The Witcher 2

[a purple future]

the preload pauses with about 100mb left or so for everybody right?

[Erkki]

I've been playing a bit of The Witcher 1 today. I really hate the fighting mechanism. I hope they completely changed that in TW2, or else I won't buy.

How much have you played? Very similarly to Orvidos, I found the combat very odd at first, and it contributed to me stopping playing for a while without completing Kaer Morhen. Later I came back and loved it (after getting out of Kaer Morhen).

So the combat was fine in my opinion, but I'm also not saying they shouldn't change it -- there may be better ways to do it.

What eventually really starts irking me about Witcher 1 every time I play is the small little pauses you have to endure everywhere:

• pause before speaking as the screen goes into dialog mode
  
• if dialog threw you out, pause till the NPC finish their often long animation until you can speak again
  
• pause after fighting ends before you can pick up stuff/interact
  
• pause after fistfights
  
• the slow running from A to B when you are in a peaceful area (but more fast-travel would probably have lessened the atmosphere)
  
• maybe a few others
  
• (and in the original unpatched game... the horrid 2 minute load times, but with the patched version they are 1-10 seconds)
  

I hope this was due to the Aurora engine and will be gone from Witcher 2.

[elmuerte]

I'm way past Kaer Morhen and I've already completed a couple of quest from the "inn" hub. I stopped playing today when the game crashed while saving.

But I really don't get how to properly start fighting. Sometimes he just stands there doing nothing while I try clicking on things to initiate the first hit.

Yes, those pauses are really annoying. Actually, there are quite some annoying things in the game. Like all the people with exactly the same voice and same lines. The UI also has a few minor annoyances.

[Erkki]

The UI also has a few minor annoyances.

Like what? I've heard other people complain about it, but nothing specific. I kind of liked it.

[Lu]

Don't know if you knew this and I can't remember if it's an actual thing or not, but if you disable the subtitles and have audio only, I think the conversations move quicker without these weird dialog pauses.

This is during conversations, mind you. Not something you actually listed, but it reminded me of that.

[a purple future]

Like what? I've heard other people complain about it, but nothing specific. I kind of liked it.

no, he's right, a lot of the menus were abominations. the inventory screen especially pissed me off. it's obvious they were more concerned about aesthetics rather than ergonomics if that makes any sense.

for example: when you open your inventory, it only takes up about 1/4 of the screen, but then each item slot is about 10px high and you have to mouseover everything to see what it is. it takes way too long to find a specific potion or ingredient. when you're trying to sell things, if you have a stack of items, you have to double click on the item, mouse over to the middle of the screen, move the quantity slider (which defaults to 1 for some reason), then click OK. unless there's a shortcut that i somehow missed. why can't we just drag and drop or ctrl+click or something?

speaking of ctrl+click, i made it through the entire game without knowing you can ctrl+LMB to "collect all" on a container. so that sucked.

[Erkki]

Oh, yeah, the inventory UI kind of sucked. And I guess there are some other details that I didn't like (the skill tree if not meditating didn't give enough info etc.) I liked the Journal a lot though, but I guess that could have been better too, with links between entries.

speaking of ctrl+click, i made it through the entire game without knowing you can ctrl+LMB to "collect all" on a container. so that sucked.

What? Without opening the UI? I've played through it almost 3 times and still didn't know. Aaargh.

[a purple future]

What? Without opening the UI? I've played through it almost 3 times and still didn't know. Aaargh.

yup. as far as I can tell it's mentioned nowhere in the game or documentation. someone in the somethingawful Witcher 2 thread mentioned it and it blew my mind.

[Orv]

Well hells, I wish I'd known that.

That said, I really hope 2 lives up to my expectations. Dragon Age is such a lackluster set (only two currently, but. . .well) of RPGs that I'm losing hope for the genre.

[toblix]

Complex games like that would do well to spread the tutorial part of the game much more, even into the main part of it. Too many times they have these introductory settings (9 out of 10 times, it's the part where first everything is cool and then the main bad guy comes and destroys everything but you're too weak to do anything) where they just drown you in knowledge and expect you to absorb everything before they you enter the first town. Instead, they should do like Settlers 7 is doing with great success: open up the possibilities reeeeal slow, giving you time to get to know each system before the next one becomes available. In the case of advanced shortcuts, it's a typical mistake that a game tells you about it once in the start of the game, and you forget, because there's too much information, and you're busy getting to grips with mixing potions and spell gestures and how to forge swords and dress your guy. They should have a counter that keeps track of how many dudes you've manually looted (because at the start of the game that might not be a huge pain) and further in, when there's not so much intense learning going on, a pop-up could tell you "Looks like you've manually looted a hundred men! Did you know you could..." and so on.

So many games are so close to doing this; they have all these "did you know" kind of text on loading screens and in their web site FAQ. If they're able to keep track of the stupid stuff they do to give you achievements, they should also use that technology to learn you to play the game. Come to think of it, doesn't Valve do this sort of?

Sorry for using so much text to convey such a simple idea. tldr: a Tip of the Day thing that isn't terrible and useless.

[Gwardinen]

Complex games like that would do well to spread the tutorial part of the game much more, even into the main part of it. Too many times they have these introductory settings (9 out of 10 times, it's the part where first everything is cool and then the main bad guy comes and destroys everything but you're too weak to do anything) where they just drown you in knowledge and expect you to absorb everything before they you enter the first town.

I actually agree, but it's worth noting that Final Fantasy XIII basically did this (you didn't have access to every possible option in the combat system for a good 20 hours) slow ramp up of systems and concepts over a long time, and got lambasted for it by press and fans. Of course, it didn't help that the game genuinely didn't really become fun for quite a long time, but one does wonder how much the technical holding back contributed to that.

[toblix]

You'd have to hit a good balance between not drowning the player in stuff and not pissing off the ones replaying it.

[a purple future]

as much as I support good tips on loading screens and such, I'd be happy with a list of ALL the commands somewhere I can look at in-game.

[Nappi]

I quite enjoyed the slow introduction of Assassin's Creed II. Except for the race bit at the very beginning which I failed many times because I couldn't figure out wall running (or something like that). They taught you how to properly execute it right after the race, though, so..

I'm getting a bit scared of The Witcher 2 actually. It looks like the game is freaking huge and has tons of mechanics, and the last time I really played a sword and wand based RPG was Baldur's Gate 2 (which didn't go well). The game guide will come in handy, I suppose.

[Erkki]

I'm getting a bit scared of no pre-loading on Steam. What if the servers can't handle the pressure of everybody downloading what is probably 10+ GB of game on release day? What will I do then? I would go crazy.

[Lu]

I can play the game with you. I'll broadcast it to you and I'll wear my headphones so you can whisper in my ear what I have to do.

[a purple future]

shoulda GOGged it. on top of everything else, it downloaded for me at over 3mb/s which is massive. Steam and even torrents usually cap at about 1.5 for me.

[Erkki]

I can play the game with you. I'll broadcast it to you and I'll wear my headphones so you can whisper in my ear what I have to do.

It would be like a text adventure game! But with modern 3D graphics! And human-like AI!

BTW. If anyone watched the new [chris remo voice]five[/chris remo voice] launch trailers today, I'm kind of worried that this is going to be a lot more 'epic' than Witcher 1. What I liked a lot about The Witcher was that it didn't feel epic at all, except maybe once you get to Old Vizima. But with these huge battles that you actually take part in... is Geralt going to fight humans or monster mostly?

And I even would have preferred if the original game had less monsters, but tougher ones. If the world has so many monsters, how come there aren't a gazillion witchers for hire in each city, only Geralt. The Drowners got annoying after The Tower in each playthrough and the repellents sometimes hindered rather than helped.

[Lu]

We won't find out until release. The last 5%, you will not get them.

I win! My prize? The Witcher 2, yaaaaaaaaaay!

[Erkki]

You bastard. 1st I slept in and now the Steam servers are too busy to handle my kind request.

[Orv]

First impressions: Jesus christ, this is improved combat? 5 guys at once and my only defensive options are either knockback with two charges, or roll and take a sword in the back regardless?

Argh, no! I am far too tired for this bullshit parade right now. I'll try it when I wake up, but I'm not enjoying the combat, so much so that it's drowning out my enjoyment of the story.

Oh! Sidenote: There is a block key, and it is 'E', and the game never fucking says a word about it.

Edited May 17, 2011 by Orvidos

[Moosferatu]

Wow, the graphics card in my poor Vaio does not hold up so well. I think I'm going to have to drop the resolution.

[Gwardinen]

Two of my three main complaints, already addressed. The performance is terrible, I've had to really ramp down all kinds of options to even get it to approach a stable framerate, and it's still choppy at times, and the combat system is just as shallow as the first game with the added entertainment value of being incredibly frustrating.

The first is somewhat forgiveable, CDProjekt has clearly done its best to make this a serious graphical game, but with so many other AAA titles recently being much kinder to my computer (Dragon Age 2 and Portal 2 basically allowed me to run with everything worthwhile on max with literally no drop in FPS, for example) it is somewhat galling.

The latter is... well, bullshit. Maybe it gets better, but at the start of the game the combat just feels rushed, uncontrolled and punishing. I actually switched to easy difficulty almost immediately after that ballista fight right at the beginning of the game (you can switch difficulty without restarting) because they just throw you into the deep end of a very difficult combat system. What's more, it's not like the combat actually impresses me now anyway - it's still just clicking fast in the direction of your target. Things are actually going into a strange and uncomfortable tradeoff territory. Yes, you no longer have to fiddle with putting the cursor on the enemy, but now the auto-targetting system is rather dodgy much of the time and I frequently find it hard to change targets fast enough. Also, yes you're no longer just waiting for a cursor prompt to come up to tell you when to hit again, now most likely you're just literally hammering the left and/or right mouse button until the time comes that you need to dodge with space (I knew about E to block but frankly it doesn't seem useful, the dodge reacts faster and often ends up saving you from damage entirely). Additionally, it literally just hands you a load of Signs with no explanation of what they do or what resource they work on. What's more, most of them seem crap. In my experience the push/stun sign and the defensive shield sign are the only ones that have made a substantive difference.

Finally, my biggest gripe - it literally refuses to accept anything other than 16:9 monitor ratio! If you select a resolution with any different ratio, it will slap massive black bars across your screen not only in cutscenes and dialogue, but in the actual game itself. This makes it very difficult for me, with my 5:4 monitor, to even READ the tooltips coming up, let alone act on them. What's more it's just fucking ugly and makes everything much smaller than it needs to be while I'm trying to fight within a system that demands full situational awareness from the second fight in the game. I've actually had to hook my computer up to my TV because I couldn't stand playing it like that.

At first glance the actual story, dialogue and so on seem great, but right now I'm having a hard time objectively rating them due to my experiences with these three issues. Perhaps a more positive post later.

[Erkki]

Hmm... ok came home for a late lunch to try to start the download again. The servers don't seem to be that swamped looking at the charts, how come it's says they are too busy: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

[edit] Anyway, this seems kind of stupid. Regretting not getting it from GOG/physical. Why doesn't it just queue my request and try automatically later? I understand there may be some interactivity required in the process but I already accepted the EULA (and again on each attempt).

[elmuerte]

ok.. bargain bin it is