The Witcher Officialsky Witcherovda 2 Impressiovna Threadskaia

[flushfire]

I "died a LOT" during a scripted bossfight (the kayran). Neither daggers, nor bombs, nor high attack/block skills would have made a difference there.

I've already played thru it twice. A point in footwork or quen makes a significant difference.

Otoh Mrowak explained that the difficulty of this dragon fight largely depends on your build. So who knows, maybe my build sucked.

Maybe skills don't mean too little, then?

 

[Arlborn]

Even though I have a feeling I will want to start my second play-through right away as soon as I finish the first, I am pretty sure I will wait instead a bit until a good mod is made to balance combat because while it is indeed not an easy walk in the park for me at all, I'm pretty sure that the fore-knowledge combined with the unbalanced combat will make it way too easy for me.

I am specially hoping for something nerfing bombs and Quen.

Besides, maybe I can buy a decent videocard by then because playing this game on low with low fps is just not nice.

 

[dragonfk]

Letho (another "boss") was also challenging, but only because he cast Quen a lot, so the challenge was running around and waiting for his Quen to expire while he was throwing bombs at me.

I don't claim the combat to be a godsend, but VD if you combated Letho the way you described then indeed you seem not to use every possibility the game presents you. Quens timer, as you should have noticed, is decreased with each blow you land on it. So I defeated Letho with no problem hitting him with a stun bomb or Aard and slashing at him when Quen gave away. Luckily he doesn't spam Quen the moment he loses it so the fight certainly wasn't tedious the way I played it nor especially hard.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I "died a LOT" during a scripted bossfight (the kayran). Neither daggers, nor bombs, nor high attack/block skills would have made a difference there.

I've already played thru it twice. A point in footwork or quen makes a significant difference.

As does knowing what to do and how the whole thing plays out.

I wasn't sure what to do when I chopped off the tentacles at first and got killed while trying to figure it out. Then I got killed because I didn't press the spacebar during the final sequence to jump off the tentacle.

Otoh Mrowak explained that the difficulty of this dragon fight largely depends on your build. So who knows, maybe my build sucked.

Maybe skills don't mean too little, then?

Surely you realize that if skills are truly needed only during a couple of fights, they don't really matter?

Let me try a different approach: Doctor skill in Fallout 2 was pretty fucking useless because you healed during traveling, because you had a chance to heal yourself with a starting skill level, because you had plenty of stimpacks, etc. However, you had to have 75% in Doctor to learn how to do the implants, which was a pretty fucking useless upgrade because by the time you can do them, you're practically unstoppable. So, do the implants suddenly make the skill useful? No. Does a tough endgame fight make the otherwise useless skills important? No.

Letho (another "boss") was also challenging, but only because he cast Quen a lot, so the challenge was running around and waiting for his Quen to expire while he was throwing bombs at me.

I don't claim the combat to be a godsend, but VD if you combated Letho the way you described then indeed you seem not to use every possibility the game presents you. Quens timer, as you should have noticed, is decreased with each blow you land on it. So I defeated Letho with no problem hitting him with a stun bomb or Aard and slashing at him when Quen gave away.

I didn't have bombs with me and I didn't know that Aard counts. Well, goes to show that it's even easier than I thought.

 

[Hamster]

I don't claim the combat to be a godsend, but VD if you combated Letho the way you described then indeed you seem not to use every possibility the game presents you. Quens timer, as you should have noticed, is decreased with each blow you land on it. So I defeated Letho with no problem hitting him with a stun bomb or Aard and slashing at him when Quen gave away.

I didn't have bombs with me and I didn't know that Aard counts. Well, goes to show that it's even easier than I thought.

Actually you can cast Aard right at the start before he even casts Quen, than make 3 heavy slashes and repeat, puting him in a stun lock. I easily defeated him that way.

 

[flushfire]

I wasn't sure what to do when I chopped off the tentacles at first and got killed while trying to figure it out. Then I got killed because I didn't press the spacebar during the final sequence to jump off the tentacle.

That's two, you said a lot, what about the other deaths?

Anyway thank you for your replies but as I said I am giving up. Points in position and hardiness make the difference between mistake and OHKO. People get different experiences fighting bosses/mobs based on their builds. That is enough for me.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I wasn't sure what to do when I chopped off the tentacles at first and got killed while trying to figure it out. Then I got killed because I didn't press the spacebar during the final sequence to jump off the tentacle.

That's two, you said a lot, what about the other deaths?

I died a lot due to my own mistakes, not because my character wasn't good. I died a few times when I tried to find a safe spot, a place I can run to after I chop off a tentacle. A few deaths have convinced me to stay and fight hit spacebar a lot. I died once (probably a glitch) when I trapped a tentacle, clicked on it, the chopping animation kicked in and then another tentacle hit me.

Maybe stronger Quen or more HPs would have let me live longer despite the mistakes but I don't think that that's what a good character system is supposed to do.

Anyway thank you for your replies but as I said I am giving up. Points in position and hardiness make the difference between mistake and OHKO. People get different experiences fighting bosses/mobs based on their builds. That is enough for me.

Forget about the bosses. Why won't you try playing the game without investing any skill points, now that you understand the controls and the signs better, and see if that understanding makes more difference than the character system, enough than you can play the game *easily* without improving your skills.

 

[Orgasmic ThoughtCrime]

I followed the discussion thus far regarding the quality of choices, and I feel that both sides make good points.

I feel that there is another aspect that wasn’t taken into account and that makes a huge difference.
I analyzed my first playthorugh and I came to the conclusion that, apart from the more immediate reward / no reward, or “fork in the road” type of choices, there is an underlying factor to them that definitely changed the way I played the game. And that is: the way the gameworld reveals itself to you based on your choices.

Even though I played the first Witcher and had knowledge about the setting, characters and basic mechanics, I was thrust in a world which was unknown to me, full of gray characters each with their own motivations and personality. So , as I played the game, the world around revealed itself to me based on the choices I made, which ultimately led to me making the following choices based on what I had managed to find out up to that point, which in turn led to me playing the game in a certain manner.
I think that the game does a great job of masking the story and characters and outright cancels some bits of info you receive based on the choices you make.

Of course, all of this does not fall into the more apparent type of gameplay-affecting consequences that VaultDweller talks about, and is valid only for the first playthrough. The effect is lessend on a second playthrough (assuming you choose the other “fork in the road”), and virtually non-existant on a third; but I can firmly say that the choices I made influenced the way I played the game for the first time, and its conclusion was the sum of the choices I had made based on what knowledge I had about the gameworld and its characters.

 

[Arlborn]

snip

I'm pretty much experiencing the same so far.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Guys. Guys. Let's not argue, let's just discuss Geralt's hair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIne71lagtI

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Finally got a new graphics card and experiencing this game in all its glory. Radeon HD 6870, max settings except the ridiculous ubersampling thing. What a gorgeous game.

Unfortunately, my cutscene tolerance ran short at the beginning of chapter 1 and I had to bail. Still.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Is there a mod for Witcher 1 that removes the constant weapon sheathing?

 

[Toffeli]

Zero Punctuation - The Witcher 2 aka Yahzee can't play and why doesn't the game shove everything right to my face

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Zero Punctuation - The Witcher 2 aka Yahzee can't play and why doesn't the game shove everything right to my face

Can you summarise what he said? I'm downloading The Witcher 2 bonus videos at the moment and don't want to compromise the download speed.

 

[Havoc]

Got killed a lot. Didn't think writing was good. Didn't mention characters. Played up to Kraken. Didn't have fun, so he quit.

Most of his complaints were "The game doesn't teach me how to enjoy it!", a true consoltard.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Kraken? Fucking retard. It is nothing like a kraken. And that is pretty much the first main quest you do in Act 1. So he's missed like 80% of the game.

He's a fucking prick, like Jim Sterling, for reviewing a game he couldn't be bothered to play properly. The Escapist should sack him, but they're a bunch of cunts too. Ben Croshaw has pulled this shit before, and when people criticised him, they got banned by Escapist staff.

 

[MasPingon]

Omg, what a tool he is

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Watching his review now. Yeah, that was the game I was talking about, Witcher 1. He pulled the same shit with that one. And all this moaning about 'PC elitism' is tiring, most elitism I see is from console gamers like him. He plays all his games on consoles, so I'm not surprised he was pissed off about having to play a game on PC for once. That biased him against Witcher 2 right away.

His criticisms are so petty. Not being able to drink potions in battle, having to use TWO swords, not being hand-led through the introduction, having to fight GROUPS of monsters, the area around Flotsam actually being dangerous, and the game not auto-saving every 5 seconds.

He's seriously gone full retard now. I'm just glad he's not living in my country, the Australians are welcome to the stupid bastard.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

That guy is the first who is being sent to an extermination camp when your wise and benevolent leader of the future (namely: me) takes control over this world.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

I can understand him complaining about the prologue being hard and other subjective crap but saying he gave up out of frustration from unskippable cutscenes pre-boss fight is just getting the facts wrong. Dialogs and cutscenes are skippable/fast forwardable.

 

[flushfire]

you gotta admit there's too much tho. and there's a lot of getting dropped into dangerous situations right after a cinematic. its pretty frustrating until you get used to it.

 

[Gerrard]

You know it's the same guy that complained that the UI was too complex and there were too many screens (inventory, character, map) in the first game.

 

[asper]

Just dumping some of my annoyances with the game --

Goddamn, I don't see what I get when someone gives me something! The message either fades quickly, is obscured by something, or doesn't appear at all. That is just SO BAD. Same goes for amounts of earned XP when finishing a quest. GRR

Inventory/journal interfaces are sooo horrible...

A non-choice appeared in the Polish version; I could choose two options, but both basically meant "yes", it looked really Biowarian..

I would have preferred if they had toned down the epic a bit.

Enjoyable game otherwise.

 

[Doma]

Zero Punctuation - The Witcher 2 aka Yahzee can't play and why doesn't the game shove everything right to my face

This is the same guy that complained about too much text in Mass Effect.

Just saying...

 

[1eyedking]

Zero Punctuation - The Witcher 2 aka Yahzee can't play and why doesn't the game shove everything right to my face

Most of us never cared about Yahtzee's opinions, but at least his rants were humorous.

Problem is, he's not funny anymore. In fact he sounds plain bored and tired of his job.