Zero Punctuation: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

[Hoplon]

Yeah, it not so much hand holding as needing some hint of where to go with some of the stuff would be nice (took me forever to work out the mutations go on your skills, since the game only tells you where you can't use things) even just a link to the PDF manual on the launcher would be nice.

These criticisms are not unfounded or unfair, it's not so much a learning curve as an 800 ft escarpment that the game waves at you from the top of.

 

[Hristo Tzonkov]

Yahtzee lost his shine for me sadly

 

[sanquin]

Potion before, not during combat makes you think before charging into a fight. Not being able to just hack and slash makes you actually use some tactics. Things not being explained isn't true, as there are tutorial popups and you can read them in your journal too.

Imo, the inventory is too complicated yes. And the signs should be more clear on what they do. Moving around still feels a bit sluggish like in the witcher 1, but it is improved a little. Being thrown into a mass fight was a bit overwhelming at the start. But combat actually got easier in a way. You don't need to time your clicks any more and can just bash RMB or LMB.

Basically it comes down to this: Gamers, especially console gamers are used to games being easy these days, with only a fake feel of difficulty. When a game is actually hard, and you actually need to read the manual a little bit to know some basics, they wine that it's too hard and tedious.

 

[Wolcik]

Recently I've learnt that there are two theories about gaming - one that focus on gameplay while treating story as an extra to help player to get around the game, and the second when it's just to happen that you have to press buttons to get your so important story.
Witcher focus on story in similar way to Final Fantasy does... guess why Yathzee didn't like it then
I can't be bother neighter to play a game just to find out the ending or any plot - there are guys that will spoil it for you in 3 or 5 minutes on YouTube saving you the nightmarish experiance of playing a horrible game XD

To be really honest it's not even problem with focusing on a story - it's just that it's soo much based on a book that it doesn't translate into a game. Gerald drinks before battle because he does so in the book, but it's a irrelevant this to the story there, so next time I'd suggest to leave the whole alchemy mechanics (we didn't need to know or remember what he drinks for what monster) and maybe focus more gameplay on sex which was so much more interesting in the book XD
Less cut-scenes and more gameplay for stories XD

 

[Imp_Emissary]

Actually, I can't remember who (Yahtzee himself or someone else), but I think it's suppose to be taken as a critique, and not a review.

That's the thing.

Yahtzee himself has said that these are not reviews, but critiques.

The only problem is that every time he says that, he is trying to make a point about something specific...

If you look at the OP it says:

''This week Yahtzee reviews...''

I think he needs to decide for himself what he want's to do and then stick to it instead of shifting between the 2 definitions whenever it pleases him.
It does actually make a significant difference.

True. It is different, and he sometimes dose shift. However, knowing Yahtzee, he probably dose it on purpose just to confuse people, and piss some people off. I don't think he'll stop doing it until people stop talking about the whole thing.

But a least it all leads fun conversations.

P.S. Also, I miss when the OP use to say a funny comment instead. Like the Extra Punctuation still do.

 

[synobal]

Recently I've learnt that there are two theories about gaming - one that focus on gameplay while treating story as an extra to help player to get around the game, and the second when it's just to happen that you have to press buttons to get your so important story.
Witcher focus on story in similar way to Final Fantasy does... guess why Yathzee didn't like it then
I can't be bother neighter to play a game just to find out the ending or any plot - there are guys that will spoil it for you in 3 or 5 minutes on YouTube saving you the nightmarish experiance of playing a horrible game XD

To be really honest it's not even problem with focusing on a story - it's just that it's soo much based on a book that it doesn't translate into a game. Gerald drinks before battle because he does so in the book, but it's a irrelevant this to the story there, so next time I'd suggest to leave the whole alchemy mechanics (we didn't need to know or remember what he drinks for what monster) and maybe focus more gameplay on sex which was so much more interesting in the book XD
Less cut-scenes and more gameplay for stories XD

The alchemy system is one of the main things I rather like about the game. I liked it a lot in the first one, and more in the second though it does need some stream lining. Like the ability to make more than 1 with out having ingredients reset to the default ones each time. After all I'm trying to use up all my extra Nekker parts.

 

[Kahunaburger]

No..no it doesn't. I have yet to see a single game that tells you "Press buttan x to skip cutscene". There is a limited amount of buttons you'd expect to skip a cutscene, namely space, esc, enter and the mouse buttons. Thats about 5 buttons to go through. Apparantly thats too much for the console crowd to handle though.

Witcher 2 does, actually - if you hit a button other than right click to skip a cutscene, it pops up a little "right click: skip cutscene" sign in the right-hand part of your screen. This may have been added in in one of the patches, though, which would explain why Yahtzee didn't see it.

This is not a review, if the reviewer can't even bother to play the game why did he even put this up?
And at the end it all just came down to mocking the pc gaming.

No, it's not a review - Yahtzee's more of a critic. And his entire point was that the game's (often pointless) dense-ness makes it very hard to approach.

Also, NO, I don't think the game is bad. However, what Yahtzee says about it is mostly true, and he isn't the only (or even first) person to talk about it. The game could be better, but that doesn't make it a bad game.

Calm down everyone. Its all for fun.

^This. I'm playing the game now and so far I think it's probably one of the best I've played, period. But, I enjoyed this review and think a lot of the criticism we're seeing here is absolutely correct - the interface is needlessly complex, the difficulty curve is incredibly harsh (he should just count his lucky stars he didn't get to Letho), and the combat system, while one of the best in terms of flexibility and tactics, is also incredibly clunky, and so on. And anyone who rages at Yathzee for pointing out the flaws in what they like needs to work on their pattern recognition.

The one criticism I don't get is the potion thing. You're not going to be able to drink a potion in the middle of a fight, because that would leave you wide open. The planning ahead is not that ridiculous, given that basically every big fight with only a few exceptions at the very least lets you know you're fighting something, and more often than not lets you take your sweet time researching exactly what that something is. Really, how hard is it to say "gee, I'm fighting a giant bug, which my research tells me is poisonous. Maybe I should take a potion for health regen, a potion to protect me from poison, and a coat my blade in the oil insects are weak to." Even if you have no idea what you're fighting, you can really never go wrong with health regen

 

[Saladfax]

Yeah... so criticisms can be summed up as, what, a bad tutorial? The game really does provide the necessary abilities to survive, even without some of the easy-mode leveling upgrades. It doesn't explicitly state how to do every little thing (or anything, I suppose), but five minutes of experimentation reveals how to not die at this game.

Hell, I'll sum it up in two words: Quen Sign. If you have trouble in combat, use that. When they knock it off of you, recast it. Bam.

I get it that we like to have detailed tutorials to ease us into the world and how to survive, but does that have to make people incapable of figuring anything out on their own? The combat is *not* hard. It sucks that they don't tell you how to succeed, but it's also not very hard to figure out.

 

[nbamaniac]

Lol! Yahtzee seems very pissed at this.

Oh and FYI, the kayran cutscene can be skipped aka right mouse button.

EDIT: People, it's Yahtzee. The blatant pessimism really shouldn't get into you by now.

Oh and yes.. PSN hackers = African warlords.. How have I not seen this?!

 

[Imp_Emissary]

I'm surprised nobody has commented: Witcher 2 is coming to Xbox 360 [http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2011/1690.html] at least, so place the PC snobbery aside.

My major complaint with the game was the total lack of direction-- I dunno, maybe the manual covers a lot of that, but since I got the Steam edition, the manual wasn't readily available. That, plus the difficulty curve seems absurdly uneven, particularly for a game where you can't set the difficult (I don't think).

Funny ZP tho. Best one in a while, IMHO. Particularly loved the finishing line.

Manual wasn't readily available? Every page in the steam store has a link to see the game manual and if you right click a game in your library there is typically an option to view the manual. That said I do feel your pain of having bought it on steam, I don't imagine you signed up for 9 gig patches when you bought it. I hope that's fixed soon.

Oh and you can set the difficulty at any time and it even asks you at the beginning explaining the differences between each of the settings.

Yeah you CAN read the manual, but why in this day in age should you have to. There are lots of games that do a fine (sometimes amazing) job at teaching you how to play the game through game play itself. Also I think he was saying it was hard because the game was poorly teaching him how to play.

That all said, most people say once you die a WHOLE lot and start to get it, then the game gets really fun, and I'm ok with that.

 

[Thoric485]

Yahtzee's complaints are legit - bad tutorial, difficulty curve and interface. Yet those things have been mentioned in every other review and they don't stop the game from being one the best RPGs in years.

Also, i'm pretty sure his experience with the game is blown out of proportion for comedic value. Somebody who's been playing on various platforms, including PC, for 20+ years wouldn't have THAT much of a difficult time finding his way around an RPG interface, or dealing with combat.

And hell, i'm not being payed to play video games all day and i have a PC that runs this on Ultra.

Just goes to show that Zero Punctuation is a comedy skit and not a review.

 

[Ishiro32]

So... It was very funny, but... Really once again you couldn't spend more than few hours playing game because you didn't want to read manual? You didn't even mention big feature of the game which is decisions... I'm a bit dissapointed. It was unprofesional...

Anyhow, it made me laugh so i will give a B- .

Oh and making fun of gamers just because, at the end was... stupid.

 

[Sandvichman]

I find it quite sad that Yahtzee gives up so easily. So he doesn't like the game because it doesn't hold his hand? Oh lawd. I admit that first boss fight was challenging, but it is far from impossible. Lots of gamers have just become extremely inept at any challenges after the market has been flooded with so many games that even a monkey can play.

 

[Triforceformer]

This is precisely why I'm a console gamer, console games don't take all day and I don't have to reduce the graphics to 1st grader quality to actually play. Good review Yahtzee you faustian king amongst us mere mortal squishies. Just remember to have fun with Brink He he he.

Nope console games comes pre-factored at lowest grade quality.

It's more that consoles ship out with relatively good hardware...from the year they ship.
As time goes on they eventually become "Lowest Grade Quality" when compared to what PCs are capable of now. And since pretty much every game is made on or using PCs...yeah. Console games start to show their age after a couple of years, when PCs keep doing their thang. Then the new consoles come out and it all starts again.

But I'm not sure how we're going to keep this cycle up with the next generation of consoles or maybe the one after. I mean have you seen how fucking powerful some of these PC components are? And how much they can cost, individually? I just cannot imagine a next-gen console being made with high-quality modern parts and still being sold at a price that makes a profit without being too expensive.

 

[sune-ku]

Enjoyed the episode but was a little sad - the Witcher 2's prologue was undoubtedly too hard and didn't give enough tuition, but once you got past that it was a great game with some niggles. I'm a bit disappointed Yahtzee got entirely distracted by the initial flaws and didn't go any further into the experience. The decision making and the locations were done better than any recent RPG I can think of and I found myself getting completely immersed in it.

 

[bombadilillo]

Oh well, to a lot of people figuring out how to play a game is part of the fun.
That is why I stopped playing Dwarf Fortress once I got to know all the key bindings.

I guess it is just a different approach to what makes a game challenging.

This is the same demographic that likes getting games thatt dont work and trying to rig the .ini files to get the game working in the first place. Its almost a meta game. Be that guy to get props on a forum for making the game actually work....

Doesnt sound fun for me , but I appreciate the poeple who do it!

 

[Danallighieri]

Funny review, also liked the mention of game of thrones ;D

 

[EchetusXe]

The Dicksucking factory. Marvellous.

 

[Wolcik]

One more thing about roleplaying as a Geralt:
You might think that having potions and sword skill and magic is so people can customise their experiance, but if that so it's untrue to the book where Geralt had to use all he could to do his job. I'll say one more thing - this fantastic story that I wanted to play because I loved the book so much was also the reason why I couldn't do it - amnesia and then screwing around with perfectly connected plot for the book? And especially when we could have play as Geralt from before or after the events of this book. It's so much like a StarWars game - you can play them if you'd like to be a jedi for a while, but don't make me in any way connect the prequals to the good episodes - or even worse make my action in game part ot that process.
I know that Witcher has some very attractive asspects and I argue with my friends about them all the time, but when they spent 200 hours in that game I consider that time wasted