The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition

[MoonlitKnight]

So, this has been driving me insane, and i cant find the answer on interwebz.

Why do you have to complete the Kayran quest? Its a main quest, you cant progress without it, but I cant remember which quest is locked until you complete it, and why.

If I'm not mistaken it locked the rose of remembrance quest because the elven prisoner is on that ship which the Kayran blocks

 

[mbv123]

Just started playing this after finishing TW1 and really liking it.
Now I started prologue and noticed that something was off, then it finally clicked
IT WAS THE FUCKING CONTROLS AND INTERFACE

What happened to the grid inventory system of TW1?
Why do I need to meditate to drink a potion?
Why do potions and oils last only a few minutes now when they lasted hours in TW1? Alchemy seems totally pointless and tedious now when it was great and useful in TW1.
Now the combat is just your usual uninspired third person action game stuff. (I enjoyed the style combo based one in TW1)
Also noticed some QTE's already
Also cutscenes, cutscenes and more cutscenes.

Somehow, I lost all the will to play after noticing this decline. Shame really, since I was really eager to play it.

 

[v1rus]

Just started playing this after finishing TW1 and really liking it.
Now I started prologue and noticed that something was off, then it finally clicked
IT WAS THE FUCKING CONTROLS AND INTERFACE

What happened to the grid inventory system of TW1?
Why do I need to meditate to drink a potion?
Why do potions and oils last only a few minutes now when they lasted hours in TW1? Alchemy seems totally pointless and tedious now when it was great and useful in TW1.
Now the combat is just your usual uninspired third person action game stuff. (I enjoyed the style combo based one in TW1)
Also noticed some QTE's already
Also cutscenes, cutscenes and more cutscenes.

Somehow, I lost all the will to play after noticing this decline. Shame really, since I was really eager to play it.

Give it a chance, it has got its own set of perks. And remember, TW1 was also clunky as fuck when you just started.

 

[Falksi]

Just started playing this after finishing TW1 and really liking it.
Now I started prologue and noticed that something was off, then it finally clicked
IT WAS THE FUCKING CONTROLS AND INTERFACE

What happened to the grid inventory system of TW1?
Why do I need to meditate to drink a potion?
Why do potions and oils last only a few minutes now when they lasted hours in TW1? Alchemy seems totally pointless and tedious now when it was great and useful in TW1.
Now the combat is just your usual uninspired third person action game stuff. (I enjoyed the style combo based one in TW1)
Also noticed some QTE's already
Also cutscenes, cutscenes and more cutscenes.

Somehow, I lost all the will to play after noticing this decline. Shame really, since I was really eager to play it.

I hated it for about 10 hours. 4 playthroughs later it's my favourite game ever.

It aint for everyone, but to me they're minor gripes which just need a little adjusting to. I'd give it at least until you finish Flotsam before you decide on whether to ditch it or not.

If you can get through The Swamp section of TW1, you can easily bare with the worst TW2 has to offer IMO.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

What happened to the grid inventory system of TW1?

The masses don't like tetris, they don't even care for encumbrance/weight limits(mostly gone in tw3).

Why do I need to meditate to drink a potion?

My guess is it was either for lore or more likely TW1 got too many complaints from those who would constantly get hit while trying to quaff a healing potion in the middle of combat. Making the player sit down in order to drink them was probably their last attempt at getting the player to realize that potions are about preparation before hunting a known prey. In TW3 you now can spam all the potions&oils you want instantly during combat, even food&drink(which heal as much as a potion). They clearly gave up.

You should at least have installed the pseudo-official Full Combat Rebalance 2 mod before starting TW2. It improves the arkham-ish combat system(new animations, added responsiveness, automatic blocking, twirls rathers than rolls etc), redoes the skilltree system(you only buy active rather than passive skills, all basic skills unlocked from the start), balances the economy(from my testing, if you do a completionist run on the hardest setting you'll only have just about enough at the end of each act to buy and craft that act's "dark set" gear along with the alchemical recipes).

List of changes: https://pastebin.com/ftqdeqsU

Its official cdproj modpage seems gone so you have to grab it from nexusmods now:

Full Combat Rebalance Mod 2 v 1.2: http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/822/?

optional shit that might be interesting:
FCR2 Fixes http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/647/?
FCR2 (Full Combat Rebalance) Adrenaline and Finisher Fixes http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/687/?
FCR2 Missing Armor Fix and Hoodless Kayran Compatibility Patch for FCR2 http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/804/? (hopefully it doesn't simply offer you those extra dlc armor pieces and potions right at the beginning)
The Witcher trailer armor http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/63/?

Also the game expects you to lose your silver sword during the prologue and start chapter 1 without one, you even get a quest for a new silver sword. When you import a TW1 save with endgame gear you start the game with multiple silver swords so you won't even get that quest and will break the sense of progression/starting from scratch you should have in chapter 1. IMO better off dumping all imported gear at the end of the prologue, they took it from you in prison after all.

 

[Falksi]

Meditating & preparing with potions before battle not only felt more realistic, but it added weight to that "Witcher" feel for me.
I wanted them to expand on that for TW3. Give me monsters I have to really prepare for, ones I can't kill without an oil or certain potion pre-prepared beforehand, and part of the quest researchin/obtaining these. Instead they gave us "neck dried fish mid fight to heal, and level up to beat anyone".

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

^The spamming food&potions midfight to heal are easily fixed by mods at least, the enemy upscaling option introduced in one of the later patches also somewhat rendered leveling up and level differences moot.

 

[MoonlitKnight]

Also noticed some QTE's already

you can (and should) turn them off

 

[Falksi]

^The spamming food&potions midfight to heal are easily fixed by mods at least, the enemy upscaling option introduced in one of the later patches also somewhat rendered leveling up and level differences moot.

Damn I wish they'd release finished products.

 

[bloodlover]

Gonna finally play this soon(ish). Any tips or tricks? I did W1 mostly with sword fighting so I'd give W2's "magic" a chance. I don't want to spoil myself with spoliers but I remember people complaining back then about the combat being brutal.

edit: Screw you grammar! I am too tired for your shit.

 

[flyingjohn]

Gonna finally play this soon(ish). Any tips or tricks? I did W1 mostly with sword fighting so I'd give W2's "magic" a chance. I don't want to spoil myself with spoliers but I remember people complaining back then about the combat being brutal.

edit: Screw you grammar! I am too tired for your shit.

Most important thing in witcher 2:
Roll,roll and don't forget to roll some more.

Or if you want super secret haxor technique just use queen.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Gonna finally play this soon(ish). Any tips or tricks? I did W1 mostly with sword fighting so I'd give W2's "magic" a chance. I don't want to spoil myself with spoliers but I remember people complaining back then about the combat being brutal.

edit: Screw you grammar! I am too tired for your shit.

Most important thing in witcher 2:
Roll,roll and don't forget to roll some more.

Or if you want super secret haxor technique just use queen.

Its basically dark souls 3 combat. Except with a shitty potion mechanic that punishes you for watching cutscenes and taking the alchemy path.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

Most important thing in witcher 2:
Roll,roll and don't forget to roll some more.

Or pirouette, if you installed FCR2 like a good boy.

 

[Cadmus]

Finished the game on Dark in 37 hours, thoroughly disgusted by the experience. In fact, it took me 3 years to actually get through it, as I was almost queasy from controls at first, but then it either improved, or I just got more tolerant of lag. In all, huge decline compared to W1. I actually wonder why did they bother to get the game on PCs almost a year before consoles because it's actually plays worse than vanilla DS1 without any patches / hi-res packs.

- Controls are something in the game, it's like I'm controlling rover on Mars or the Moon, the lag is so big. Super slow mouse, keystrokes register quite slow as well.
- It looked like the game designers took great pains to make the game feel like true console product - autosaves at the most annoying / inopportune moments (if there's a 30 seconds cutscene, like in Kayran fight or the ghost story fight, the player should watch it 30 times before he finally manages to beat the QTE sequence or a stupid fight that probably no one tested on any difficulty except easy. Button choices are random and weird - why you have to press space, then enter to add a mutagen, why there could not have been a single button to do all that shit? Seriously. Also, who decided that it's good to only use mouse to select lines in dialogue? Getting that back (and an ability to jump over fences) feels like a huge UX revolution in W3.
- Apparently Geralt cannot into backpedalling which leads to funny situations in the aforementioned ghost sequence - you can't really retreat there so you either parry to victory (as in the draug and the zombies would stun-carry you to the edge of fire circle and then back off) or recieve 100500 points of damage in your back while trying to disengage.
- The world is super-small and corridor'y compared to W1 and W3 (which I just started playing), there's only a handful of quests. Idiotic choice 'DO YOU SIDE WITH FASCISTS OR ELVEN ANTIFA?' (I know it's the other way around in the books, but whatever) as compared to more subtle choices in W1 (at least there were 3 choices, not just two, including 'true' witcher path which actually made everything worse, in a sort of true Geralt way). I did not feel that I was in a coherent world, rather in a series of disjointed memories / experiences.
- Armor/ Weapon progression is really strange, also armor was basically useless as most enemies would kill you (from behind) in 1-2 strikes. Huge disparity in fights difficulty - I probably spent more time on the first Letho/Kayran/Ghost Battle fights than all other parts of the combat in the game. Potions and oils absolutely useless (for a warrior + signs witcher) from prologue to epilogue.
- Too epic and unwitcher'y plot. Forced dichotomy, strange choices, rash and unspymaster'y Broche (as compared to Dijkstra or Vattier in the books) whom, to my sincerest regret, I could not kill in the Act 2 after he just ruined everything with his stupid 'square coin' plot. Why I should help such a person, especially as a witcher?

Hopefully W3 is much better (at least it feels so in the beginning, even in-game and menu music is more like W1), because this is not far away from DA2 in terms of gameplay, scope and overall experience.

- the controls are fine you fucking autist, takes about an hour getting used to them, there's no delay in my game so that means you are fucking it up
- the autosaves and saving in general is kinda bad, yeah. Big deal, don't remember anybody whining about replaying a level 500 times in Dark Souls you fuckin tryhard, use the mouse, jesus fuck how hard is it. If you cocksuckers can play shit like Wizardry 1 or Ultima 5 then this should be the best control scheme ever.
- learn the skill to remove backstab damage you moron
- the world isn't "super" small, it's just not as big as the uselessly huge world of TW3 and annoying swamp shit in TW1, you're a retard
- Broche is a hothead moron but a bro so fuck off

Basically you're mostly complaining about meaningless shit so go play Oblivion where you hit a button and something happens.

I'm replaying this for the 3rd time now but I guess I'll side with Roche again because I can't stand that green prick. At first the inventory and controls put me off but now it plays great and still looks great for the most part. I set the QTEs to easy and they now really provide the downtime fun they were supposed to. This game did so many things right - the alchemy, the spell effects, the characters, the witchering quests are nice, the story is great and complicated, the landscape is varried. TW3 took some sad steps back compared to this.

 

[Invictus]

So after finishing Witcher 1 and already in the 5 book (Tower of Swallows) I started this yesterday and while I dislike the changes they made to alchemy (which I loved in W1) and the horrendous performance for a game 7 years old I am really enjoying the game.
I halway expected the combat to be janky but it kind of reminds me of Dark Souls where you cannot go willy nilly swinging your sword but you have to actually adapt to your opponent, for example fighting an elf requires parrying and countering or trying to stun him with some magic, while most monsters you are better off hitting with fire and then a good combo... overall I am enjoying the combat more than I thought I would and like Dark Souls I felt that every time I died was more my fault for rushing for another hit or getting surrounded

This is so far one of the most rewarding gaming experiences of my life of playing the games and reading the books, it makes me feel very immersed in both the setting and the characters. Some people have commented how Triss somehow took advantage of Geralt’s situation but so far to me it feel s like she is just seizing up Geralt’s resurrection to have a second chance with him, which I find kind of relatable and very understandable

So far my main problem is the increibly shitty performance where medium settings do stay at 60 FPS most of the time but it somehow taxes my GTX 1060 more than Resident Evil 7 or demanding modern game

 

[Rahdulan]

Was your ubersampling on by default? It's a big drain on performance.

 

[Humppaleka]

you cannot go willy nilly swinging your sword but you have to actually adapt to your opponent, for example fighting an elf requires parrying and countering or trying to stun him with some magic, while most monsters you are better off hitting with fire and then a good combo...

so the usual quen roll spam then

 

[Invictus]

Was your ubersampling on by default? It's a big drain on performance.

Yup I did but still it is incredibly how baddly optimized this is

 

[Invictus]

you cannot go willy nilly swinging your sword but you have to actually adapt to your opponent, for example fighting an elf requires parrying and countering or trying to stun him with some magic, while most monsters you are better off hitting with fire and then a good combo...

so the usual quen roll spam then

Like I wrote before I am used to it because of Dark Souls so I dont really mind it too much and it is not horrible, feels a bit like the Arkham games where pressing the attack button isn’t always the same movement and context sensitive
Found a mod that allows you to decide exactly the sword swings so I might try that just to see how it feels but so far the combat feels ok

 

[RNGsus]

Finished the game on Dark in 37 hours, thoroughly disgusted by the experience. In fact, it took me 3 years to actually get through it, as I was almost queasy from controls at first, but then it either improved, or I just got more tolerant of lag. In all, huge decline compared to W1. I actually wonder why did they bother to get the game on PCs almost a year before consoles because it's actually plays worse than vanilla DS1 without any patches / hi-res packs.

- Controls are something in the game, it's like I'm controlling rover on Mars or the Moon, the lag is so big. Super slow mouse, keystrokes register quite slow as well.
- It looked like the game designers took great pains to make the game feel like true console product - autosaves at the most annoying / inopportune moments (if there's a 30 seconds cutscene, like in Kayran fight or the ghost story fight, the player should watch it 30 times before he finally manages to beat the QTE sequence or a stupid fight that probably no one tested on any difficulty except easy. Button choices are random and weird - why you have to press space, then enter to add a mutagen, why there could not have been a single button to do all that shit? Seriously. Also, who decided that it's good to only use mouse to select lines in dialogue? Getting that back (and an ability to jump over fences) feels like a huge UX revolution in W3.
- Apparently Geralt cannot into backpedalling which leads to funny situations in the aforementioned ghost sequence - you can't really retreat there so you either parry to victory (as in the draug and the zombies would stun-carry you to the edge of fire circle and then back off) or recieve 100500 points of damage in your back while trying to disengage.
- The world is super-small and corridor'y compared to W1 and W3 (which I just started playing), there's only a handful of quests. Idiotic choice 'DO YOU SIDE WITH FASCISTS OR ELVEN ANTIFA?' (I know it's the other way around in the books, but whatever) as compared to more subtle choices in W1 (at least there were 3 choices, not just two, including 'true' witcher path which actually made everything worse, in a sort of true Geralt way). I did not feel that I was in a coherent world, rather in a series of disjointed memories / experiences.
- Armor/ Weapon progression is really strange, also armor was basically useless as most enemies would kill you (from behind) in 1-2 strikes. Huge disparity in fights difficulty - I probably spent more time on the first Letho/Kayran/Ghost Battle fights than all other parts of the combat in the game. Potions and oils absolutely useless (for a warrior + signs witcher) from prologue to epilogue.
- Too epic and unwitcher'y plot. Forced dichotomy, strange choices, rash and unspymaster'y Broche (as compared to Dijkstra or Vattier in the books) whom, to my sincerest regret, I could not kill in the Act 2 after he just ruined everything with his stupid 'square coin' plot. Why I should help such a person, especially as a witcher?

Hopefully W3 is much better (at least it feels so in the beginning, even in-game and menu music is more like W1), because this is not far away from DA2 in terms of gameplay, scope and overall experience.

- the controls are fine you fucking autist, takes about an hour getting used to them, there's no delay in my game so that means you are fucking it up
- the autosaves and saving in general is kinda bad, yeah. Big deal, don't remember anybody whining about replaying a level 500 times in Dark Souls you fuckin tryhard, use the mouse, jesus fuck how hard is it. If you cocksuckers can play shit like Wizardry 1 or Ultima 5 then this should be the best control scheme ever.
- learn the skill to remove backstab damage you moron
- the world isn't "super" small, it's just not as big as the uselessly huge world of TW3 and annoying swamp shit in TW1, you're a retard
- Broche is a hothead moron but a bro so fuck off

Basically you're mostly complaining about meaningless shit so go play Oblivion where you hit a button and something happens.

I'm replaying this for the 3rd time now but I guess I'll side with Roche again because I can't stand that green prick. At first the inventory and controls put me off but now it plays great and still looks great for the most part. I set the QTEs to easy and they now really provide the downtime fun they were supposed to. This game did so many things right - the alchemy, the spell effects, the characters, the witchering quests are nice, the story is great and complicated, the landscape is varried. TW3 took some sad steps back compared to this.

That's what happens when they go AAA open world. Jump the shark moment for any company these days.

 

[Master]

Most important thing in witcher 2:
Roll,roll and don't forget to roll some more.

Or pirouette, if you installed FCR2 like a good boy.

I tried this mod but after a while it gets just as dumb looking as the rolling. Dont bother with this game's combat, it cant be fixed. Only good thing were the alchemy and the graphics, which look better than TW3.

Still cant get over the dissapointment with this series. After a great first game, the 2nd and 3rd just make me embarrassed to be associated with rpgs.

 

[Invictus]

Just started the second chapter and overall I am enjoying the game quite a bit. Decided to add a few mods and they have fixed most of the issues I had with the game; mainly the cooldown on the witcher medallion, more skill points per level and PS4 prompts. The higher skill points I felt kind of guilty about but I did raise the difficulty to the next level to complement and it has made combat simply fun to me.
Most of the complaints I have heard about the combat beign a roll fest I guess that kind of get addressed by using a controller for better movement and using a more sensible approach to fighting by combining magic, items and swordplay. For example I might start a fight with the Igni sign (still my favorite for monsters) go for a fast swing (which usually means a rolling stab) get in a heavy attack, roll out of the way and go into my parry stance to either wait to riposte or go straight for a spell, especially for crowd control
All in all I am enjoying the game quite a bit, the combat is very enjoyable to me and while I feel like a killing machine I still have to be careful especially if surrounded or if I try to go overboard with the offensive

Went with the non humans although I really liked Roach but kept a saved game before that for replaying afterwars that area, which I might go straight after finishing this playthrough before jumping into Witcher 3

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

 

[moon knight]

I feel this critique is a bit too harsh

 

[Tom Selleck]

I feel this critique is a bit too harsh long