The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition

Have to admit i was a bit deluded by the 2nd witcher Game has great graphics, good storyline (even thou a bit rushy) and leaves a decent overall feeling, but.. 1- i don't like the changes they made in combat mechanics, expecially hate the "press this button or you die/loose" sequences, like the first time you meet the dragon but not only there 2- inventory is a mess, no way to actually organize it i spent about 30-35 hours on my first play, and 1/3 of the gametime was "eaten" by those 2 points 3- new potion system is imo wrong..ended up using very few of them. I see it like this: The witcher 2 < The witcher 1, exactly the same ways Dragon Age 2 is < Dragon Age 1... both got dumbed down a notch, while making them more easily "visually" appealing,and that's disappointing

In the interest of full disclosure, this is the first game I bought at full price since Oblivion (usually I wait a few months for the price to fall), and the only one I've ever pre-ordered. I did so mainly to support GOG and encourage DRM-free releases, not because I expected this to be even better than average. TW1 was entertaining but not great, so I don't think I had unrealistic expectations. First, the good. Like the previous title, it's got an interesting story and detailed, immersive world. A good variety of side quests. Believable characters. Cinematic, flowing noncombat sequences. A bunch of cool abilities to play with. Most of the visuals are exceptional, far beyond what I was expecting. Performance was quite good and frame rates stayed high. Overall, this is the foundation and environment for a really, really good game. Unfortunately, the combat is so profoundly bad that it ruined the game for me. It's not challenging (which would make it satisfying) so much as frustrating. There are some battles that were ridiculously easy, so that using the cool abilities just wasted time. In the rest, I couldn't stand still long enough to use them. I spent entire battles rolling around on the floor trying desperately to get the camera and targeting system to point at an enemy. The boss fights require dozens of reloads, as I could only find each boss's vulnerability through trial and error. And when I finally beat a boss, there was no sense of satisfaction or pride, because I knew it was pure luck. The excessive reloading completely derailed the cinematic feel, too. There are a bunch of other minor annoyances. A few of the character models are really bad, which I noticed only because the rest of the graphics are so good. The inventory system most closely resembles a junk drawer. Some of the dialogue choices don't match the conversation that follows. This is about 75% of an amazing game grafted onto 25% of a terrible one, and the terrible overshadows the amazing. The only reason I don't regret the purchase is because it supported a good cause.

This review contains no spoilers. Dont get me wrong, i think this game is quite good at the end, some aspects are really the best around. I personally trust in CDP as developer, they did a great job patching and improving the witcher 1, proving they aim to be a solid company for their customers. Im not talking about bugs here because actually even with 1.1 patch the game is full of them, but we know that CDP RED is a trustable company that will do their job and iron out everything possible later on. CDP did a huge step forward with this release with the introduction of a new and great engine, but there are many opinable if not poor decisions about developing different aspects of the game. There is a very bad design of all the menus (inventory, crafting system, trading etc) and a gameplay too much script based, really limiting the gameplay, in many occasions the game plays like an interactive movie as don bluth dragon's lair, not sure how some ppl can see an rpg masterpiece in this mess. There are other reasons that i will explain soon. ---Graphics: the new engine is one of the best if not the best around, the game even at mid video setting looks impressive, the landscapes, vegetation, and textures in general are the state of the art, lighting effects and raining are great too, everything looks very realistic and beautiful to see at a point that you can spend some time looking the landsacpes from a cliff as it was somethign real. About that there is a bloom effect which should be adjustable cause with different video settings you can end to have an effect too strong, still cool but quite unrealistic, anyway this is not a big issue. The engine and this impressive graphics is surely the best aspect of the game. ----Audio: The music and the audio effects are excellent, anyway most of the npcs are repeating to death the same statement every 5 seconds when you stand near them, which is really really annoying and make no sense at all, much better the old fashioned dynamic ambient sound which is a lot less redundant. ----Combat system: The combat system is different from wt1, now its full real time and its developed to be played with a joypad more then keyboard+mouse, anyway it works fine and its fun and interesting as idea. There are ranged weapons like throwing knives (actually op) and bombs, many different traps to place on floor, the possibility to parry (and counterattack if you have the proper talent), the signs to add more depth. Overall the combat system is fun and nice, it relays a lot on the user skill and i think the result is quite good. Anyway after some time you will see some issues in this system. Parry is a bit inconsistent due to the fact its not always working when you press the button due to a complex animation structure, its not lag or fps but just to avoid breaking a fluid animation the game lets you parry only when your character is not doing anything else, adding this to the fact you cant parry most monsters, so you will end to prefer dodge in most occasions. The best tactic at the end is always rolling on the floor like a madman and strike when you can, in many occasions it seems just an hack'n'slash, but i return to tell, the combat system has his ups and downs, but overall its good. On a side note the use of the potions is different from wt1, you need to drink the potions out of combat, so you should prepare yourself before a fight, too bad this system obviously works only if you know in advance if you are going to be involved in a fight, wich is possible only with a die-and-reload-gameplay. Bad choice tbh, as potions should be part of the withcer combat arsenal and in this game you will end to use potions only after you died in a fight to repeat it with a little help, also the pots lasts too little and you will end to use them marginally. ---The story: The story may be appealing itself but if you played tw1 and you know what happened before it make no sense at all in many circumstances, the problem is how the story is implemented in the game, and expecially the fact Gerald seems always without the knoledge of any important event, person, situation, that should be part of his backbround. I will not go specific here to avoid spoilers but just the fact that Gerald starts as level 1 character having issues to beat even the most crap solider, without the knowledge of any monster and with a very basic alchemy knowledge is totally in contrast with any possible prelude to this plot. It was better to say this is a cousin of Gerald starting to be a witcher too, or duno, another amnesy... best was surely to start Gerald around level 35 with the possibility to assign x talents at game start (ofc with a different develop of the actual talent trees) to add more logic and also replay value to the title . But as it is implemented the story collide in many situations with the background that Gerald must have, even later on there are absurd situations. ---Gameplay: The gameplay is a bit weird to be an rpg, infact as it is for many other modern titles the rpg is action based, heavily cinematic and deeply scripted, with a very limited freedom in interaction and exploration, and short dialogues with very limited choices. One of the most annoying aspect of the gameplay is the fact in many situations, expecially some fights, its implemented the "dragon's lair" gameplay, so you basically interact with a cinematic pressing the right button when needed, if you do it right you go on, if you dont it will start the cinematic of the game over. About that i really cant stand this gameplay, considering it modern seems absurd to me. It can happen you find a destructible wall/door/window, you try interact with it but you cant no matter what you try, later on you will see this game element can be destroyed/opened only after triggering a specific script. The fictional world buildt around your hero seems alive, but only if you look it from the distance, as you cant interact with most npcs which will just repeat exactly the same routine every day like a pack of zombies. The issue here is the fact CDP tried to give a trait and give some personality to any marginal npcs, but the result is that they are annoying and non sense cause when you enter their range a script will perform something very specific, but always the same thing everytime. As i wrote before the speech of most of the npcs is annoying cause they will repeat the same sentence every 5 seconds when you are near them. There are many sections of the game where you need to do something with one or more npcs, in some of those sections sadly the game seems forgetting you want to loot. In other situations there are sections where you are called to rush doing something, ofc full scripted again, but if you just stand or move doing something else the result is just the npc/s shouting to hurry but nothign happens, the script is just waiting you to go in the direction needed. You are a super hero but its meant you to search every barrel/box around collecting every junk, it seems a bit dated as idea. You can enter every house regardless the daytime and steal everything under the eyes of the npcs without any direct or indirect consequences, even the npcs will always salute you as it was normal to see a withcer checking every box in their house at midnight. the interaction with npcs is very very imited and until you trigger some specific scripts even the most important npcs in game will give only the same 2-3 options if talking to them no matter if the situation in the story is a lot different or Gerald gathered some important informations. This is a huge problem cause even if you are progressing into different stages of the game the fictional world made of npcs seem frozen at the first interaction you had with them, this is quite a drawback for an rpg game. The looting system is not really user friendly, positioning your hero to pick up the loot is a total mess, some boxes/objects are not accessible even if you try 3 hours, you can be blocked by some object on the ground, even vegetation. To prevent issues in combat the game requires you to exit combat before looting, there are many situations where you will need to move on leaving loot on the ground, loot on the ground will disapper after some time, also if you drop an item in many occasions you cant take it back. The looting window is very tiny and you cant scale it, also cant get why the mouse cursor sometimes is placed on take all by default and sometimes just appear in the screen corner. you need to press z key and use your medallion to highlight possible loot and objects you can interact with, the medallion needs to recharge so sometimes you have to wait to use it. the color of highlited objects can be confusing during day cause all the bloom effects, it last not long, also if you are using the nightvision potion the highlight effect will not be so different from what you see, its annoying. The inventory system and the menu in general are the weak part of this game, the inventory is a list of items, there are buttons to see specific categories, like weapons, traps and so on. Too bad there are a lot of categories that have not any button or just the category is too big, you cant sort junk from all the rest, so to sell junk you need to pass the whole inventory list looking every line one by one to check what is junk and what not, there is not the possibiltiy to sort the shcematics resulting in a huge list of potions, upgrades, crafting sheets etc with no possibility even to sort them alphabetically. If you select an item you cant see the price and the quantity you have, you can see those informations only when the item you are interested in is not selected. When you select an item in the inventory there is a little popup as tooltip but its a scrolling text ultra slow which is really annoying and make no sense. Everything in the inventory is showed into a little window with a scrollbar, and all the menu are made in this way, too bad most of the screen space results black totally unused, cant understand this choice really. Only mentioning that you will have items in your inventory tagged as mission items, even if you dont have any quest, task or mission related to the item yet, kinda weird as you cant know if you need to keep all this stuff in case is stackable materials like monster parts. There is not any customization and even if the game was a console port i think its possible to do something better then this. Trading suffers the same issue as basically you cant hide the patterns you just have from the merchant list, and there is not any graphical info about that , resulting again in taking your list and read it line by line to be sure you are not buying a schematic or o a book twice. At start maybe this is not an issue but later on the lists are quite long and this system is out of any logic. What you can carry is based on weights, the game is full of different ingredients, patterns, items in general and you will see soon that what you can carry is quite limited, so at a point you will end to contiune go back and forth to sell items or just you will leave most of the loot on the floor. At the time of this review also some weights looks incorrect and prolly a next patch will fix it in some manner. I will not be surprised to see the introduction of the bag of holding in this game at a point or the reduction to all the junk to zero weight, duno but atm its not working ,expecially all the gameplay related to inventory/trading is in contrast with the develop of an fast peaced action oriented game, all the menu system should be revisited in a future enached edidtion. The alchemy system is good overall but it suffers the same issue as all the other menus, its a big list without any possibility of sorting different patterns, also the pc will auto select the elements to create a potion regardless the price, rarity or the number of elements you have in your bag. So it can happen to create a basic potion the pc auto selection choose a very rare and expencive element while the same could be swapped with an herb that you can find every 30 seconds and you got 150 in your bag, very annoying and non sense. The progression tree and leveling system is ofc present, tbh anyway i dont see so much the impact on the game of many talents and some seem really useless, but about that i may be wrong. The map is made as cartoon cel-shading style, its oki artistically but its very little, its very approximate and more then once you will be mislead looking the map and you will just avoid it. About the mini games, i cant get who may be interested or may find fun or appealing the arm wresting, boxing, and the damn poker dice. Really, no one liked those mini games even in the witcher 1, why they are present again in this sequel goes beyond any logic. Into specific the poker dice its just a matter of save game, play poker, if needed reload game, play poker... non sense really. I would like to point out that the windows solitaire is more interesting, requires at least some skill and its free. -----Conclusion: At the end i think some aspects of this game may be welecome for some players but i really dont think a standard rpg player could find this title a masterpiece of the genre. At this point we should decide what is an rpg and what does it mean a to be non linear, cause every developer seems to claim those 2 aspect to be present in every release. I hope we will not see Colin McRae Dirt 4 sold as a non linear rpg just cause you play the role of a pilot and the result of a race depends on your driving. Tbh even if this was announced as an rpg made for pc, the feeling is to play a console oriented game. The choice to build the game around the gamepad has a very strong impact on every aspect of the game, from the combat to the menus, sadly its a choice that limited surely the develop of this title, like if Blizzard decided to develop starcraft2 to be played with a pad just to achieve more market, imagine the result. In general this game plays more similar to titles like Darksiders or Assassin's Creed then any traditional rpg, its oki CDP wanted to implement something more modern into a genre maybe a bit redundant, but the result seems looking more to the console market then the rpg players.

The graphics are much prettier, but aside from that every single change from the first one in the series is a step backwards. The story feels a lot more linear, the combat has been reduced to click-as-fast-as-you-can (one of my favourite things about the combat in the last game was that it was all about timing). The voice acting is better, but the dialog is painful and now NPCs replay conversations over and over in you hearing, rather than just little snippets. And the running. In the first game, I never felt like quests were 'run to this side of the map, then run back'. Now I don't seem to be doing anything else. This is made more annoying by the fact that the map is now terrible and you can no longer set destination waypoints unless they're quests. The entire UI (especially the inventory screen) feels like it's been dumbed down to work with a console controller, and so everyone has to suffer because of the XBox 360. I played the first game in periods of an hour or more, interrupted only because I had to do other things. I don't think I've yet managed half an hour of solid gameplay of The Witcher 2 without getting bored. I bought both games together on the special offer, and I'd feel ripped off if not for the fact that The Witcher by itself was easily worth what I paid. The value added to the bundle by the inclusion of the sequel was negligible.

Having just completed the game, I can easily say this is the best RPG (so far) of 2011. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at, the sound and voice acting are generally solid, the characters are excellent and full of depth, the story is non-linear, mature and thoroughly interesting, and with 16 different endings there is a lot of incentive to play through it again. There are, however, some drawbacks that many have already stated. Personally, I found the QTEs (quick time events) to be the most disappointing aspect of the game. When I had my first fist-fight and saw the required buttons pop up on the screen, I felt like someone had just taken a dump on my ruby diamond. QTEs once had their place in gaming, back in the days of quasi Sega-CD gameplay ala Sewer Shark and Power Rangers, but nowadays it just feels lazy. There are only a handful of animations during fist fights that you'll see over and over again if you decide to pursue the related side quests, and at no point are they ever challenging. One button press, or two button presses--that's it. I'd laugh when the host of the fist-fighting tournament would announce some acclaimed, vicious, baby-eating champion and I'd defeat him with the exact same sequence of keys as the lowly peasant before him. Besides the QTEs turning the fist-fighting into mediocrity, they also made a number of other sequences downright infuriating. There's nothing fun about fighting a boss for 10 minutes straight, only to die instantly and restart because a QTE popped up on the bottom of the screen and you happened to not be looking for it at that particular moment. God of War got away with using QTEs because they were well-implemented and forgiving; you generally didn't die immediately after hitting the wrong button. In The Witcher 2, you're severely punished for not expecting these QTE moments, and in my opinion it damages the experience as a whole. As the game progresses, and dramatic cutscenes unfold, you'll be looking at the bottom of the screen instead of enjoying the action and dialogue because you'll wonder if you have to hit a certain press of a button. Another issue I had was with the constant need for Quen-spamming. When cast, this sign protects you and sends damage back to the attacker, and it's something--no matter what skill tree you choose--you'll need for many of the battles. There are a number of fights that I simply couldn't beat without it (the bosses in particular), and I think this really limits the customization of your character, especially since you can't regenerate vigor while Quen is cast. Most new players will have to use Quen at the beginning of the game in order to progress through the merciless tutorial, and at that point they've probably already made the decision that it's a spell they'll be using religiously for the rest of the game. As I said before, most of the voice acting is solid, but considering the important role Triss Merigold has in the game (she was also a main character in The Witcher 1), they could have done a much better job with her. It sounds like she's incredibly bored every time she speaks, lacking the emotional ups and downs of the English language and instead residing somewhere in the middle--a monotonous , generic tone that doesn't sit well with the rest of the excellent voicework. Some complain about the feeling of "consolitis" in this game, and they'd be right to do so. The entire interface feels like it was designed for the Xbox 360 controller. I should know--I played through the whole game with one. I tried using the mouse and keyboard initially but it just didn't feel right--like a console port with keyboard functionality tacked on. The mouse also had massive input lag compared to using my Xbox 360 controller--I could barely navigate menus with it, much less fight a group of mobs. Lastly, although it's amazing that the NPCs all have lives and perform different tasks depending on the time of day, it feels kind of empty as it doesn't have any real meaning in terms of gameplay. In RPGs like Gothic 1&2, and Oblivion, the NPCs going to sleep at night meant (for me at least) that it was time to sneak into their homes and steal their loot. But nobody cares in The Witcher 2; you're free to rob every house blind right in front of the homeowners without so much as a slap on the wrist. The reasoning behind this from the developers was to increase the "fun" aspect, but personally I find it more fun to have that extra layer of tension and, dare I say, realism. Yes, despite the game featuring dragons, sorcery and midgets with deep voices, there is a very evident level of realism and believability that the developers try to maintain in other facets of the game. Being punished for thievery would not have been out of place at all; it would have only strengthened that believability. Ignoring these imperfections, there is a beautiful, excellent game here with tons of content and a massive appeal to old-school RPers and new ones alike. If I were to compare it to another series of popular games, I would say this is the Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 1. It's more streamlined and accessible, with many improvements over the original game to create a more fast-paced, and less cumbersome adventure. It'll make your jaw drop numerous times as you gaze at the gorgeous scenery, and you'll raise your fists in the air with joy as you defeat some of the more challenging foes. The mature story will have you interested until the end, and with so many different conclusions and whole towns being connected to your specific dialogue choices, there is a ton of reason to play through again. The Witcher 2 may not be the flawless game we were all hoping for, but it excels in ways that few ever have. Its positives outweigh the negatives, and even when you fail that unexpected QTE button press, you won't want to put the controller down. Any fan of RPGs should play this, and with the no-DRM, full-featured option at GOG, there's no reason why you shouldn't already own it. I can't wait to see what CD Projekt comes up with next.