The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition

[subotaiy]

Witcher 2(and 3 possibly) needs a mod that ties rolling to vigor consumption. Screw lore fidelity, I'd rather have a better combat.

 

[Gord]

In my playthrough of Twitcher2 + FCR mod, I'm now in act 2, Iorveth path.
Game's still piss-easy. Found a rune that has +200% chance to insta-kill on hit. I thought it's just a typo and installed it on a sword. but it's really +200%.
Every standard mob goes down in one hit. Doesn't work on stronger enemies, but that hardly matters.

More like Full Combat Trivialization, amirite?

Oh and loot progression is wonky now, too (or even wonkier, I think it wasn't stellar to begin with). Most recipies, swords and armors have been (re-)moved, so you don't exactly have much possibilities to choose from now. When you get some new options (say, through a new chapter), most of the stuff is already obsolete.

 

[the_shadow]

Just finished the game with the Iorveth path.

Overall, I'm not impressed. It's a serious downgrade from its predecessor, for the reasons already mentioned. My main three gripes are:

1. Linearity. Witcher 1 was already pretty linear, but Witcher 2 takes it to an entirely different level. You aren't allowed any detours, or to develop the story through initiative and discovery. Instead you are shit through the plot, beginning to end.

2. This sort of ties into Point 1, but you don't feel like an actual witcher. The whole game is about Machiavellian political intrigue, without actually involving any real Witcher duties. Witcher 1 had the Salamandra/Grand Master as a driving force, but Act 1 focused on freeing a village from a hellhound, whereas Act 3 (?) involved lifting a curse. Witcher 2 has Geralt relegated to some sort of political pawn, where he occasionally tags along because more powerful individuals are like "Oh, you have a silver sword? You might as well tag along in case we run into monsters, lol"

3. Witcher 2 lacks personality. All the 'political intrigue' just strikes me as try-hard, and doesn't resonant with me. I can't think of any event in Witcher 2 that was memorable. Witcher 1 had quite a few memorable moments. Saving Abigail from the mob, Vincent fighting by your side after freeing him from the curse, the party at Shani's house, playing detective for 'Raymond', finding out the truth about Berengar, lifting Princess Adda's curse. Witcher 2 just felt like I was ticking off boxes and going through the motions. Oh, and look out, dragon!

 

[Carrion]

1. Linearity. Witcher 1 was already pretty linear, but Witcher 2 takes it to an entirely different level. You aren't allowed any detours, or to develop the story through initiative and discovery. Instead you are shit through the plot, beginning to end.

Agreed. Even though the general structure of TW1 was very straightforward, the quests themselves where often quite open, seemingly spreading into a dozen different directions and even mixing into other quests before eventually reaching their conclusion. In TW2 the main quest is much more straightforward, as in the first act you basically only get a couple of objectives that you can do in any order while everything else is set on rails, and the openness in the second act comes mostly from collecting a ton of different items, which is alright but not nearly as interesting as, say, Act 2 of TW1. The side quests don't really tie into the main narrative in any way either, unlike in the first game where you got to meet Kalkstein, Abigail and a bunch of other characters by doing witcher work for them before said characters even became important to the story.

2. This sort of ties into Point 1, but you don't feel like an actual witcher. The whole game is about Machiavellian political intrigue, without actually involving any real Witcher duties. Witcher 1 had the Salamandra/Grand Master as a driving force, but Act 1 focused on freeing a village from a hellhound, whereas Act 3 (?) involved lifting a curse. Witcher 2 has Geralt relegated to some sort of political pawn, where he occasionally tags along because more powerful individuals are like "Oh, you have a silver sword? You might as well tag along in case we run into monsters, lol"

Well, the vast majority of the second act is about lifting a curse. It's maybe a bit overkill for an ordinary witcher's job, but it fits the tone of the game very well. The monster-killing quests are also generally more interesting than in TW1, although I do miss spending the majority of my few orens on monster books. I personally didn't mind the political focus or the change in the game's overall tone and thought it was a logical follow-up to the first game's more down-to-earth approach.

3. Witcher 2 lacks personality. All the 'political intrigue' just strikes me as try-hard, and doesn't resonant with me. I can't think of any event in Witcher 2 that was memorable. Witcher 1 had quite a few memorable moments. Saving Abigail from the mob, Vincent fighting by your side after freeing him from the curse, the party at Shani's house, playing detective for 'Raymond', finding out the truth about Berengar, lifting Princess Adda's curse. Witcher 2 just felt like I was ticking off boxes and going through the motions. Oh, and look out, dragon!

I don't know about that, I think there are plenty of memorable moments. Then again, I love the politics in the game. I guess one difference is that in TW1 it felt like you had more control over your actions whereas TW2's cutscenes feel a lot less personal. In TW2 you often become just a passive observer and feel like you have little control over Geralt's actions. Many of TW1's memorable moments were pretty low-key, perhaps just a piece of dialogue somewhere where you learn something new about a character that has been around for ages, Shani's party being a good example, or a choice that had been patiently built up for a while, like having to choose between Abigail and the villagers. TW2's pace is a lot more frantic, so individual moments like that don't really stand out in the same way (especially if they're delivered in a form of a cutscene over which you have no control).

For me TW2 was an initial disappointment partly for the reasons you mentioned, but I've come to appreciate in a lot more after subsequent playthroughs. Although it loses to TW1 in many areas and is overall probably not quite as good, it does a better job in some other areas, like C&C, characters, story and writing in general, and as a result its game world is notably more cohesive. I mostly just miss the slower pacing and player initiative of TW1, along with some mechanical stuff like the alchemy and inventory systems.

 

[JMab]

I agree with the lukewarms views on TW2. I'm struggling to enjoy it. I'm not ashamed to say I found it hard on normal difficulty initially, before I checked a walkthrough and realised I'd already missed a load of stuff in the prologue and hadn't been spamming Quen like I was supposed to.

It all got a lot easier with some walkthrough help, but then I got in the mindset of not wanting to miss stuff, which is compounded by the highly linear nature of the game, so I picked up too much info from the walkthrough and got too powerful.

I don't usually complain about game difficulty, but I think the balance isn't quite right.

 

[the_shadow]

Well, the vast majority of the second act is about lifting a curse. It's maybe a bit overkill for an ordinary witcher's job, but it fits the tone of the game very well.

Yeah, as soon as I posted, I thought about Act II. I guess I didn't find that quest to be particularly engaging. It reminded me of the OC in Neverwinter Nights 1, where you needed to go and hunt down the four different ingredients for the cure. It's just ticking off boxes for the sake of ticking off boxes. I would have preferred to participate in the ghost battle without all that bullshit beforehand.

I'm struggling to enjoy it. I'm not ashamed to say I found it hard on normal difficulty initially, before I checked a walkthrough and realised I'd already missed a load of stuff in the prologue and hadn't been spamming Quen like I was supposed to.

It all got a lot easier with some walkthrough help, but then I got in the mindset of not wanting to miss stuff, which is compounded by the highly linear nature of the game, so I picked up too much info from the walkthrough and got too powerful.

I don't usually complain about game difficulty, but I think the balance isn't quite right.

I completed the game on Hard, and I have to admit that I died a lot. If I knew what was coming, I could control the situation with Aard, Yrden and Axii. However, most of my (many) deaths were from sucker punches that occurred when I was moving from one Quest marker to another, or getting tag teamed by previously neutral opponents. Given that my game took 15 seconds to load each time (longer as I played more), this killed quite a bit of my enjoyment.

Quen was completely nerfed in my edition of the game. It would protect me from perhaps 2 hits before fizzling out, making the damage reflection upgrade completely useless. Igni is fantastic once upgraded. I was able to take out Letho without a scratch by simply pelting him with Igni until he dropped.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

Bros, would someone remind me the consensus on which voice over is best for a non-Potato? My choices are Eng, Rus and Pol, but I'll have to rely on subtitles with the latter, which is not ideal for a game with QTE cutscenes.
I think I played with Eng before, and I think I recall it being kinda meh.

 

[Jools]

Started playing this. I like it, i dont mind all the changes.

But the graphics. So busy, saturated, colourful. Its a visual overload for me, and a bit of a mess. Details and stuff everywhere, I cant differentiate things properly, and it strains my eyes. I dont think they designed the graphics very well. Yes its packed with detail, but it looks too damn busy.

Witcher 1 was much more clean, and easy on the eyes. It actually looks more real than Witcher 2.

Just play it on dark and get the dark armour/weapon sets. Goodbye colours.

 

[Cadmus]

Bros, would someone remind me the consensus on which voice over is best for a non-Potato? My choices are Eng, Rus and Pol, but I'll have to rely on subtitles with the latter, which is not ideal for a game with QTE cutscenes.
I think I played with Eng before, and I think I recall it being kinda meh.

I think that if possible, the game should be played with slavic language.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

Found a video comparison for different voice overs:



Jeez, Rus voices are bloody horrible. Eng sounds somewhat passable, but Potato definitely sounds best. Goddamn, I'll never see the game reading subs the whole time. What do.

 

[DraQ]

Witcher 2(and 3 possibly) needs a mod that ties rolling to vigor consumption. Screw lore fidelity, I'd rather have a better combat.

And remove it from blocking.

 

[Seaking4]

Well I finally got around to this one. I thought it was ok. For everything positive I can say about the game, I can say something of equal importance that was done badly. I went in with the lowest of expectations for combat so I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't turn out to be the worst thing since the opposite of sliced bread. I was actually pleased that they made most of the signs more useful than the first game (where I used igni 95% of the time and aard the other 5%). It did turn in to a bit of a quen and roll spam though. There were a really high number of talents in that game. Seemed like a good chunk of them were useless though (like the entire alchemy branch). I didn't mind having to take potions before fights because it's usually obvious when you are going to get into a fight (even in TW1 I took most potions before the fight). However, the cutscenes before fights would make the potions run out. Kind of incentivized rushing through conversations to make sure your potions wouldn't run out (which would normally happen if I died during a fight and ended up loading a previous save as I already knew everything that could happen in the conversation). I appreciated that you had greater access to the numbers involved. I never found out how to check out Geralt's HP or Endurance in the first game (which could be my own mistake but I'm fairly certain there was no way to check) so seeing numbers like "costs 25 endurance" or "+100 vitality" meant nothing to me in TW1. I thought the main story was a bit better but the strength of the first game was in the side quests which were virtually non-existent in this game. I also managed to laugh in this game. Not as often as the writers hoped I'm sure but not every joke fell flat on its face like in the first game. It also looked and sounded good.

The QTEs were obvious garbage. Not sure anyone could/would defend those. Especially since they would come out of nowhere. The kraken fight (I know it's not a kraken) is exactly how you shouldn't design a boss fight. Speaking of boss fights, I fought most of them to be completely disappointing with the exception of the first Letho one (Edit: Ending was a bit weird. You generally don't want to win a fight and then have the game tell you that you actually lost). I was surprised that a Witcher v Witcher fight worked out so well but this may be because it was before I really got a handle on the game. I mean it has no annoying QTEs or cutscenes so that alone makes it better than the other boss fights. Was not a fan of cutscene finishers either. I thought the first game handled them well and would have liked to have seen that continue. I also preferred the painted style movie/Geralt voiceovers from the first game but that's not a major issue at all. The parts of the game where you played as different characters was awful. Truly terrible. Especially since it was difficult to tell exactly what was going on. Playing as Triss and betraying(?) Phillipa to Dethmold means nothing to you if you don't know who Phillipa is. That one wasn't too bad though. The really terrible one was playing as Henselt. Oddly enough, I ended up letting most of the people in the game live with the exception of Henselt.

When people made jokes about The Wild Hunt I always thought they were exaggerating but no ... they really are interdimensional murderous elf/wraiths.

Well I guess I'll keep my save file and went for TW3:EE that will come out in 2016.

 

[Humppaleka]

I never found out how to check out Geralt's HP or Endurance in the first game (which could be my own mistake but I'm fairly certain there was no way to check) so seeing numbers like "costs 25 endurance" or "+100 vitality" meant nothing to me in TW1.

Did you try like, you know, hovering your mouse cursor over the health and endurance bars?

 

[Seaking4]

I never found out how to check out Geralt's HP or Endurance in the first game (which could be my own mistake but I'm fairly certain there was no way to check) so seeing numbers like "costs 25 endurance" or "+100 vitality" meant nothing to me in TW1.

Did you try like, you know, hovering your mouse cursor over the health and endurance bars?

Apparently I did not.

 

[Cadmus]

I never found out how to check out Geralt's HP or Endurance in the first game (which could be my own mistake but I'm fairly certain there was no way to check) so seeing numbers like "costs 25 endurance" or "+100 vitality" meant nothing to me in TW1.

Did you try like, you know, hovering your mouse cursor over the health and endurance bars?

Apparently I did not.

yeah that's how you get them but I don't blame you, I think I found that out on my 2nd playthrough :D:D:D:

 

[Ezrite]

Well morely, what he did, he did out of a reason. He did try to help humanity. It was not "Haha I hate all cause im evil! Shitty evil!"

Also...the combat in the second game, I find it to be shit and less tactical. I just roll around like a idiot hoping to avoid damage and bash away some hits. Is this supposed to be fun? Action oriented, poor mans Dark Souls?

 

[Nryn]

Well morely, what he did, he did out of a reason. He did try to help humanity. It was not "Haha I hate all cause im evil! Shitty evil!"

Also...the combat in the second game, I find it to be shit and less tactical. I just roll around like a idiot hoping to avoid damage and bash away some hits. Is this supposed to be fun? Action oriented, poor mans Dark Souls?

I just finished my Witcher 2 Dark difficulty replay today, and I lacked the patience for the original combat system this time around compared to around release. If you're at your patience's limit, the following mods might be worth checking out:

The most well-known one is the Full Combat Rebalance mod. It addresses quite a few issues, but unfortunately, the mod also makes wholesale changes to other aspects of the game besides just the combat. As such, it's probably not the best option for a first playthrough. Furthermore, the mod didn't address the other big issue with the combat besides the rolling: the seemingly random nature of attack animations. Often times, Geralt will leap halfway across the screen with a long and overly flashy animation that gets you killed.

The second, and far less known, mod I discovered, The Rise of the Sword, is my personal favorite mod for the game since it addresses the shitty animation issue by giving you complete confidence about which animation will play out (sort of like in the Souls games or any competent action rpg). For any future playthroughs, this mod is going to end up the first mod I install despite its negatives. This is what the mod does from my experience:

- It separates all of Geralt's attacks into 3 categories based on attack ranges: short, medium and long range attack animations. Within each range, the WASD direction buttons determine which of the 4 attacks Geralt will perform. If you've played Mount & Blade, you should sort of get the general idea. By holding down the Control or Shift keys, you change the attack range to medium or long.

- The game also allows you to manually aim your attacks with a targeting reticule. As a result, it's possible to precisely choose attacks that are aimed at an enemy soldier's right half of the body when he is carrying a shield on his left side.

- It takes a bit of getting used to since there are over 20 attacks that Geralt can do, and I had to clear 20 waves in the arena before I got the hang of the mod's combat system. The combat becomes entirely offense driven, and on the plus side, the necessity to roll around or spam quen is quite minuscule. Clearing entire waves in the arena without taking a hit or rolling around is actually quite fun and does justice to the in-game lore that states Geralt is one of the best swordsmen in the game.

- As a bonus, it allows you to hold down the medallion key to continuously send out pulses (rather than having to wait for the medallion to cool down), which helps a ton in looting.

The biggest issue with the mod is that once you are used to it and figure out the more potent attack animations, combat becomes trivial. You absolutely must play it on Dark difficulty to have any semblance of challenge, but even then, the AI is not designed around the player having complete control over which attack Geralt performs, and so the game becomes a cakewalk. The mod also makes all of Geralt's actions instantaneous, which allows you to spam attack enemies to death. Give the mod a try in the arena to see if you like the combat changes.

 

[Ezrite]

I will probably try that! Cause right now It just feels like im playing a bad Dark Souls clone. A pity cause I love the story, the world is beautiful and the characters means something now since I finished the first game, even more than just jumping in to the second game without playing first as I did some years ago.

I did play a lot of Mount and Blade Warband so I think I should get used to ti! Can I mod this in after starting the game?

 

[Nryn]

Can I mod this in after starting the game?

It should work. Just make sure to backup the file it tells you to.

 

[Ezrite]

Can I mod this in after starting the game?

It should work. Just make sure to backup the file it tells you to.

Will do!

 

[naossano]

Or you can get an invincilble mod. Still doesn't save you for the cluncky control of a 3rd person game...

 

[Gerrard]

Or you could commit suicide and save yourself from living the life of a cripple.

 

[Ezrite]

Third person games can be made good. They do not need to be clunky as hell or feel stiff.

 

[naossano]

IF you are OK with it, no problem.
It doesn't me it's ok for everyone.

 

[Akratus]

Dark Souls does it right. People say they hate games being compared to Dark Souls so much. Then maybe modern action games shouldn't suck so much.