Now this is an excellent thread. Loads of constructive criticism, well done op. I don't necessarily agree with everything you said but a lot of good points.

I completely agree with everything here. I absolutely love the game, and I can tell CDP poured their souls into it, but I really think it could've used another few weeks or so in the oven. It just seems like some of the secondary...stuff got less of a thorough debugging. Alot of the UI stuff already mentioned, but also alot of the tertiary elements seem to have been overlooked a bit. Off the top of my head, when you play dice with Skalen in Vergen in chapter 2, he's supposed to give you The sword of warrior princess Xenthia and a Dun Banner cloak if you beat him twice. I got the cloak, but not the sword. Definitely a bug. Another example is also in Vergen, where you meet one of Vivaldi's bank managers who says I can draw out some money. I Persuaded him to give me more, and I didn't get anything at all. Just small bugs like that tend to really irk me.

Also, I understand the decision to limit the amount of time potions last, as they effect your character and could make you uber powerful if not, but...Cat? All that does is allow you to see better in dark places. It's really annoying to have to stop and re-potion myself every 5ish mins. Especially in large places like the Mines in Vergen. I know you can upgrade your skills in Alchemy to make potions last longer, but I feel like Cat should last awhile from the getgo since it doesn't affect your combat prowess in any way.

Just my 2 cents. I'm sure I'll have more as I get deeper in. Still love the game though :)

i'd like to add one more UI bug:

Some items get invisible and inaccessible through the inventory.

I used throwing daggers in the prologue. The kind of dagger I used does not show up in my inventory,whether i craft or buy it. Checked by dropping everything down to weight 0 and bought that type of dagger, weight changed from 0 to 1. Not selectable via pocket cycling, does not show up in inventory.

Probably related to the removing of stuff in pockets in the prologue.

Edit: there's an awkward solution with gettin stripped from stuff in certain quests, which will fix the invisible items.

Related thread: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/the_witcher_2/inventory_daggers_vanish

A point that is also a bit bothering with the inventory : quests items that can't be sold nor be dropped.
At the end of the game, added to the necessity to use 'all items' view to sell junk, scrolling through all of those quest items that are not anymore useful is a bit tedious.
They could just go with a warning when you try to drop a quest item coupled with a confirmation key.

Can't scroll in Journal entries that are longer than a single page when using a gamepad.

Also,when exiting the various screens (inventory,journal) you're taken directly back to the game instead of the pause menu. This is very troublesome when you're alternating between the various menus using the gamepad and have no access to hotkeys.

And I really hope the attributes section get some improvement. Especially the bonuses section where everything is clumped up together. That particular screen is fairly bland honestly.

I'd love to see this list of items fixed and at the very least the alchemy crafting portion. It's annoying having to switch rare ingredients out everytime you want to craft something.

This is a great list, especially the alchemy stuff, the alchemy screen is far more confusing than it needs to be.
To that, I would add that while I really like the clean, simple icons they've designed to represent each ingredient type, in the central alchemy wheel the icons are tilted at various angles depending on their positions in the circle. When the difference between some icons is that one has a vertical line and another has a diagonal line, this makes it very difficult to tel them apart.

Also:
The zoomed-out map of the kingdoms has no current location marker, which makes it a bit pointless, and while the cyrillic runes are cute, it would be nice to actually know which kingdom is which (I don't have the boxed version with the paper map).

A minimap north marker is great, but what would also be nice is an option to lock minimap orientation to north=up

Show what the second level of a talent does before you invest a talent into the first level

A single-click option for harvesting plants

A shorter delay before corpses are lootable/ a shorter delay before you can reuse your medallion

I've got to disagree. I think the UI issues are even worse with a controller.

This is a solid list. The UI really is a major hindrance on being able to enjoy the game. Just tonight I hopped on excited to play but, by the time I had sorted through all of my junk and cleared enough space in my bag to get going, I didn't want to play anymore...

The only thing Id add is the the weight of items relative to their purchase and resale value seems off especially considering the player's near total lack of knowledge of what what's whilst trying to sort through it all. It's also annoying to not be able to buy anything back, ever.

Honestly, I'm not even sure why they didn't include a junk filter other than it didn't mesh with their UI's backend design. As far as I can tell items with a mask value of exactly "1" are junk or trinkets and can be filtered by that (i.e., active but no other special category). I mean... I tested it out and made a junk filter mod and more (sorting even), which seems to work. I haven't released it yet because I wanted a quicker way to update it against patches, which I've now gotten solved. Also interested in seeing what the upcoming patch fixes too.

I agree with all of the complaints about the UI. Great game otherwise, but the UI is one of the weak points.

We need someone like Darnified (makes awesome UI mods for Bethesda games) to fix the Witcher 2 UI. :)

The problem with fixing the UI is that it isn't something like a bunch of XML files, but Flash 8. There are some free tools like flasm, flare, swfmill etc that help, but without at least a couple hundred dollars investment in Flash tools and a lack of sleep, you'll not overhaul it that much. Ultimately it would be a lot easier if CDPR released their .fla and .as files, but that might be more complicated since they use some third-party components - cheap to licence but also free for noncommercial use, but it'd probably be a grey area for them. At least you should be able to use the free MTASC AS2 compiler... they obviously did in parts.

Big up to you, stormclaw. I support!

Most annoying thing in the game (the only one, for me); to make a long story short the alchemy menu sucks.

Also there really need to be more sound effects while browsing the various menus.
Sometimes while accessing menus when there is no background music, the only thing I hear, even through headphones are the sound of my mouse clicks.
I'm not sure if it's an issue with my onboard soundcard though.

I've got Flash & hate sleeping but what I'd really need is their API that ties flash to the rest of the game.

I'm sure I could piece it together with their .fla & .as but not even a company as community oriented as CDPR is going to give us those.