Questing, QTEs and boss battles
Actually playing out the main quest is more interesting than before - there is far less progression via just running around and talking to people, and more genuinely interesting gameplay scenarios that require you to make use of Geralt’s various abilities to progress - for example tracking trails of blood to find someone who is injured - you can do it visually, although it gets very hard especially when the trail crosses a stream or is confused by other blood trails, or you can drink a potion that highlights such marks and makes the job in dense undergrowth much easier. Outside the main quest lines the side quests are also much improved from the original and no longer are monster contracts a simple matter of going somewhere and killing x monsters. They now each require gathering of information - to find out about a weakness perhaps, or to investigate a deeper route cause, and it is now much more work, and more satisfying, to complete them.While Geralt’s story choices and consequences require less trial and error than before, the same can’t be said for combat. This has been overhauled for the sequel and now consists of a more action-like hack as often as you like with different types of attacks - light or strong. Weapon choice (steel or silver blades, or other weapons which are now useful at last) is important, as are the correct preparations for example oils or potions. This isn’t a bad thing at all when it comes to using your intelligence to prepare or inform tactics for a fight - information can often be discovered to help, but there are unfortunately many moments that will require a several reloads. It’s not just that the combat is tough, especially at the start of the game, but one of the changes for the sequel is that potions can now only be drunk while meditating, which you can only do in a non-combat situation. What tends to happen is that you are watching some series of cutscenes or dialogues, and then at the end of them you have a tough combat situation. You then discover that you need a potion or three to give you a decent chance of surviving the fight, but you didn’t get a chance to quaff one. So you have to reload and get to a point, or even change your conversation options to allow you to get to a point where you can then meditate and drink the right potions for the up-coming fight.
Worse is yet to come however. QTEs, or quick time events, abound in The Witcher 2. Fistfights, boss scenes and various mechanics may require you to watch for instructions appearing on screen and hit buttons or keys quickly in response, sometimes mashing them. On one hand it’s a way of getting the player a little more involved in what’s going on rather than having a magical one-click awesome button, but on the other hand it gets amazingly boring when you have to reload the same bit time after time because you don’t quite understand what the game is asking or it’s not seeming to register your right click properly in the right time frame. Unless you (by trial and error) memorise the up-coming instructions it’s also rather easy to focus on them rather than whatever is happening in the background.
Continued overleaf...
