Game Design Issues

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Game Design Issues

The Witcher 2 really isn't an RPG. It's a third person hack and slash with a level up system. A true RPG lets you choose your class, your name, set up your character's traits, appearance, clothing, etc. It lets you do this within the first 10 minutes of play. The Witcher isn't a true RPG in this sense.

Potion System

The potion system is a mess. This whole 'meditating' thing is just asinine. I know some game players are saying, "Well, that means you have to plan in advance". How can you plan to drink enough potions in advance? Seriously, plan to drink potions before a battle? You have no idea how many foes will be thrown at you. You can't 'plan' to drink enough potions for an upcoming battle. This just leads to trial and error gaming. Trial and error gaming is stupid and considered bad game design. If you have to go into a battle several times only to die just to 'get the lay of the land', that's a stupid waste of time. No, a proper potion system should let you not only stop and drink potions, but do it any time you like. Granted, you should have limited potions with you, so you do need to plan in advance to bring the correct number and type of potions with you, perhaps even creating them yourself. But, even in real life, you can drink something at any time, even in the middle of a battle. There's nothing realistic or useful about this potion system. In fact, it's so bad, you might as well just remove potions entirely.

Game Over Screen

This is not an arcade game where you're plopping quarters into the game. This is an at-home game played on a consumer device. Gone is the days where 'Game Over' screens are necessary. No, once again bad design prevails. If you die, the game should immediately pop up a requester to load the most recent save without any kind of 'Game Over' or death screens. Yet more wasted gaming time.

VATS

If you're going to intentionally limit how to heal the player character during battle, then you need to offset that with a system to target the enemies and, at the same time, avoid their attacks. This at least allows the player character to avoid being struck during battle.

Wasted Money

I had high hopes for this game, but my hopes were dashed by silly game design choices that make this game less than what it should have been. What makes a game fun is giving the players the things they want in a game and specifically within an RPG. Taking away things that, in someone developer's opinion, made the game too easy, but breaks RPG gaming conventions is just not the answer. This is why games like Skyrim win Game of the Year and why the Witcher 2 won't. The Witcher's game designers need to fully understand why Skyrim works to understand why The Witcher 2 doesn't. It's very simple. Make the right game design choices and your game succeeds. Make the wrong choices and you end up classified as a bad game.

For me, The Witcher 2 was not $60 well spent. In fact, it's a frustrating game to play and not all that compelling to boot. The best part of this game, so far, is the animated intro on board the ship which is, to say the least, quite impressive. The game play is, unfortunately, less than stellar. The lack of potions during battle is frustrating and the 'Game Over' screen is simply a waste of time each time it's shown. Yes, every game should be somewhat different from others, but not so far different from the expected RPG system norm that it tries to rewrite RPG gaming conventions. Unless what you're designing is a huge advance in gaming, it's never wise to 'mess with things that already work'.
 

Aver

Forum veteran
A true RPG lets you choose your class, your name, set up your character's traits, appearance, clothing, etc

I stopped here. But I laughed hard. :D
 
Granted this game is not for everybody but if you were thinking this is a Bioware or Bethesda type of game then you were very mistaken . The first witcher game did not have a character that you could customize so why should this one . As for the potion system this game is based off a series of books where witchers drank potions and prepared before battle and definitely not during .

And you put this in Tech section because ?
 
There is not such thing as a "true RPG". As long as you play the role of somebody or just a make up character of your own it doesn't matter, it's still a role you play as.

Game design is good, your thinking is linear.
 
Class: Mage, Swordsman, Alchemist, or Hybrid
Name: Geralt of Rivia
Character Traits: Set the up as you level up like in most RPGs
Appearance: Change hair style at any time, and get a tattoo of a naked lady and a sweet bird nose if your patient
Clothing: Each armor set has a very unique appearance (unlike most RPGs) and different stats (like most RPGs)

Kinda seems like a True RPG to me
 
commorancy said:
This just leads to trial and error gaming. Trial and error gaming is stupid and considered bad game design.

Stopped right here. Dark Souls and its critically aclaimed vision says "sup".

I didn't actually stop reading.


Game Over Screen - God Of War has a Game Over screen. Metal Gear Solid has a Game Over Screen. Critically acclaimed, and are two of the greatest game series' of all time. They are only 3 years old
VATS - You kidding me?


"Yes, every game should be somewhat different from others, but not so far different from the expected RPG system norm that it tries to rewrite RPG gaming conventions"

I humbly suggest you stick to Fallout/Skyrim + Dragon Age/Mass Effect. I feel more of a sense of old school RPGs from The Witcher than I do from a lot of recent action RPGs.
 
Even though you put this in the tech support part of the forums, if you're actually prepared to discuss maybe you'll understand that your definition of an 'RPG' is oddly narrow. This is what wikipedia has to say on the matter: using their definition, one might argue that almost all games are RPG's. That kind of limits the use of the word, but still I think that many of us look for different things in RPGs to 'be immersed in a ficional world'. For me, characters, world, story and most importantly story interaction (in the form of choices and consequences) are the genre-defining elements, it seems you prefer being able to choose your character's appearance and stats.

Your point on potions has been made many times before, and you use the terribly overused word 'realistic' in your argument against them. I don't think I need to elaborate on why I think that's not a particular strong argument, but I can understand your annoyance at how they work. Still, I think that though the implementation isn't perfect, it does force you to prepare (yes, even if that means preparing for the unknown!) and IMO ties better into the gameplay than Skyrim's spamming of potions.

Other than that, I'm sorry that you were disappointed by the game - I do think reviews, gameplay and trailers should have been sufficient for you to decide that this game wasn't for you. I hope you'll get over these annoyances and enjoy this game, because it's such a great game in many ways.

And if you're not prepared to discuss but instead persist that The Witcher 2 is a bad game, we'll just have to disagree. I hope that you'll at least be able to see why TW2 is a good game, even if you're not able to enjoy it. Because I think one of the main flaws of the video game industry is that they all want to make games for 'mainstream' gamers, whereas I would prefer 1000 niche games, even if that means I don't like 999 of those. Skyrim's main flaw (IMO) was that it had almost no ambition. TW2 is not like that, and that's why it's not for everyone.
 
Not everyone will like the mechanics of the game but it doesn't mean the game is flawed or broken. So many games follow the same boring line that people get used to and any game that goes off that line is some kind of freak of a game.

So what, we love it, you don't, next....
 

Aver

Forum veteran
commorancy said:
The Witcher's game designers need to fully understand why Skyrim works to understand why The Witcher 2 doesn't. It's very simple. Make the right game design choices and your game succeeds. Make the wrong choices and you end up classified as a bad game.

"Transformers" movie earned 4 times more money than "The girl with the dragon tattoo". Does it mean that producers should make another-big-robot-movie instead of "The girl with the dragon tattoo"?

The Witcher will earn less money than Skyrim. But it doesn't mean that it's worse game. Skyrim is easy and very accessible, but it doesn't make it better than hard and ambitious game like Witcher. TW2 has great metascore and user score so it's definitely not a bad game.
 
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