of Avalon is a much more visceral reading than the A Song of Ice and Fire(still very good). BUT, because of the time in it was written and because was wrote by a woman, its never got the deserved credit.

Just wanna say that you can't decontextualize.

It's not that.In LOTR there are no shades of grey.There are no changes of heart apart some things that were caused by corruption of evil.There's a stark contrast between the warring factions.It's a lot more akin to a fairy tail.There's good guys with a clear goal and the book just describes reaching it,while bad guys try to foil everything.While it may have sparked the whole genre when compared to the Witcher it really is a fairy tail.

lord of the rings is tad more subtle than what you describe here. There are a lot of dark & abstract themes, it's just that it doesn't hit you in the face like a 2 by 4. Lord of the rings may not really deal with good guy bad guy ambiguities but it deals with much more abstract choices, like free will and fate, or death & immortality.

 

[RedDeadFred]

"One particular moment stuck out: when Geralt openly mocks the plot of The Lord of the Rings as a frivolous fairy tale, it feels like such parody is beneath the integrity the game achieves the rest of the time."

But LOTR is a frivolous Fairy Tail.It doesn't even hold a candle for The Witcher or the Game of Thrones series.LOTR is just another overblown thing that I'll never understand.

Is hard to compare. LOTR was written in an age that husband and wife make sex with their pajamas in a totally dark room. Things were innocent because they had to be. Thinking, The Mists of Avalon is a much more visceral reading than the A Song of Ice and Fire(still very good). BUT, because of the time in it was written and because was wrote by a woman, its never got the deserved credit.

Just wanna say that you can't decontextualize.

It's not that.In LOTR there are no shades of grey.There are no changes of heart apart some things that were caused by corruption of evil.There's a stark contrast between the warring factions.It's a lot more akin to a fairy tail.There's good guys with a clear goal and the book just describes reaching it,while bad guys try to foil everything.While it may have sparked the whole genre when compared to the Witcher it really is a fairy tail.

So Faramir at first wanting to take the ring to his father but then later in the book decides to let Frodo go free isn't change of heart?
How about how for a large portion of the series, Aragorn did not want to become the King of Gondor but ultimately decides that he must wield the blade that was broken?
And as for no one becoming evil without corruption, how else do you turn evil? No one wakes up one morning after being a good character for the whole series and just decides: "I think today, I'm going to slaughter a few children." Something needs to corrupt them, whether it's an idea (Boromir believes that the only way to save his people is to get the ring) or the ring itself (Smeagol) or even fear/desire for power (Saruman fears that he will be destroyed if he does not side with Sauron and he also sees how he might be able to rule with Sauron).
I just really don't understand how any of these are not changes of heart...

 

[Thoric485]

Pfft, that review was just a long list of petty complaints. Really doesn't do the game justice.

Then again i only come to this site for Yahtzee.

So yeah, your complaints are just pathetic whining until you can explain why the review is bad beyond, "DA2 sucks and Greg is bad at games!"

See, that's funny, because pathetic whining is exactly what i can sum up this review as.

It's like going to Ozzfest and then complaining that it was too hot, that there was no place to sit, no vegetarian food joint, the water was overpriced and that someone spilled his beer onto you.

 

[CatmanStu]

I could be wrong, but isn't this CDPR's second game? It seems a little harsh to judge a game created by a fledgling company by the same standards as an established one. Everyone learns from making mistakes - The Witcher 1 was a total mess when it first came out but they fixed it (mostly) after listening to criticism - and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more common niggles in W2 get sorted in a patch. (My personal niggle is having to go back to the game screen every time when leaving a sub-menu rather than going back to the root menu.)
Any objective gamer would never say that this game is devoid of flaws, but none of them are game breakers; the inventory can be frustrating, but does it's job; the combat isn't stiff, just fussy (not a game for button mashers); and the crafting is laborious, but functional; the world map can sometimes feel like orienteering (could definately use a manual waypoint system)
If this was a Bioware or Valve product I think 3.5 would be a fair score as they should know better than to make a game this "impenetrable", but considering the very short track record CDPR has, I think The Witcher 2 is a fucking masterpiece.
If their next game has the same level of improvement they're going to have to mark out of six next time.