Why I hate Witcher 2

[Kamamura]

My greatest complain is the screen shaking in combat. That really, really, spoils the action and makes me stop playing frequently. Games are not movies, they don't need to be a "cinematic" blurry mess full of artificial screen shakes and other cheap effects to conjure up drama!

 

[whiplash27]

The issues with the dark gear effects can be fixed with mods. It's one of the first things I do when I play TW2.

I personally have always hated mini games in TW, they're always a mixture of frustrating and waste of time. Dice poker sucks in TW1 & TW2 I don't care if someone likes it. Sitting around waiting for a random dice roll is boring. I'd rather play Pazaak in KoTOR. Arm wrestling at least is quick, but also super easy with the exception of the very last one until you call out the cheater. Fist fighting was way better in TW1 & TW3. I also wouldn't have minded having the drinking games of TW1 brought back (they're not in TW3 either).

Also, once you figure out how to beat them, all of the bosses are quite easy. I can beat the dragon on dark mode in a couple minutes.

I have no framerate issues, the game runs perfectly for me and I wouldn't say that my computer is high end by modern standards (i5-4670K @ 3.4GHz, GTX 770, 8 GB Ram, game is installed on traditional HDD). I'm going through another play through right now. I'm even playing in 3D at times (which looks amazing) and get no lag at all.

Level design I think is a strong suit of TW2, Flotsam is one of my favorite gaming worlds that I've come across. I do wish there was a bit more content (especially since there's a completely unused area past the broken bridge), but the areas are loaded with content even if they are slightly smaller in some aspects. I'd rather a smaller area with tons of content than a huge open area where you just go into an area for a couple minutes and then never see it again.

Combat there are some animations that you always get to work by pressing certain directions and attacking. For example, move left and then left click and Geralt will do the spinning attack that tends to hit the guy like 5 times on the way in. Combat obviously wasn't amazing in TW2, but it was deep enough that you could play the game without doing cheap crap all the time and have a great experience. Obviously TW3's combat is way more refined, but you're talking about going from click click click combat in TW1 to this and then finally a much more refined system in TW3. When I first loaded up TW2 again I was trying to dodge like in TW3 and then remembering that the only thing you can do to get away from enemies is roll. Took me a few minutes to get used to that.

With proper gear enemies die quite easily on dark mode. I have the first set of dark gear and the game is already becoming super easy for me. I also never use quen and only use dodge to retreat from enemies for the most part (rather than rolling behind them). So I don't use cheese tactics too much (except maybe Aard -> Heavy -> Heavy -> Heavy ).

Turn off difficult QTEs in options (poor design to have them in the game anyway I'll admit) and you'll never die in a cut scene. Devs actually expressed the fact that QTEs were a bad choice after the game's release. That's why there's at least a way to disable the ones in cut scenes. The only other time you'll run into them is fist fighting.

UI can be annoying, but it's vastly improved from the game's release. Either way, you can get used to it after a while. Otherwise just get a zero weight mod and you can just hold on to everything and then sort by value to figure out what's the best.

Alchemy was kind of bland in TW2, but mostly because too many potions had tons of negative effects and made you not want to use them. Rook, Swallow, Tawney Owl were the only ones worth using IMO. Then again, in TW1 & TW3 with rare exceptions I pretty much only used those as well. Being forced to carry around liquor to make your potions doesn't make alchemy much better. Also, the alchemy tree in TW2 is the most OP so there's that.

 

[Feline_Witcher]

Why I hate Witcher 2

Technical:
- awful, terrible cursor lag, I'm assuming a consequence of a cross-platform hack (it'll work on PC fine, said some lazy programmer)

- dreadful engine, dreadful optimization. Doesn't handle system events like losing window focus well. Fault tolerance and graceful degradation was left buried in the TODO list. There is significant stutter (exceptionally high render times for certain frames) due to suboptimal asset streaming.

UI:
- shopkeeper UI convoluted and not intuitive. It's hard to discern which stuff belongs to you and which is the shopkeeper's stuff. For some reason the gold you have is displayed above the shopkeeper's list of items

- the in-game map viewer is an abyss of awfulness. UI elements get clipped and it's possible for the player marker to get clipped. The small overworld map gets replaced with the big overworld flavor map - adds nothing gameplay-wise and gets in the player's way.

- Upon selling an item, once the list gets updated, the player may not sell the item that has moved up under the cursor until the cursor has been moved.

- In-game map is mostly accurate in terms of defining passable areas, but for a game with a maze-like level structure the quality of maps as tools for navigating that must be much higher.

Minigames:
- dice poker gets a redesign from W1 in all the wrong directions. It makes it all too easy to throw dice off the board, making the player just drop the dice instead. The UI is clunky and doesn't explain the rules of the game in any way. Not even why the player won or lost.

- The brawling minigame was mechanically trivial and extremely easy. Proper testing was not done, timings did not adjust dynamically (as in dynamic difficulty) neither did they scale with player-selected difficulty.

- The arm-wrestling minigame was OK, but again no (perceptible) difficulty scaling.

Level design:
-Effective map size and freedom of movement has been DECREASED compared to W1. One step forward, one roll backwards.

- Maps form a maze-like network with narrow chokepoints separating sections of the map. Maze-like levels are a valid design choice for areas where confusing mazes are appropriate - eg. dungeons. In W2's case the maze-like nature of hub areas is confusing, hard to traverse and disruptive to the overall experience.

I understand technical limitations and lack of engineering expertise to go and pull a Skyrim on last-gen consoles - the game has suffered tremendously due to this.

Animations and combat
- Geralt attacks enemies using random animations, the player has little control over which move gets executed

- Target selector is semi-broken. I do not change my targets with confidence. The system is so buggy and clunky that I rarely use it at all.

- The combat system is schizophrenic in what it's trying to achieve. On one hand it goes for the skill/timing/action-based approach (reminds me of a bad version of ONI), on the other it doesn't give the player control. Animations are lenghty, Geralt is extremely unresponsive compared to games that do this right. This is on top of poor performance - the quicker a player must respond, the more responsive the game must be.

- Enemies are damage-spongy, unlike Geralt. My latest experiment involved FCR2. A guard can be hit by 26 wizard fireballs before dying. Geralt takes two before he croaks.

- Erratic difficulty. There are several encounters that are effectively very hard when they shouldn't be. How difficult a fight is is primarily dictated by whether the player has the space to manouver and kite the enemy

- Whenever the player experiences death by cutscene. Especially when it would be technically possible to win such an encounter. This is terrible, terrible design. NEVER TAKE THE WHEEL AWAY FROM THE PLAYER, EVEN IF HE'S DRIVING STRAIGHT INTO A TREE.

This is ironic as the game certainly allows the player to make mistakes and fail quests. However it does take away control at certain crucial points. This smells of bad design.

General gripes:
- Internal inconsistency in mechanics. While sneaking through the camp in part 2 the witcher has to charm a cook in order to avoid detection. This can only be done if the player is very close - much closer than the actual range of the axii sign. In addition the player has to spam the LMB instead of using the button the player normally uses.

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And I liked W1. Hell, I think that mechanically and technically it's a much more competent game than W2. W2 is a hard game due to all the wrong reasons. It tries ambitious ideas, which is awesome, but also breaks a lot of stuff that worked from W1 and introduced it's own issues.

It's wall-punchingly frustrating.

I actually hate TW3 gameplay but kinda love TW2's (specially swordplay and alchemy). Just like Geralt himself says: "Mounted Witchering just never took off" lol