The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

[bandidoquest]

One more thought. I just finished Act I, and overall, there isn’t a lot of combat in the game. Doing a gross estimation, about three times less than in The Witcher 1, which i played a few weeks ago. In particular, there isn’t a lot of random of combat encounters in the wild, the forest is mostly empty and the spawn of new critters is slow, the combat comes mainly in specific quests and specific scripted moments. In other words, when it’s related to the plot and it’s needed as a climax of the quest.
It’s a interesting change of combat heavy rpg games like The Witcher I and Dragon Age, with a great duration but full of random encounters, quests padded in length with combat at every step, etc.
It also makes sense given the new lethality of combat. It also emphasizes the need of preparation for the fight, as if you were fighting every 2 minutes it would be too tiring to do the preparations (bombs, traps, oils, potions).

Also, it partially explains the much shorter length of The Witcher 2. For what i am reading, the length is about 26-30 hours, and yes it’s clearly shorter but if we take in account the lack of generic fedex quests, the reduced backtracking in comparison with W1, the lack of loading screens and the general sparseness with combat, it’s not shorter by as much as apppears at first.

That’s true and a big quality of TW2 for me. My biggest complaint about TW1 was the extremely annoying respawn and constant enemy encounters. I must’ve killed thousands of Drowners in that game!

[thinkingork]

I agree the game have problems with difficulty balance and gimmicky fight in bosses and qtes in general, but i don’t agree it’s a step backward. It as great leap forwards, better than other more pure action games i tried.

Yah. Witcher 2 is definitely better than other action heavy RPG. Just seems pale in comparison with the original.

Another thing the original does better is the day/night system, which is much underplayed in Witcher 2. There are probably only one or two quests which utilize it. The changes in the environment also don’t seem to be as dramatic as they are in the original, which you have a quiet little village turns into a depressing hellhole during night time. It reinforces one of the themes of the game that there is a monster underneath even the most innocent thing. In Witcher 2, the assets are certainly there with the beautiful nightsky , dynamic lightings and even npc schedule. But there simply are not have enough contents or I couldn’t find them during my playthrough.

This problem can be easily solved with DLC packs tho.

[Sir_Digby]

I wanna do a full complete run, I reckon doing all the side quests first is the way to go, right?

[MattKeil]

Yah. Witcher 2 is definitely better than other action heavy RPG. Just seems pale in comparison with the original.

There is not a single aspect of the combat system that isn’t superior to the original. Just a massive leap forward in every possible respect.

I do agree on the day/night cycle, though. Somehow the nights seemed noticeably more menacing in the first game.

[TurinTur]

Let’s agree on disagree about the combat, thinkingork. :P

In the other hand i agree with the day/night cycle, it was more marked in the Witcher 1.

I am still impressed with the voice acting, how even secondary characters and misc npcs that do “ambient” talk between them have a great effort in them.

[Kurina]

This may be a silly question (and sorry if already brought up), but does anyone have difficulty receiving rewards from NPCs? Without getting too specific and risk spoilers, although I doubt they really are, I have both won and been given rewards through normal questing and some random gambling. The problem is, I can never find it in my inventory. My weight is also not changing.

Anyone else encountered this as a bug? Or am I completely missing something here? I did check the ‘All’ section as well in my inventory.

Gah, driving me crazy. Minor issue, as I have continued to play and enjoy the game immensely, but curiosity is going to kill me here.

[Razgon]

Those of you who imported a savegame - Did you start in the prologue as well with a lot of money? I had my armor and such, but only 130 orens…

[Sir_Digby]

“Witcher Digby was confident… too confident as a matter of fact; he drank two potions, coated his silver sword with a damaging poison and rushed towards Malena’s Cave… 5 seconds later he was torn apart by 15 Nekkers.”

Yeah, I was totally not prepared.

[John_Reynolds]

Yeah, I finally beat that quest but the amount of nekkers that spring up from the ground seems to be random. I finally got only 2-3 attacking me, took care of those with lots of rolling and kiting, and then found what I needed in there. But there were times when a f’n baker’s dozen appeared and sent brave Ser Whimper running back toward the cave entrance.

[TurinTur]

This may be a silly question (and sorry if already brought up), but does anyone have difficulty receiving rewards from NPCs? Without getting too specific and risk spoilers, although I doubt they really are, I have both won and been given rewards through normal questing and some random gambling. The problem is, I can never find it in my inventory. My weight is also not changing.

Anyone else encountered this as a bug? Or am I completely missing something here? I did check the ‘All’ section as well in my inventory.

Gah, driving me crazy. Minor issue, as I have continued to play and enjoy the game immensely, but curiosity is going to kill me here.

Well… what reward?

[Bandersnatch]

I was unable to get the troll tongue through the dice game, played like 30 rounds of it before I gave up and failed the quest. I could have completed the quest through other means, but I didn’t want to go that route.

“Witcher Digby was confident… too confident as a matter of fact; he drank two potions, coated his silver sword with a damaging poison and rushed towards Malena’s Cave… 5 seconds later he was torn apart by 15 Nekkers.”

Yeah, I was totally not prepared.

“These Nekkers aren’t so bad once you get used to…OH SHIIIIIIII”
Frantic grapeshot throwing ensues

[Kurina]

Well… what reward?

Sorry, I never know how picky people may be with spoilers, even though I don’t consider them such. I get worried clarifying too much these days.

Practically, all of the items I have won thus far. A sword (of xantha? something like that) from a dwarf in chapter 2, a mysterious unnamed item a defeated foe gave me in chapter 2, and a tempered armor reward from gambling with the quartermaster to name a few. Regarding the mystery item, I was just told to “Take this.” I have no idea what it is, I can’t find anything new or interesting in my inventory, and weight didn’t change.

I keep winning items I can never find, and am just curious if this is a bug others get as well, or if I am completely missing something within the game. I’m guessing the former, but thought I would check around and see. Want to see what I’m winning! Even if I am continuing fine without.

[Gendal]

I never got that sword of xena or whatever either.

[Equisilus]

Those of you who imported a savegame - Did you start in the prologue as well with a lot of money? I had my armor and such, but only 130 orens…

I imported a final save and didn’t have a lot of orens (about the same as you, actually). Unfortunately, I don’t remember how many I had in that final save of TW1 so I don’t know if I should have had more or not.

[Paul_cze]

I had over 11000 orens in my last savegame, but in TW2 I only had 200 or so.

[Pogo]

My biggest complaint about TW1 was the extremely annoying respawn and constant enemy encounters. I must’ve killed thousands of Drowners in that game!

There was a talisman you could buy from Kalkstein for about 300g that repelled Drowners.

Or you could run around them, gather up all 15 of them, and kill all of them with one Silver Group Style combo :)

[John_Reynolds]

Man, I feel like an idiot. Because the game starts with the other skill trees locked out, I assumed that the push/stun sign was the only one available. Had no idea the others could be used until I hit 7th level and those other trees opened up, and by then I was running around outside Flotsam. Would’ve made that final monastery fight against six opponents a lot easier.

Starting to really get into the game now, getting the hang of combat and loving the graphics.

[bandidoquest]

There was a talisman you could buy from Kalkstein for about 300g that repelled Drowners.

Or you could run around them, gather up all 15 of them, and kill all of them with one Silver Group Style combo :)

Don’t think I saw this talisman on my playthrough :(. And yes, it was really easy to kill a lot of them but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s pretty bad design (at least for me, there must be people who like it) and even though Drowners were the worst offenders, the respawn was bad with basically all of the enemies. I distinctly remember being really annoyed with the Bloedzulgers as well. Anyway, this is only a minor complaint of an awesome game.

[Pogo]

OR, you could just run around them, or keep running to your destination and eventually they would just stop following you.

I was pretty annoyed with it before I started doing that, though. At some point I realized I was getting 1xp for even killing a drowner, so I said fuck it and kept running!

[Paul_cze]

I enjoyed killing bloedzuigers. There was one huge group of like 10 of them in one place in the swamp. I killed that group at least ten times because it was so much fun to massacre them all at once and watching them explode : ))

Drowners I was running from too, those were a bit boring after a while.