Decline Witcher 2 is awful.

[NecroLord]

It sure is the weakest part of the series.
The only good thing about it is the cool tattoo you can get.

Only good thing about it are Triss's tits.

 

[yellowcake]

It sure is the weakest part of the series.
The only good thing about it is the cool tattoo you can get.

Only good thing about it are Triss's tits.

W2 has seriously excellent production & presentation and good taste in design. Except known issue with cutscenes direction.

 

[Starwars]

The character design in Witcher 2 is excellent, I love the way they designed clothes, armors and all that stuff. Characters themselves also look pretty cool and are mostly really well acted. Some of the areas look really good too.

It's a game with plenty of problems though, I really hate how clunky it feels to just move around. The whole game feels like that, from moving around, to UI. Just trying to do the stealth sections was painful due to the controls, thankfully there were only a few of them.
And the whole prologue is just weird. It's like they were trying to make a different game in a way.

On replays, I've liked it a lot more than I did initially but you definitely have to go into storyfag mode to get enjoyment from it.

 

[cretin]

Even though combat is a bad imitation of Dark Souls it's still better the previous game.

Believe it or not, W2 came out several months before Dark Souls.

If it was just a imitation of souls combat, it might actually be enjoyable.

And its absolutely not better than W1's combat. W1's problem is that you need to mod it (FCR) for the combat to not be a total cakewalk, but in terms of mechanics, its fine. It's literally CRPG combat and I'm surprised people on this place of all places, do not see this. Hitting and defending are all stat and roll based, the timing minigame is just a crit multiplier. Different witcher 'styles' are just attack modals. Signs and bombs are just spells with different resources, potions and oils are buffs. 3D positioning matters insofar as not letting the enemy get flanks or backstabs.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

nobody besides console babies were aware of dork souls/demongo souls when witcher 2 came out

 

[Semiurge]

Neither sequel is better than, nor as good as the first one. The latter two were both out of character, and mechanically a waste of time. Horribly dumbed down combat and alchemy;

Yeah... I loved the combat on Witcher 1.

I love the combat of Witcher 2

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Neither sequel is better than, nor as good as the first one. The latter two were both out of character, and mechanically a waste of time. Horribly dumbed down combat and alchemy;

Yeah... I loved the combat on Witcher 1.

How he fights in witcher 1 is as how it's described in the book though

 

[Falksi]

This game is a turd, and I have no idea how it has the level of respect that it does, and you are literally insane if you're one of these "people" who say its better than witcher 3.

Straight away on a technical level its bad, and obvious was made with consoles in mind to the point where you can't even edit keybinds without going through a config file. The UI is peak xbawks awfulness. The graphics suffer from that era's combination of lack of subtlety in post processing fx, and muddy textures. The game has this awful stutter jump approx every 30 seconds to a minute on PC that you can't get rid of no matter what you do, seemingly related to how it is loading in and out assets constantly.

All this would be excusable if the gameplay was good, but it's not. Actually, it's fucking garbage! For starters, the combat is clunky as fuck with geralt picking random actions from a pool of animations and not even the basics of a 3d action system like orientating towards the enemy you are actually targeting, not even with a fucking lock on. It shares with W3 random input delays and dropping, but even more egregiously here. This is also where the rolling nonsense began, because there is no roll animation in W1, and "dodging" in that game is actually used to reposition. I'm not joking when I say Risen 2's combat is more enjoyable than whatever the fuck is going on here. (and yes, I tried FCR2, which is makes the game smoother in a vague sense but then introduces a bunch of bugs like AI just randomly deciding to wait in the middle of a fight)

Topping this all of, it shares with the most faggoty movie games of that awful time by having setpiece cutscene, corridor, into a fight, into a corridor, then QTE, then cutscene, repeat. A sprinkling of "Dont hurt these innocents or ill slay you/Nah I'm busy mate fuck off" filler CYOAs and then repeat aforementioned pattern. This is mind numbing shit. I don't know if the game gets better after the prologue, but based off this shit now I don't care to see if it does. An awful opening to any kind of video game, but especially to a witcher game.

Keep playing.

Seriously, I felt similar about a lot of the complaints which you're making the first time I played. I quit just shortly after the first chapter.

Had a break, gave it another go, and then I'd got used to all the off-center stuff and one of the best RPGs which I've played in recent times unveiled itself to me. It's a game which gets better and better the deeper you dig, and soon you'll be playing another playthrough on Dark Mode and craving more.

It's just one of those games which requires effort to enjoy.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

muddy textures

While I agree with most of your points of the game's technical woes - which are probably the result of that being the first game CDPR created an engine for
This I don't know where you got it from
Visually W2 is very good and quite sharp - surpasses W3 imo
Perhaps you're playing with low settings?
At least that's what I assume considering your next bit about stutter - which I didn't experience even when I first played the game in my old laptop toaster
Are you using ubersampling?

the combat is clunky as fuck

yes

not even the basics of a 3d action system like orientating towards the enemy you are actually targeting

That's not a bad thing
That's how Ninja Gaiden controls
And mechanically that game stomps on 99% of all brawlers
In fact, that control scheme is a key element of why Ninja Gaiden's combat is so good

not even with a fucking lock on

W2 does have lock-on

shares with the most faggoty movie games of that awful time by having setpiece cutscene, corridor, into a fight, into a corridor, then QTE, then cutscene, repeat.

Have you only played the prologue?

 

[Gerrard]

Neither sequel is better than, nor as good as the first one. The latter two were both out of character, and mechanically a waste of time. Horribly dumbed down combat and alchemy;

Yeah... I loved the combat on Witcher 1.

This isn't limited to W2, but it's one of my pet peeves that pretty much none of the games (or any other adaptations really) depict the physical abelites of witchers in comparison to ordinary human(oid) correctly. In the books it's mentioned many times how much faster their reflexes and overall agility is. W1 combat is the only place where this is realized to some extent.

 

[Beastro]

I think everyone was taken with it because of how happy to see W1's combat system gone.

I didn't hate W1s after I got used to it, but I was glad to have something more engaging when I played W2.

 

[turkishronin]

I like the Polish cynicism in this one. You spend all that effort saving the dwarven city only for it to be gobbled up by another empire.

 

[Average Manatee]

W1's combat is appropriate to the game.

Making it more actiony like W2/W3 makes it shit where you can trivially beat anything by having 1/10th of the skill necessary to complete the Dark Souls tutorial. The only way around this is to make a good action combat system (impossible for CD Project) or make godawful damage/HP based level scaling so that higher level enemies could take 100 hits and one shot Geralt (the way W3 went).

On the other hand having literally nothing for players to do would make it very quickly boring as players just watched things happen. It's not like a traditional RPG where you have a party of at least 6 to manage, nor is it like NWN where you're playing in MP with other people. Single character games where you watch things hit each other back and forth is boring. It's stupid but forcing players to pay attention and click makes the player involved in combat without making combat skill dominate. And there is some depth to it, especially in FCR, since positioning matters a ton and completing a full attack chain is sometimes going to make you take far more hits than dodging mid-chain.

 

[Chippy]

I played it when it first came out and it had QTEs. They even randomly placed the prompt for the QTE in different places on the screen, so with the bloom effects and the glaring graphics there was times when I didn't even see the QTE on the screen in the 1 sec or so you had to play where's Wally's QTE.

It got to the point where I wanted the enemies to kill Geralt. It was like "Is there a QTE to make his death fucking worse?". Whoever agreed to that shit...

 

[moon knight]

Perhaps you're playing with low settings?

There is a bug that applies low settings to the game. You need to mod the ini file and set it to read only.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/20920/discussions/0/810919056966320280/

Put UberSampling to 0 instead of 2 if you don't want it

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Witcher 2 has terrible optimization issues at launch, the kind that made Cyberpunk 2077 look like a good release in comparison. You had to have a NASA-tier pc to be able to run it because Ubersampling was always an issue. While these days it's obviously not much of a problem, there's still some issues from back then.

 

[moon knight]

You had to have a NASA-tier pc to be able to run it because Ubersampling was always an issue.

Ubersampling increased the internal rendering resolution of geometries. If you play at 1080p with Uber ON, you are effectively playing at 4K.
It's not a matter of "optimization", it's a matter of not putting everything at Max without knowing what the settings do

 

[Ezekiel]

Better than Witcher 3, which has so many quests that you become overwhelmed and the story loses all urgency. Walk a few paces, another quest. Funniest moment was when I searched the Barron's bedroom for signs of what happened to his wife and daughter. Couldn't figure out what else Iwas supposed to look at, got distracted, did another mission, ended up doing several more, came back days later, Barron still sat there by the bedroom door, Gerralt told him he was still checking the room, lol.

 

[Angthoron]

I have a conflicting opinion of TW2, and in a way it's the opposite of my opinion of TW1. In short, I feel TW2 is less than the sum of its parts.

Don't get me wrong, TW2 did lots of things extremely well, and say what you will, its existence created the hype for TW3, so by no means is it a bad game.

Hell, it even does some rather bold things with the game structure, I mean, how many games in general have branching game worlds/storylines on the level TW2 did it? There's not that many, especially games that became mainstream enough to be noticed.

However, the pacing in the later part of the game crashes and burns, I've never found it in me to complete the game for that reason.

Well, that and the awful combat. Good grief, after the wonky but relatively unique combat system of TW1 they went ahead and picked the most bog-standard system of that year. Controlling Geralt felt like playing with a remote-controlled wheelchair filled with bricks and jelly, rolling, dodging, and combat in general felt absolutely rubbish. Didn't help that the game has a lot of it at times.

 

[Multidirectional]

There is a bug that applies low settings to the game. You need to mod the ini file and set it to read only.

From what I recall it would apply lowest LOD to ground textures by default, and the way to do it was to first set graphics preset to max and then lower the settings individually. That way shit wasn't constantly popping in on ground few meters in front of you. But it was a long time since I played it, maybe that has changed.