So The Witcher 2 sat in my Steam library for two years. I occasionally tried loading it up and playing it, but the game would stick and stagger so badly in the tutorial mission that I just couldn't bear to continue. Well, one (modest) hardware upgrade a few months ago, and I felt ready to tackle it. Now that I've finished it, it is a great game that everyone who loves medieval-style fantasy games and choice-laden narratives should have in their library. Go out and get this one. With sale prices for The Witcher 2 dropping as low as $3, there is very little reason not to purchase it at some point.
What follows was after one playthrough of The Witcher 2, played without importing a save-game from The Witcher.
THIS LIST CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS.
Gameplay
+ High replayability (always the first thing I look for), thanks to a branching narrative and choice-laden side-quests.
+ Four skill trees, but lots of skills to choose from.
+ Lots of equipment, and the ability to craft and upgrade new new armor and swords
+ Lots of customizations for the equipment.
+ Lots to do and explore.
+ Big maps that, while maybe not "open world" in the same sense as Skyrim, are nevertheless sprawling and provide a good sense of size
+ Choice-centered dialog, some of which is on a timer (only a few seconds to respond). This prevented me from pausing the game and looking up ramifications on the internet.
+ / - Combat may be more realistic, but (as a hack 'n slash fan) I found the combat in the first Witcher game, with three on-the-fly styles to choose from, much more engaging.
- The "click to climb" and "click to jump" mechanics may have been easier for the developers than programming jump and climb abilities, but they break immersion at best and are annoying as heck at worst. For instance: descending the path to Kayran's lair.
- Map size can be an illusion generated by the time it takes to travel. There is no fast-travel (also as in the first game)
- The in-game map has points of interest marked on it, but nothing else
- The inventory system is a cluttered mess. I finally quit trying to monitor it, and just watched the weight meter to make sure the weight of what I was carrying didn't slow me down.
- Bad combat scaling, i.e. combat is too hard in the beginning, and too easy by the end.
- Alchemy and brewing potions is less intuitive than in the first Witcher game, and while potions are helpful (the Cat potion is easily the most creepy), it was extremely frustrating to ready up for a fight, have a cutscene, then find that for some reason the cutscene cancelled ALL the potions I had painstakingly brewed and consumed.
- Some quests provide no indication of how to proceed. So I can wander around the game-map for hours looking for the right NPC to further the quest, or I can just look up a let's play. Completionists will probably discover where to go since they'll explore every nook and cranny of the map, but more casual gamers will be frustrated by some incomplete quests in their journal.
- - Geralt has to meditate to drink potions. Who thought this was a good idea? Again, more realistic, perhaps. Forget about dodging away from a fight, quickly drinking a potion, and diving back in again. Can't do it. If you try, Geralt's animation going into and out of meditation will take so long that he will absorb extra damage in the process. That's if the game allows you to meditate in combat in the first place; sometimes I could, while other times I got a "Meditation Cannot be Performed at this Time" message. Horrible design decision.
Characters
+ Lots of old friends are back. Dandelion narrates the game, and Zoltan Chivay fights along side Geralt in several missions.
+ Geralt himself is a little less restrained, depending on the situation. One possible scenario sends him on a path of righteous slaughter to rescue someone. We have seen numerous times that NPCs are afraid of witchers, even though Geralt is usually torn between two sides. This was a chance to see what happens when a witcher is motivated by cold fury, and the carnage was devastating. Geralt just seems more human in general, with some wry sarcasm appearing occasionally.
+ Some great new characters (to those who have only played the games). Ves, Roche, Saskia, Sila, Letho, Philippa, and my man Iorveth - all well drawn and superbly voiced.
- Triss Merigold returns as well. Now don't get me wrong. Playing as Geralt, Triss was the woman for me in the first game. I never really bought into the whole Shani romance. It was always Triss. Well, in The Witcher 2 they changed her character design, making her less willowy and more compact, though more voluptuous as well. That's fine. Most of The Witcher 2 is spent on the road, not in court advising kings. But Triss' voice actress is flat, wooden, and simply boring, as well as sounding more girlish. The Triss of the first game was someone I would have hesitated to cross. In The Witcher 2, Triss is a damsel in distress for about half of the game, and the voice acting makes her sound young and naive. I was still motivated to save her, but am ultimately disappointed that she has so little to do when she is there.
Narrative
+ There are two different paths to the game, and lots of tangential choices to be made along the way.
+ A simple motivation - finding the kingslayer - gives the story good forward impetus.
+ You can't please everybody. You'll have regrets about many decisions in this one. In true Witcher fashion, though, the alternatives are not always better options.
+ / - Only two romance options (though there are plenty of opportunities for more base gratifications).
+ / - Lots of nudity in this one. Some of it is gratuitous. For instance (SPOILER): Triss is captured, wearing her usual outfit. She gets shrunk into a statue; the statue, when we see it, displays her still wearing her outfit. When the statue is decompressed and she is "reborn," she is reborn naked. Though the next time we see her in the dungeon, she is wearing the same outfit from prior to her capture. So logically, she should have had clothes on when being "reborn."
+ / - Lots of violence, too. Though torture is not shown on screen, the immediately before and the immediately after is shown, and might be disturbing the first time you play through the game.
- Some of the politics and background are insufficiently explained at the beginning - like the full implications of Foltest's war. It is mentioned once (maybe twice), then never mentioned again. This was one of the first times I kept referring back to journal entries for completed missions (ghost-written by Dandelion), because that is where large parts of context lay hidden. I don't doubt that multiple play-throughs will bring additional understanding.
- The story starts with a lurch. Excluding the tutorial level, the beginning is told in a series of flashbacks. It's a burdensome method in this case that slows down the story-telling. I was bored by the end of the Prologue, and itching for the game world to open up. Maybe that was the intention of the developers, but that method can backfire for those players who judge a game based upon first impressions.
Graphics etc.
+ The graphics are fantastic. Water, light shafts, bloom, foliage detail, wood detail. The mud even looks as real as the water - not an easy feat.
+ The music score by Adam Skorupa and Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz is superb. More folksy in a renaissance way, then it goes all Hans Zimmer when the action heats up.
+ / - Character models are good, but the faces do not have much expression.
- You'll need a half-way decent graphics card to run the game. I'm using an A10 6800k APU (basically an over-clocked Athlon 760k), and CPU usage never went over 60%. All four CPU cores were utilized, though, so the more cores the better. My graphics card, a 2GB Radeon R7 260X, was the bottleneck, running at 100% for the entire time I was playing the game. I averaged around 50 frames-per-second on low-to-medium settings with v-sync turned off.
- Some overlapping sound. Don't advance too quickly while an accompanying NPC is providing exposition via speech; if you get attacked by monsters, the speech will be overwhelmed by the sound of the battle.
- Some crashing. The Witcher 2 locked up and crashed on me five times over 35 hours. This was usually preceded by a memory usage spike (the game would jump from 900MB-1.2GB of system ram to using almost 2 GB), so there is probably a memory leak somewhere. How or what triggers the leak I have no idea.
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