The Witcher series should be much more popular

[Zing]

I just finished The Witcher 2 and I found it to be superior to pretty much any of the modern games BioWare churns out, in every way. The moral system drives the plot perfectly, it's not black and white in it's choices like BioWare games. The gameplay (as a swordsman) was great, it took real skill, most fights you had to weave and dodge in and out of battles and use traps, bombs and magic to deal with crowds. The story its self is really in depth and I actually found enjoyment in reading all the journal entries and such(I usually hate this). My only complaint would be that I have to wait for Witcher 3 to continue certain storylines that came up.

The Witcher 2 was pretty much everything Dragon Age II should have been.

 

[Dandark]

I agree, I haven't played any of the games but from what I have seen it's one of the best pornos out there.


Just kidding. I have heard good things about it but I have also heard that only people experianced with PC RPGS will enjoy it because it's quite hard to get the hang of. At the current itme I have not bought it because I have been kinda intimidated by the fact it's for "Hardcore" PC gamers.

Is this true?

 

[LordRoyal]

Yeaaah I'd enjoy the game a bit more if it didn't take a super computer to run.

The 10 hours I played at like 10 FPS were amazing though. Though I kinda preferred the original the Witcher slightly more. But the Witcher 2 was still fantastic.

 

[Zing]

I agree, I haven't played any of the games but from what I have seen it's one of the best pornos out there.


Just kidding. I have heard good things about it but I have also heard that only people experianced with PC RPGS will enjoy it because it's quite hard to get the hang of. At the current itme I have not bought it because I have been kinda intimidated by the fact it's for "Hardcore" PC gamers.

Is this true?

I found it easier than DA: Origins, which was pretty difficult. I wouldn't say you need to be a hardcore PC gamer. At least not with the class I played. Sometimes it was a bit hard, and the bosses are all challenging, but once you find their strategy you can defeat them straight away. I'm going to replay it as a Mage and see how that goes, but being a swordsman was really fun, and the magic signs were still useful.

 

[Dandark]

I might give it a try at some point then. Although I imgaine I need to get my new Gaming PC first. I can't even my Global Agenda on my labtop right now.

I don't need any previous experiance with the first game then, Im not going to miss out on something important and have no idea what's going on?

 

[Kurai Angelo]

I'm inclined to agree. Although in regards to the combat I found that it's only become playable since the 2.0 update.

Before that the combat system was a broken piece of arse. Seriously, easy mode was doing my head in. Now I can comfortably play it on normal.

Also, the addition of a real tutorial helped. Compared with thrusting you into a fight and expecting you to read tips that get thrown on screen for all of 1.5 seconds.

 

[Bobbity]

I've always wanted to give it a shot, but I'm not sure that my PC is up to it. Definitely going to give it a go when it hits the 360 though.

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

It released with no tutorial and one of the most obtusely hard combat systems I've ever touched never mind being a sequel to a game not many people played based on a novel series even fewer have read. How on earth would it be popular.

 

[Zhukov]

Whoo! Finally a topic where I get play the villain.

I really enjoyed the first half of Witcher 2. The prologue siege level, the dungeon escape and the first village/forest area were all really good. Also, the game actually made a real effort to give tangible consequences to your choices.

But then the second act rolled around and it all went to hell. The story proceeded to shit itself inside out ("She's a dragon! What a twist!"). The combat started getting really repetitive (Hint: just throw bombs at everything). None of the characters were worth a damn (Except that elf guerrilla guy, he was interesting). The writing was waist-deep in exposition and the voice acting was flat and amateurish.

Oh yeah, and the checkpoint placement was bloody woeful. "Checkpoint in front of the difficult boss? Ha! No way! If you die we're going to make you watch an unskippable cutscene, fight some mooks with your dodge move disabled, fight a miniboss, skip through some more shitty dialogue and then you can fight the boss again. Also, your save function will be disabled the whole time because we're just awesome that way."

By the time the game finally coughed an unsatisfactory ending onto my lap I was completely fed up. My thoughts were not, "Wow, that was awesome", but rather, "Oh thank God that is over, now get the hell off my hard drive you piece of crap, I need to room to install something decent, like maybe Duke Nukem Forever..."

 

[Takolin]

The only thing I disliked about the game were some of the boss fights.

Spoiler

The Kayran and the dragon in the end for taking forever and most of it was roll away to avoid getting hit by stuff and I tended to roll too late.

Well and the fact that the humanoid bosses could all be vanquished by spamming throwing daggers which ended up being too easy.

 

[poleboy]

I have the first one (on PC). I really liked it for a while, but never finished it. I think the main reason is a combination of frequent crashes, too much loading and a corrupted save game that set me back several hours.
Note that this is the Steam version with all the extra fluff and patching they added later, so I'm assuming this is the best possible and most stable version of the game. I liked the story. I enjoyed the combat to some extent, though later it started to annoy me (out in the swamps with endless respawns trudging from place to place). I REALLY liked the dialogue, though I never felt the main story was that unique or interesting. By now, CRPG's have prepared me so well for amnesia, I feel like I could cure it myself if it ever happened to me. The trick seems to be killling everything in sight that looks male, and having sex with everything that appears female to regain your skills.

Also, it is GODDAMN hard at times. Not that this is a problem per se, but at times the difficulty swings from mediocre to hardcore from one screen to the next, without any real warning.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I don't need any previous experiance with the first game then, Im not going to miss out on something important and have no idea what's going on?

You can play the second without the first, but considering that it goes on sale for $5-10 on a regular basis and is still a great game, there isn't really a good reason not to play it...

 

[black_knight1337]

I havent gotten around to playing the witcher 2 but i grabbed the original a while back and i hated it. i quite honestly cant see why people like it. the gameplay in it is some of the worse i have ever seen. i might grab witcher 2 when it gets cheaper and i get my new pc but i highly doubt im going to find it any different.

 

[Darth IB]

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

I never managed to get into either of the Witcher games. They were too difficult, too complicated, and the dialogue - especially in the first one - felt rather stiff.
As far as I'm concerned, DA2 was pretty much everything The Witcher 2 should have been.

 

[viranimus]

Well it will be. But there are two hinderences thus far. At the moment it is still PC exclusive. Obviously that will eventually self correct. The second is that you have to look at that franchise like Witcher 2 is its own separate game.

The reasoning is while it is a sequel, the game runs better, and is laid out from a narrative perspective better. What I am getting at is, the Witcher 1 was not a bad game, but it really suffered from acts 3-5 and that massive lull caused many people to get bored and give up on it, .

I know I tried to run through the game 4 times and kept getting stopped around act three. I JUST beat the game just a few months ago for the first time and it was tedious as hell to push through the ending content. I literally could not work my way through it fast enough and only did so because I wanted a Witcher save file to transition. I think many people had this same problem.

TL;DR It boils down in my estimation that with the tech and narrative problems discount the original witcher game and honestly Witcher 2 was the first truly good from start to finish game in the franchise. So from here, the franchise will get more respect.

I

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

Well it will be. But there are two hinderences thus far. At the moment it is still PC exclusive. Obviously that will eventually self correct. The second is that you have to look at that franchise like Witcher 2 is its own separate game.

The reasoning is while it is a sequel, the game runs better, and is laid out from a narrative perspective better. What I am getting at is, the Witcher 1 was not a bad game, but it really suffered from acts 3-5 and that massive lull caused many people to get bored and give up on it, .

I know I tried to run through the game 4 times and kept getting stopped around act three. I JUST beat the game just a few months ago for the first time and it was tedious as hell to push through the ending content. I literally could not work my way through it fast enough and only did so because I wanted a Witcher save file to transition. I think many people had this same problem.

TL;DR It boils down in my estimation that with the tech and narrative problems discount the original witcher game and honestly Witcher 2 was the first truly good from start to finish game in the franchise. So from here, the franchise will get more respect.

I

Maybe if they stop being so obnoxiously obtuse about everything even the first witcher was better than the second one and the first one was hardly good or generous about explaining anything.

 

[9thRequiem]

I havent gotten around to playing the witcher 2 but i grabbed the original a while back and i hated it. i quite honestly cant see why people like it. the gameplay in it is some of the worse i have ever seen. i might grab witcher 2 when it gets cheaper and i get my new pc but i highly doubt im going to find it any different.

Same here. I hated the first one (It managed to get everything wrong - gameplay, storyline, dialog, characters were all terrible) which will instantly raise serious questions about any sequel.
Perhaps the sequel would have done better if the first one hadn't been so awful.

 

[Puddleknock]

Well I've only played the first Witcher game and I thought it was pretty average to be honest. To me the game was more awkward than difficult and overall it was good in parts but largely forgettable.

Maybe I need to play the second one to get a full impression of the series, but that game is way down on the list of things I want to play next.