Phatose on 22/5/2011 at 05:14
Is there an item bank somewhere in this game equivalent to Innkeepers from Witcher 1? The inventory system sucks, and apparently the alchemy system will happily use up special quest ingredients for normal potions.
van HellSing on 23/5/2011 at 12:17
@Phatose nope, there isn't one. Which item/quest are you talking about, by the way?
Finished The Witcher 2 yesterday. Act III is a bit on the short side, but I wasn't really disappointed, it carried a lot of gravitas, and since I'm a big fan of the books, I felt very involved in the events. And dang, I'll definitely be starting another playthrough soon just to see how much these events can be changed. I did miss some sort of confrontation with The Wild Hunt though. Not a final one, since they're obviously saving that for the next game or maybe an expansion, but at least some sort of appearance outside of flashbacks.
From a gameplay side, the game needs much balancing. Near the beginningthe difficulty was murderous, but as the game progressed, I started feeling almost invincible. Sure, some of that is probably me getting the hang of the fighting system, but still, there's a definite reverse difficulty curve here. There's also quite a few bugs, some just annoying, others nearly game-breaking. And whoever designed the interface should be trialed for crimes against humanity -I do hope they get around to releasing something like the Enhanced Edition patch, and give it some massive overhaul.
Phatose on 23/5/2011 at 14:15
The Endrega Queen Pheremones from act 1. Apparently, it's part of something very valuable later on, but can be used in Alchemy by accident. And I really don't want to have to check every ingredient every time I make a bomb.
van HellSing on 23/5/2011 at 15:05
Hmm, that's a loss indeed. And yup, it's annoying. You can't sell quest items (even when they're no longer needed), yet you can use some of them up for alchemy... there should be a prompt if you really want to do that.
Malf on 23/5/2011 at 15:05
Massive tip by the way:
If you find the Escape key getting progressively slower to respond, to the point where you can hit it, leave it, make a cup of tea and it STILL hasn't brought up the menu, delete some saves from Users\InsertNameHere\Documents\Witcher2.
There's a degree of caching for every single save file at the moment; hopefully that'll get patched.
Played it through on hard and loved it. I only had to lower the difficulty once (fighting Letho for the first time).
I don't understand the complaints about length to be honest; I felt that Chapter 3 was quicker through necessity; if they'd lingered too long there, I think fatigue would have set in.
I've immediately started a new game as I'm keen to try a different approach and see how things change.
van HellSing on 23/5/2011 at 16:01
Hey, thanks! I might use the reduced weight for crafting items one, and definitely the minimap pointer thingy - that should have been in the game from the start.
Pemptus on 24/5/2011 at 09:06
It's Jim Sterling. He's a special case, not necessarily in a bad way.
Many of the points he makes are right on the money. I'll have to play a bit more to verify the rest.
Malf on 24/5/2011 at 09:40
He makes a lot of fair points, but I also think that review is an excellent example of why scoring systems don't work and shouldn't be used. Tagging an arbitrary number at the end of a review only serves to polarise your audience and reflects none of the depth or subtlety that may be present in the text itself.
He didn't say that he didn't like the game (although there are some worrying pointers that indicate he rushed through it), but there's a 6 at the end, which is what most of his readership will skip to and has been defined in the Metacritic era as meaning a poor game.
There's the real rot in modern games journalism: scoring, Metacritic and artificial inflation of such in order to satisfy marketing, even to the extent of financial leverage being used to influence scores.
Jim Sterling is obviously trying to mimic games journalism from a bygone era where the 1-10 scale was more representative of quality, which is admirable, but naive. Dropping scores and relying on the ability of your audience to interpret your actual review content is the only way games journalism will properly evolve into criticism rather than simply another form of advertising.
