Ended up buying it and if the prologue is anything to go by, it truly is good - and better than Witcher 1. Combat felt interesting though I can see how it might be hard if you have no experience with the first game and just try to wade in without using signs. Once I started using the shield sign combat turned a lot easier, before that it felt a bit harsh.
Ok, gotten to chapter two now and loving the game. One quest however made me wonder if it is at all possible - there’s a part near the end of chapter one
in Iorveth’s path where you can either save some elves or go kill the bad guy. I tried to save the elves like 10 times but there’s some sort of hidden time limit and if you exceed it you just spontaneously combust in a very artificial and stupid manner that makes even a mild-mannered guy like me yell at the computer, especially since it is entirely the awkward controls and the difficulty of targetting ladders and tied-up elven women that makes it so slow. Did anybody manage to actually save them? I gave up eventually and wandered off to kill the bad guy instead, letting the girls burn.
There, I feel better now after my almost-rant. Awesome game, even with things like this.
Finished it (on the Ioreth path, now starting a new, Hard run for the Roche path) and there’s something bugging me about the plot, or rather the driving force behind it.
[spoiler]Basically, Geralt really only has two motivations throughout the game: his memory coming back, and the search for Yennefer. The two are really linked, in that his motivation to look for Yennefer comes up because his memory’s coming back - in the first game he didn’t know who that Yennefer bint was and didn’t give a toss. And while this might have bugged those who read the novels, I think it made the first game better for it: Geralt was a blank slate, leaving the player in control of the character they’re playing.
See, apparently Yennefer is pretty big in the novels (which I haven’t read yet, but have read somewhat extensively about, which creates an odd feeling of familiarity with something I’m not familiar with. I digress) - she’s his main squeeze, they have a kid together and everything. In the books, Triss is a bit character who is in unrequited love with Geralt. So to readers of the novels, hearing about her must be swell indeed, and Triss being all cozy with him must have looked like her sleazily taking advantage of Geralt’s amnesia. This is fine - while readers and non-readers have a different perception of things, it’s not a problem because neither interpretation really matters in the grand scheme of things, and both are equally valid. If anything, it only gives readers a more extensive perspective on things.
But in my eyes, 2 ditched that on the side of the road and decided to cater more or less exclusively to the book readers. To us boorish nincompoops who don’t even know how to read Polish, I have to say the game does a piss poor job of letting us in on the Yennefer state of affair.
We’re left asking ourselves why the fuck we are supposed to care for a woman we have never seen or heard and is only introduced to us through a couple of stylized cutscenes (involving tits), when Geralt has a non-virtual, non living-in-his memory squeeze right there (who also happens to show 3D tits). Geralt’s apparent devotion and faithfulness to his One True Love is also severely undermined by the fact that he a) is quite deeply committed to not giving a shit about anything and b) humps everything even vaguely woman-shaped. Sorry, ploughs.
So really, the interminable monologue we have with Letho at the end of the game where he explains why he didn’t kill Geralt (and, by inference, why Geralt shouldn’t kill him, even though he’s a mountainous cockbag) falls completely flat because while Geralt evidently cares that he helped save Yennefer, cared for her while Geralt was away and so forth ; we the player really don’t give a shit about Yennefer, or the Wild Hunt, or whoever helped Geralt off-screen with all of that baggage. And the reason we don’t give a shit is because the designers of the game have done a piss-poor job of making us give a shit.
As opposed to Triss, whom (despite being a lying deceitful purdy cockbag, in both games) the game bends itself halfway to make us like, from the full frontal 2 minutes into the game, to her giving herself nosebleeds to save our ass, to being magically and mundanely tortured for our sake. A second playthrough also reveals just how much she’s been trying to steer Geralt away from all the politcal shit, albeit perhaps too subtly for Geralt (and the player) to notice, drowned as her quiet counsel is by the drive and energy and sheer screen-time of Roche, Ioreth, Saskia and the like. Hell, the entire second act can be seen not as Geralt taking sides in the conflict, but simply doing whatever it takes to get Triss back, and if that involves winning a war single handedly then so be it.
So the final, climactic decision of letting Letho go or killing his arse, which as I see it now is supposed to be the biggest ethical dilemma of them all (i.e. he’s a murdering shitbag who’s double-crossed everyone and set up the North for rape and pillage BUT he’s done Geralt quite a few solids over the years and even his motivations should be close to Geralt’s heart since Witchers dying out is something he and his buddies lamented in the first game) is really not a decision at all - of course we’re going to kill him, from our point of view he has no redeeming aspect. Fuck that meatbag. He took the 3D tits away.
So, to summarize: there’s a jarring dichotomy between what the player understands, wants and feels on one hand ; and what the character the player is steering wants and feels. This bugs me. [/spoiler]
Also, for fuck’s sake Roche is pronounced Rosh, not Roach !
Neither of the two Witcher game plots were written by Andrzej Sapkowski. The entire Witcher saga ends with Geralt’s death, period! The games are essentially “Highlander II” (and many of us are aware of how well THAT turned out), so there really isn’t much sense to the continuing story. I definitely felt the author(s) of the the game were trying too hard to make everything come together in the end, which is why we ended up with this big ol’ chunk of unsatisfying exposition in the epilogue.
Just decided to give the game another go and discovered there’s an option in the settings menu to disable the QTEs.
My enjoyment has now jumped IMMENSELY.