"The fundamental problem is that the game is terrible at teaching you how to enjoy it. I have no qualms with offering players a challenge, but too often I failed in the opening of The Witcher 2 because I simply didn't have the mechanics properly demonstrated to me, not because it was actually challenging. My experience with the prologue carried through the rest of the game."
I think that's a little unfair - it is very challenging given the skill set you have at the time anyway, and you can't really judge it all that well if you come back to it after playing 30 hours worth. Its a weird curve, but there's only so much you can do with training placards anyway - I'd much rather have the shit smacked out of me and just learn by doing instead of these bloody stop-and-start openings to every damn game, or the 15-hour-long tutorials (GTA IV).
But really, all you need to know for combat is to use absolutely everything to survive. I found I had the signs and general idea of the combat down within the first fight (that I died in several times over) - and it soon felt very rewarding. Its not like the design is particularly alien - you can't hit shielded/larger enemies head on, you'll need to dodge or block, etc.
There was only one point in the game, at the end of Chapter 1, where I thought there was a major flaw in the difficult curve - one that went through the bloody roof and didn't let you prepare for it either.
Also, the prologue thing is set in order of the day. I'm pretty sure that's fairly obviously sign-posted (I certainly remember just going through in order).
"After a quick, but still painful, QTE fist fight, you are let loose to explore the corrupt human settlement."
Painful? I don't really like them in there either but its about 3-button presses.
"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."
Yes there is, there's an orange arrow on the circumference of the minimap.
"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."
Sidequests?
"Drinking potions gives you an edge in combat, at least I assume so because I never seemed to have drunk the right potions at the right time. You can't drink potions while you are engaged in a fight, which seems like a silly holdover from the meditation mechanic of the first game. There is a lot of granularity in the potion system, with most giving you both positive and negative effects. I thought that once I bought enough recipes, I'd be able to dovetail the effects of the three potions you can drink at a time for a net gain, but those recipes never materialized. I defaulted to only using the few potions that I couldn't do without, namely Cat, Swallow and Tawny Owl which let me see in the dark and regenerate health and vigor, respectively. Another opportunity missed"
What do you mean? The potions either help generally in battles or make up for various missing skills, or armour/weapon upgrades.
"The list interface screams for some way to sort, and there's absolutely no good reason for every recipe to clog up your inventory."
If you look at the potion list then it'll show you how many materials you need for a particular recipe.
"I fail to see why I can't easily see which recipes the merchant has that I don't already own,"
Your inventory lists are put side-by-side like every other game?
"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.
Yeah, that was... bizarre. Its essentially the only thing I felt probably got lost in translation it was so unsubtle.
Not being bitchy, I just haven't seen these complaints all that much - they certainly never occured to me (especially the inventory stuff). Even the combat difficulty seems to be accepted as something that's just better to learn-by-doing instead of being told on placards (I really cannot see that being helpful with such an in-depth system) or a bloody tutorial of today's standards.
You don't really cover the game's choices and consequences all that much either (like the two different second acts), or just how morally ambiguous everything is.
9NineBreaker9 said:
A friend is lending me the game, so I'm looking forward to trying it out. I enjoyed the setting and theme of the first, but disliked the gameplay... doesn't seem like much has changed, but it'll be a nice diversion.
Also, doesn't awarding half a star kind of ruin the point of a 5-star system?
Round it up to 4. Trust me.
Veloxe said:
Unfortunately it looks like that hasn't changed much (I'm all for complexity, just not complexity for complexities sake, which is what it seems to go far).
Its really not complex - most recently collected stuff is put at the top, and there's about 10 different categories to break everything up. If you need to check ingredients for a potion, you can look at what you're missing (and how much more of ingredient X you need) by clicking on the recipe, where a big diagram will show you.
