Why I hate Witcher 2

+
Why I hate..? .. this is too strong word for me. If I would look on (probably all) other games I played, I would have to say I hate them all, because every one of them has some weak spots.

And with some points I just disagree:
It makes it all too easy to throw dice off the board .. if I didn't want and if my mouse worked correctly, it didn't happen to me
map seems ok to me
size of area - also fine ... maybe smaller than W1, but size is not everything I did not ejoy Skyrim more even if there was more freedom of movement
combat system - again - not problematic for me, I don't need action game with full contol

I can find something what I didn't like on W2 - mainly about story and about difficulty during first playing, but there is no chance I would hate this game. For me, there is not better game (only W1 has a chance ;) ).
 
I have to admit I did not follow the political part as well the first time I played it. But it was not as confusing that I did not understand it.
 
The truth is painful...sometimes I forget how flawed the actual gameplay in TW2 is. I still like the game, very much so, but most of these points are perfectly valid.
 
fizzbizz said:
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.

I stopped reading after this, this kind of rant bugs me. The instructions for Dice Poker is right in the manual. They even give you a warning that you can throw the dice off the board. You could just press the LMB and have the dice drop and not move the mouse so much that the dice fall off. In all my play throughs, I have never once had the dice fall off.
I find Dice Poker just as fun in TW2 as it was in TW1, even more so since the the NPC will sometime throw their dice off the board.

In the manual they tell you the winning rolls from the Highest to the Lowest. When the game tells you you won or lost, all you have to do is look at the dice of your competitor and your own dice to figure out why you lost or won.

I am going to assume everything else after this is ranting about more things that doesn't hold the hands of the player.

Read the manual.
 
It seems I am the only one with absolutely no complains about W2. I find the story AMAZING, the characters fantastic, the VA believable. I have no issues regarding performance. It is the best-looking game I've ever played and I consider the combat system among the best I've ever experienced. I find the UI totally fine, and even though I was fiftheen when I first played W2, without knowing anything about W1 or the books, I got totally hooked after my first playthrough. Even though it was tons of things I didn't understand at first, I found the game so insanely entertaining, and after 17 more playthroughs and 100+ hours spent reading the forums I believe that I've gotten a pretty good grip of what's going on. It's almost emberrasing that I've spent so much time, but I just find the game that great. If this makes me a fanboy, so be it, but we all have different taste, don't we.
 
Very good valid criticisms, I had an issue with the UI as well (although it looked beautiful) it was hard to compare between two items and discern which one was Geralt's or the shopkeeper's.

I agree, the RedEngine 2 was awful for optimization, I was lucky to be able to run the game on 35fps on Ubersampling with my 6970, but I agree, Witcher 2 needed more optimization, hopefully Witcher 3 will accomplish this.

The in-game map was an abomination of game maps, but it wasn't that bad for me personally, hopefully Witcher 3 will improve on this, as the world will be even bigger than Skyrim's.

I had no problems with mini-games, especially Dice Poker, because I am an avid Poker player :p/>/> (without real money though, lol)
Although the brawl mini-game was very easy, the arm wrestling mini-game was sometimes really difficult (Fuck you, mighty Numa).

Yes, the combat is a bit wierd, because you have no freedom over Geralt's moves, but I realized that after playing 20+ hours on the arena mode that when you move Geralt is a specific way, he will attack in one fashion, for example, if you move to the left then attack he will always do the 5 attack piroutte attack. But yes, Witcher 3 will fix this.

"- 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."

I did not understand your point, did you mean that you could die via cutscene because you totally fucked up your diplomacy skills when talking to characters THAT WERE GOING TO KILL YOU IF YOU WERE AN ASSHOLE, or did you mean that when you kill stunned enemies that you can be killed if another enemy was attacking at that same moment ?



However, I terribly and I mean TERRIBLY disagree with demanding games's plots to be crystal clear to newcomers when obviously you can just wiki confusing political events by pausing the game and looking it up, but I have to agree, because the Witcher books are not that popular in English speaking countries it would create some confusion (it did confuse me, but I just looked up the events on the wiki and I understood what 100 pages of a books managed to portray, like the Thanned Coup for example).




All in all, very valid criticisms, and I hope CDPR will improve on them so Witcher 3 will be GOTY 2014 :p/>/>
 
vivaxardas said:
You HATE TW2 because of this??? Personally I did not have any problems with lags, and even though some things could have been better (UI, maps), it is rather easy to get used to them. Location design is serviceable, and visuals are quite beautiful. Given that how much better TW2 is in terms of its plot and its characters comparative to Skyrim (sorry, but given its budget, Skyrim is an abomination in terms of story-telling), and that TW2 on Dark provides quite a few very exciting battles (Dark Souls fan speaking here), I wouldn't even be able to put "hate" and "TW2" in the same sentence.

Yes, this is why I hate W2.

Yes, Bethesda is terrible at storytelling. Bethesda's games, Skyrim in particular, is what I would imagine the result of outsourcing your quest design to India would look like. It's a generic medieval amusement park with token writing. W2's plot was too complex to grasp in one playthrough. Skyrim's plot was too meaningless, trivial and irrelevant to pay attention to in the first place.



vivaxardas said:
As I wrote in another thread, why a hell people demand a story in TW2 to be crystal-clear to the new-comers? Nobody in a sane mind demanded that the last season of Lost, for example, would be crystal-clear for people who did not watch previous seasons. For fuck's sake, just stop bringing it up as some design mistake, and go read the books!

Because it is a design mistake. It's fine to make references to lore outside the game. But the story of the game should be a carefully selected segment of the original material. The key is to select a segment that's self-contained enough so that you don't have to bomb the player with exposition in order to understand the plot. Extra optional lore is great when it's optional, not when it's strictly required to understand the story.



vivaxardas said:
If you have no time to listen to them, or incapable of reading for prolonged periods of time, it sounds like your personal problem, isn't it? I don't think games should cater to people with reading disabilities, or with lack of time.

I'm not stupid yet the plot flew over my head on my first playthrough, and that's not because I skipped cutscenes or optional dialogue.


vivaxardas said:
What exactly do you find wrong with TW2, what didn't it show? This sentence ("Lore like politics and past events do not. Those are complex events that took hundreds of pages of prose to describe in a satisfactory manner. Because of obvious limitations CDPR couldn't show them - instead they decided to deliver this exposition through dialogue." ) is so vague and general, that it simply does not make any frigging sense until you give examples. What events are you talking about that took hundreds of pages to describe, and that it couldn't have been done in lesser amount? How these events are important for a story in TW2? What CDPR didn't show us? If you want a meaningful discussion, be rigorous, man, otherwise it is just a smart-sounding b.s.

I'm not familiar with the source material so I can't give specific advice. The problem isn't what CDPR decided to tell instead of show per se. The root of the issue, I feel, was in deciding which elements are relevant to the plot. The scope of the story was very wide and as a consequence, there was a lot of telling as opposed to showing.


@Sirnaq:

I have prerendered set to 1 as default. With this setting you can notice the stutter I've been talking about. Frame render times are erratic, having a number of prerendered frames masks the spike in rendering time, to an extent.

But having prerendered frames in any skill/timing based game is terrible anyway. Responsiveness is the name of the game in those titles. Every competent fighting game out there aims for a *consistent* 60fps with V-sync and has it's animation solver wired to tick on frames, not time delta since last frame. This is why those games feel so responsive and fluid.

You can make a fluid fighting game using delta-time, sure - for an example of excellent fighting and fluidity I suggest looking into ONI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y90VJNkKRdA - CDPR animation system programmers should definitely look into this. That old game with cruddy graphics (even for it's time) feels extremely responsive. Controlling Geralt feels like driving a rocket-powered refrigerator on a field of sandpaper.

I'm posting this because W2 wasted it's potential. Some issues would require significant time to backtrack and redo. Some would be impractical. Others are plain bad decisions that would've certainly been caught and addressed with a little extra polish. No pun intended.
 
fizzbizz said:
Yes, this is why I hate W2.

Yes, Bethesda is terrible at storytelling. Bethesda's games, Skyrim in particular, is what I would imagine the result of outsourcing your quest design to India would look like. It's a generic medieval amusement park with token writing. W2's plot was too complex to grasp in one playthrough. Skyrim's plot was too meaningless, trivial and irrelevant to pay attention to in the first place.





Because it is a design mistake. It's fine to make references to lore outside the game. But the story of the game should be a carefully selected segment of the original material. The key is to select a segment that's self-contained enough so that you don't have to bomb the player with exposition in order to understand the plot. Extra optional lore is great when it's optional, not when it's strictly required to understand the story.





I'm not stupid yet the plot flew over my head on my first playthrough, and that's not because I skipped cutscenes or optional dialogue.




I'm not familiar with the source material so I can't give specific advice. The problem isn't what CDPR decided to tell instead of show per se. The root of the issue, I feel, was in deciding which elements are relevant to the plot. The scope of the story was very wide and as a consequence, there was a lot of telling as opposed to showing.


@Sirnaq:

I have prerendered set to 1 as default. With this setting you can notice the stutter I've been talking about. Frame render times are erratic, having a number of prerendered frames masks the spike in rendering time, to an extent.

But having prerendered frames in any skill/timing based game is terrible anyway. Responsiveness is the name of the game in those titles. Every competent fighting game out there aims for a *consistent* 60fps with V-sync and has it's animation solver wired to tick on frames, not time delta since last frame. This is why those games feel so responsive and fluid.

You can make a fluid fighting game using delta-time, sure - for an example of excellent fighting and fluidity I suggest looking into ONI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y90VJNkKRdA - CDPR animation system programmers should definitely look into this. That old game with cruddy graphics (even for it's time) feels extremely responsive. Controlling Geralt feels like driving a rocket-powered refrigerator on a field of sandpaper.

I'm posting this because W2 wasted it's potential. Some issues would require significant time to backtrack and redo. Some would be impractical. Others are plain bad decisions that would've certainly been caught and addressed with a little extra polish. No pun intended.

Can we put it down to this: You like the game, but hated the way it was executed which ruined your overall experience?
 
I read the topic title and thought "oh and here we go", but already said by others, you make some valid points. Some I agree with. One thing I noticed is that you compared much with Witcher 1(dice poker for instance) which is something I do daily. I couldn't possibly say I hate Witcher 2 for that though, even if I wished they had brought more from Witcher 1, edibles(consumables), alchemy, inventory gridsystem etc. And yes, dice poker was more enjoyable in 1.

The fighting animations are NOT random, they work somewhat like Witcher 1 with chaining attacks in waves. Want proof of that? Stand Geralt with his right side facing the enemy and attack to see him spin in what has become my favourite pirouette that Geralt can do. ;)

So why so angry? You aren't figthing the Operator right now are you? :p

I also want to say congrats to you on posting something daring that hasn't resulted in complete hatred! :D
 
Games top banana, it's got problems but all games do. The narratives logical and masterfully plotted, the choices and consequences are impactful and reasonable, the characters are believable and self motivated rather than just sops for the protagonist, the graphics are beautiful, the combat is tense and engaging without going into over the top childish anime crap, the political situation is handled better than in any other game i've played, the art design shames most other games childish renaissance fair settings, and the respect for the books is clear throughout. Best writing of any game in the modern period with the exception of maybe Obsidian.

For that I can overlook the few niggles i've got, but you're free to think differently OP.

Edit: One thing I totally disagree on is this bollocks that the game was too complicated, I played both games without ever having read the books and understood them with ease and i'm not smart. Obviously now i've read the books (thanks to the fan translations) and can see the little nods and bows they give to Sapkowski, but they didn't make the story any more clear. A child of five could understand both the quest for the Witcher mutagens and Geralt's hunt to clear his name, it's not like the labyrinthine plotting of Legacy of Kain, even with Alvin's time manipulation.

Knight of Phoenix hasn't read the books as far as I know and he's produced some excellent blogs on the subject matter, both detailed and insightful.
 
Mostly valid concerns, some fairly subjective observations and a few that are plain wrong. Nothing groundbreaking that hasn't been discussed to death but it's good consumer practice to bring up this sort of stuff. However, there's a perfectly good Love it vs. Hate it thread (http://en.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?/topic/3502-i-love-it-vs-i-hate-it/), not sure why you felt the need to make your own one.
 
ryannberg said:
I stopped reading after this, this kind of rant bugs me. The instructions for Dice Poker is right in the manual. They even give you a warning that you can throw the dice off the board. You could just press the LMB and have the dice drop and not move the mouse so much that the dice fall off. In all my play throughs, I have never once had the dice fall off.
I find Dice Poker just as fun in TW2 as it was in TW1, even more so since the the NPC will sometime throw their dice off the board.

In the manual they tell you the winning rolls from the Highest to the Lowest. When the game tells you you won or lost, all you have to do is look at the dice of your competitor and your own dice to figure out why you lost or won.

I am going to assume everything else after this is ranting about more things that doesn't hold the hands of the player.

Read the manual.

While you're at it you should've reminded me to be careful where my place my floppy disks. I could've used that advice in the 90s.

Today is the age of digital distribution. In W2's case more units were sold online than boxed. You expect players to print out the PDF or run it on a second monitor? There are games for which a reference manual is required - almost all I can think of are complex sim/strategy titles. And even then online wikis usually present the information in a more accessible format while having a better idea of what's actually relevant.

Having to memorize poker combinations is a form of fake difficulty. Having to look into the manual makes it more tedious, it doesn't add actual depth.

You seem to misunderstand the point. Handholding is universally bad. Difficulty is good, but you're mistaking the difficulty of the actual game - in this case the mechanics of the poker minigame - with accessibility, meaning the lack of an adequate UI.

If W2 was going for full-on skeuomorphism it'd be acceptable. You don't see novice poker players holding a cheat sheet. But this is not the case, the UI is generally abstract.
 
I think I may be the only one who had absolutely no issue with Witcher 2 . The only thing I hated was how enemy attack me right after the cutscene before Geralt can even draw his sword . That becomes frustrating on higher difficulty levels because you lose your health before even the real fight starts .
My friend recently got into gaming and bought himself a first Low end gaming PC . He didn't even know which parts to buy for his PC so he ended up with outdated PC . So he only played Witcher 2 on bad frame rates and it was his 2nd AAA game he ever played in a decade , as we know Witcher 2 is also a RPG (not suitable for new comers unlike COD) but he finished it multiple times and enjoyed the challenge that the game offered him in the process . I understand everyone have different taste and OP presented some good points but still I think that if my friend can finish and enjoy Witcher 2 (who never played PC game before and don't even know how to install the game) then anyone can .
 

Aver

Forum veteran
fizzbizz said:
While you're at it you should've reminded me to be careful where my place my floppy disks. I could've used that advice in the 90s.

Today is the age of digital distribution. In W2's case more units were sold online than boxed. You expect players to print out the PDF or run it on a second monitor? There are games for which a reference manual is required - almost all I can think of are complex sim/strategy titles. And even then online wikis usually present the information in a more accessible format while having a better idea of what's actually relevant.

I'm not sure about that. When they showed sales charts shortly after release they said that they sold almost 1M of copies and only ~200k were digital.
 
fizzbizz said:
I'm not stupid yet the plot flew over my head on my first playthrough, and that's not because I skipped cutscenes or optional dialogue.

I sympathise with you on this. I haven't got around to reading the books, I want to, but time & lack of a physical copy are making it difficult. I played TW1 once years before playing TW2, and on my first playthrough (Iorveth), although I was comfortable with the Witcher & friends, I found the story difficult to follow. But I realised quickly that the game needed to be played twice, unlike any other game of the modern era whose second playthrough differently would simply be me choosing the "ignorant response".

But playing the second time revealed the story more than enough, if not in totality, which requires multiple playthroughs. I am at 8 full playthroughs now & twice as many aborted post chapter 2. There really is that much variation in plot & characters to explore.

And this is my issue, which i've often thought of making a thread about.

TW2 should have come with a "Must be played at least TWICE!" sticker on the box, because I think the majority of gamers now do not think to play a game more than once... just finish it & move on to the next release, or play forever one increasingly uber character in that well known exploration game.

But essentially this is not something we can, or should, blame CDPR for... this is the rut of gaming we have all been brought down to due the quality of whats available to us.

edit: I seriously appreciate the style of storytelling in TW2, where the protagonist doesn't drive the story, often doesn't take part in the major events - this is sooooooooooo fecking real ! :)

and personally I side with Alan Moore who hated and never used the ubiquitous 'thought bubble' to expose story.... that is sooo unreal !
 
Parachrist said:
So blame the developer for your laziness />

I'll blame the UI lead for his instead. The UI team did a poor job and if I was to point out a single area of responsibility that was significantly lacking in production quality of the game, it'd be UI followed by engine programming. As long as you're not juggling big dynamic datasets (eg. Planetside 2) Scaleform is easy and fun to work with, which is why it's a mystery to me why it's so lacking.


@Aver:
After release yes, but discounts on steam (what, 7 USD?) changed that.
 
fizzbizz said:
While you're at it you should've reminded me to be careful where my place my floppy disks. I could've used that advice in the 90s.

Today is the age of digital distribution. In W2's case more units were sold online than boxed. You expect players to print out the PDF or run it on a second monitor? There are games for which a reference manual is required - almost all I can think of are complex sim/strategy titles. And even then online wikis usually present the information in a more accessible format while having a better idea of what's actually relevant.

Having to memorize poker combinations is a form of fake difficulty. Having to look into the manual makes it more tedious, it doesn't add actual depth.

You seem to misunderstand the point. Handholding is universally bad. Difficulty is good, but you're mistaking the difficulty of the actual game - in this case the mechanics of the poker minigame - with accessibility, meaning the lack of an adequate UI.

If W2 was going for full-on skeuomorphism it'd be acceptable. You don't see novice poker players holding a cheat sheet. But this is not the case, the UI is generally abstract.

You don't need to print the manual, or have a second screen. Instead of being lazy, you read the manual first, so you can understand the game mechanics. All I am getting from you is that you want hand holding through the UI. You don't get a UI if you played Dice poker in real life, instead you will be expected to know the hierarchy of winning rolls. You blame the developers for not holding your hand through the UI, when in fact the Developers gave you a manual to read to know how to play the game. Don't be lazy and read the manual.
 
Top Bottom