The Witcher 2 First Impressions Thread

-Seraph-

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Ascarus said:
Dulcinea said:
Second: the first one bored me so much. I really don't wanna have to read a wiki wall of text or suffer through the first again.
this .. so much this. i could never bring myself to finish the first installment, so if i have to read a wiki of witcher 1 to understand what is going on in witcher 2, i will be greatly annoyed.
They pretty much give you the abridged version of The Witcher 1's story through a bit of the prologue, some character conversations, and some books that you can pick up/buy. The story of the second game is still rather self contained while having enough ties to the original. The game has its own wiki built into it so new comers should be fine, although it always helps playing the first game of course.
 

Orcboyphil

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Having real problems with this. I played on the optimal settings (high) and the entire thing was just a jerky slideshow. Tried turning everything down and it imporved only slightly. Really disappointed with this, I'll try messing about with the configs latter to see if that improves. I'll alos look to see if I need new drivers.
 

-Seraph-

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Orcboyphil said:
Having real problems with this. I played on the optimal settings (high) and the entire thing was just a jerky slideshow. Tried turning everything down and it imporved only slightly. Really disappointed with this, I'll try messing about with the configs latter to see if that improves. I'll alos look to see if I need new drivers.
Update your drivers, but turn off/get rid of 3D vision drivers if you're using an Nvidia card. Also turn off SSAO in the advanced graphics options, that also seems to be a problem with a lot of people. Might wanna turn off Ubersampling too.

If you are suing a Radeon card, set your Catalyst Control Center Anti-aliasing to use application settings instead of the controls available It could be due to using Edge Detect mode.
 

Sunder845

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Sep 9, 2009
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Orcboyphil said:
Having real problems with this. I played on the optimal settings (high) and the entire thing was just a jerky slideshow. Tried turning everything down and it imporved only slightly. Really disappointed with this, I'll try messing about with the configs latter to see if that improves. I'll alos look to see if I need new drivers.
What kind of VC do you have? I have been running it on high with a 2 year old GTX 280 1GB and I havent seen my framerate drop once. Might be time for an upgrade, or it could be something in your configuration if it is a up to date rig.


-Seraph- said:
I love everything about it so far. Got past the prologue and a good chunk of chapter One before hitting the sack. I did have a few tech issues with the game, and about 40 minutes of trying to get my activation code to work because...it just wouldn't. Then got some graphical issues where everything looks inverted but that was fixed when I reinstalled my drivers.
Their authentication servers went down for a couple of hours on launch day due to demand, on the plus side I guess this means that they had a better launch than expected :)
 

-Seraph-

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Sunder845 said:
-Seraph- said:
I love everything about it so far. Got past the prologue and a good chunk of chapter One before hitting the sack. I did have a few tech issues with the game, and about 40 minutes of trying to get my activation code to work because...it just wouldn't. Then got some graphical issues where everything looks inverted but that was fixed when I reinstalled my drivers.
Their authentication servers went down for a couple of hours on launch day due to demand, on the plus side I guess this means that they had a better launch than expected :)
Heh well that explains why my code wouldn't authenticate despite that I typed it in right. Oh well, at least I had the awesome sound track to listen to to quell my rage.
 

godofallu

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Ok so combat system ... works or not? Yay or Nay?

The combat system and the quests are what i'm curious about. Is the combat fun, and are there tons of fetch quests?
 

Sunder845

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godofallu said:
Ok so combat system ... works or not? Yay or Nay?

The combat system and the quests are what i'm curious about. Is the combat fun, and are there tons of fetch quests?
People seem to have mixed feelings on the combat system.

I will say that the combat is very layered and almost tactical; there are potions that you can take and mix for combined effects, spells you can cast and upgrade... But, there is a lot of quirkiness in the swordplay as it is based on what your mouse is doing as opposed to what your keystrokes are doing, but after some gameplay I have gotten used to it.

As for quests, I havent gotten much more than 4 hours in yet (like most people it seems) so it is difficult to make a judgement. But from what I have seen so far it is an equal mix of your usual RPG quest fare.

Hope this helps.
 

darth.pixie

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I liked the combat...loved the mini-games. Animations are flawless and the graphics are amazing. Music is very in theme, and I love it. The story is captivating. All in all...it's become one of my favourite games.
 

Nmil-ek

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I'd love to play it but my motherboard fried and my laptop would get bent over backwards even trying to render the bloody loading screen.
 

Sunder845

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bussinrounds said:
Has anyone tried playing this with a controller as opposed to keyboard and mouse ?

Looks like it would lend itself to that more than the first game.
I am both disgusted and bemused that you would suggest such a thing as this game is one of those precious and nearly extinct things known as a AAA PC exclusive title; and we PC gamers <3 our keyboards.

Sigh... but I guess you arent wrong, the swordplay aspect of the gameplay probably would work well with a gamepad. However, there is so much little mouseclicking and tweaking that goes on in the inventory, journal, and character interfaces that it would be damned near impossible to pull off.

Check out some of the screenshots that are floating around on the internet and you will see what I mean.
 

-Seraph-

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So far the quests aren't bad, but I do find having to hold onto formulas and blueprints for stuff kind of annoying. In the first game you could read it, then throw it away and be fine, but not here. This is also compounded by the fact that unlike the first game, it doesn't tell you what you have already read. In the first, if you highlighted a formula or book, it'll tell you that you have already read it so to prevent wasted money.

Trying to find a formula for those land mine bombs but dunno where to look, probably can't complete the Nekker quest without it (and seriously, fuck nekkers).

Also, if your strapped for cash, just play the arm wrestling game over and over again lol. It's so terribly easy and you can just milk an opponent endlessly for cash.
 

PurplePlatypus

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It?s great so far.
The combats fun, although a bit of a learning curve with it, I don?t think the prologue/tutorial really introduces it well. The manual helped fill in some gaps though. I?m well into the first chapter, I?m enjoying the various quests, I like the characters, the voice acting?s much improved from the first game and it just looks gorgeous. All the bonus material I got with it?s great; the art book alone is probably worth what I paid for the entire package. I got it off GOG.

Hopefully some of the problems will be patched soon, among things it seems to be having performance issues on some graphics cards.
 

Ascarus

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bit o' thread necromancy here, but started playing last night and while it is way too early for me to form an sort of real opinion two things that really stood out to me were that you have no ability in-game (you must edit a config file) to invert the y-axis of the mouse and there is no way in-game to simply adjust the volume of the speaking voices of the characters, which i find to be quite low. i haven't done any searching online to see if this can be adjusted in a separate config file.

these two "small" things really baffle me in a game that the developers clearly spent a great deal of time on obsessing over the small details. the former especially drove me crazy because i am a pilot, so up is down and down is up ... it's that simple. not having the ability to change that in simple menu option as you have been able to do in every game ever released for decades, simply baffled me.

the voice volume issue is less of a problem as with headphones you can (usually) hear them speaking - geralt's voice to me seems especially muted. i say "usually" because there were times when there was a lot going on in the background (e.g. the dragon attack at the very beginning) where if the captions hadn't been on, i would have had no idea what geralt was saying.

like i said two small oddities in an otherwise (so far) excellent game that seem strange given the amount of time the developers spent on the game.
 

Rusty Bucket

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I really want to play it, but I'm not certain my laptop can run it. My specs seem good enough to manage it on at least low settings, but I'm not sure. Since the developers haven't released a demo the only way for me to find out if it runs or not is to drop £35 on it and keep my fingers crossed.

This is what pisses me off about PC gaming. There's such a massive variety of hardware that there's no guarantee that you'll be able to run a certain game, even if your specs are good enough on paper. It should be some kind of law to do a demo for pc games, it's such a stupid decision not to. As it stands, I can't buy it because I can't afford to spend that much money on something that might not even work.
 

Wolfram23

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Ascarus said:
bit o' thread necromancy here, but started playing last night and while it is way too early for me to form an sort of real opinion two things that really stood out to me were that you have no ability in-game (you must edit a config file) to invert the y-axis of the mouse and there is no way in-game to simply adjust the volume of the speaking voices of the characters, which i find to be quite low. i haven't done any searching online to see if this can be adjusted in a separate config file.

these two "small" things really baffle me in a game that the developers clearly spent a great deal of time on obsessing over the small details. the former especially drove me crazy because i am a pilot, so up is down and down is up ... it's that simple. not having the ability to change that in simple menu option as you have been able to do in every game ever released for decades, simply baffled me.

the voice volume issue is less of a problem as with headphones you can (usually) hear them speaking - geralt's voice to me seems especially muted. i say "usually" because there were times when there was a lot going on in the background (e.g. the dragon attack at the very beginning) where if the captions hadn't been on, i would have had no idea what geralt was saying.

like i said two small oddities in an otherwise (so far) excellent game that seem strange given the amount of time the developers spent on the game.
Yeah I noticed as well that there seems to be a lack of customizing several things. I also noticed the voice volume is way too low at times, and I'm using a really nice headset (Sennheiser PC350). I also decided to turn off subtitles because I'd rather see what's happening on screen, but with subs I almost always end up reading them instead lol. So it's a bit annoying.
 

distortedreality

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Think i'll go pick it up tomorrow.

Finally finished the first one and on the basis of that and the impressions i've seen so far, it's the second must buy of the year for me (the first being Portal 2).
 

ks1234

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I just dumped about 5 hours into the game and I am... Unimpressed. I will say one thing... It is a system hog, I have a PC that is a little bit better than the reccomended specs and I can only run it at medium with 25-30FPS
Weaksauce
 

Ascarus

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ks1234 said:
I just dumped about 5 hours into the game and I am... Unimpressed. I will say one thing... It is a system hog, I have a PC that is a little bit better than the reccomended specs and I can only run it at medium with 25-30FPS
Weaksauce
i run the game on "medium" and it runs pretty smooth. what i found amusing was the game recommended "ultra" based on my system configuration and specs and it was a horrible mess ... it looked like a freaking slide show.