Replaying The Witchers: Part 2

after putting this game off for forever I finally played through it earlier this year and I had no idea what was going on the dialog in The Witcher 2 is extremely exposition heavy and unlike the more ambiguous role-playing dialogue options you'd get in like Skyrim or pillars you are very much playing the role of a character whose character has already been written because this time Geralt knows what he's doing he's recovering his memory as the game goes on so he's more of a MarySue now and less of a tutorials amnesiac once act two hits he knows what's going on even if the player doesn't and once Act two hits a lot is going on my fond enough memories of the first game were prodding me into doing whatever I could to enjoy this sequel as much as possible so after not knowing what this plot was doing at all I decided to just go back and do them all from the beginning and replay the witcher's so this time when I made it to number two I decided to keep a cheat sheet with me I had a printed map on hand for pretty much the entire second run of this game with names and events scribbled on the backside and I'm not exactly happy with how important that cheat sheet ended up becoming but I am happy that I read sword of Destiny as it turns out the second Witcher book wasn't translated to English until May of this year with the release of the third game and even then that was only for the UK Edition North America's paperback isn't due until December considering the higher costs and shipping times of overseas delivery I decided to take the e-book option for this one and what a weird option that was to take this is the second book of the series but most of them have already been translated and printed in English so it's only just now that we finally got number two even though numbers three four and five already made the transition years ago it's also weird that this is the one they've been holding back on I read a lot of commenters who seem to agree that this is the fan favorite of the series and after reading it myself I get it sword of Destiny is a short story collection just like the last wish but this one has a much slower pace and a more contemplative tone the stories are less about what a cool dude Geralt is and more about what a confused dude Geralt is there's a whole lot less time spent with him spinning around chopping up monsters and there is spent with him falling head over heels in love running out of money or feeling guilty for feeling obligated to raise new children witcher's a recurring theme has him trying to balance the detached brutality of his profession with the scraps of human emotion leftover that might not have been fully trained out of him it's almost like maybe like the experiences of growing up with some artistically motivated desire to write fiction despite also having to live with the more industrious demands of a soviet communist economy but maybe maybe that's looking too deep into it either way I was enraptured after the pulpy sexy fantasy of the first book I wasn't expecting a heart-melting piece of literature about the terrifying inner conflicts of the human condition or the Whichard condition or something my favorite story here ends on one of my favorite last-minute twists of any book with a hungry vicious werewolf sneaking up on our heroes before deciding to just sit and listen to this bard sappy romantic song before walking away it's a lie that encapsulates the change of tone the second book makes and also hints at the change of tone the second game makes it's less about hunting monsters and twisting around fairy tales than it is about much more relatable human drama and that's also what the game developers seem to have attempted with number two it's less about hunting monsters and more about navigating human conflicts it has less Fairy Tail glades than it does muddy battlefields and military camps you won't find any leprechauns prancing round ball vines in this one instead you'll find a whole lot of politics and plot twists and big battle scenes and an overall attempt to polish this universe up for a mass-market multi-platform release instead of using outdated Bioware tech they developed their own engine that looks damn good and scaled well enough for a console release suddenly everyone's faces look like faces not potato is the voice actors sound like their voice acting and not swearing a courthouse oath and you're no longer juggling around 30 different quests for the same fetch the 2d flashbacks don't just zoom in and out of concept art but have these slighty FMV animations that make Garrett look like a dried-up crunchy leaf the UI is big and clunky the visual style is blurry and bloomie the rooms are way smaller and they're these weirdly placed wooden gates that keep you from seeing very far and then wouldn't wait a minute I see what's going on here they cost alized it after a failed attempt to outsource a console version of the first game in 2009 the developers decided to just do it themselves for the sequel a dev quote tells us straight from the horse's mouth that the whole interface was designed with consoles in mind it's impossible for me to look at these menus and think otherwise the grid inventory the tooltips the free cursor and the hotbar of the original games UI has been redesigned into slow Scaleform sub menus that require multiple clicks to accomplish what took one click before but now you have a few frames of input delay each time the background has this goopy cell biology theme that doesn't exactly fit the style of the rest of the game the first witchers interface was an eyesore but it was way more functional than this one picking up an object off the ground used to be a point-and-click process you could examine and use stuff in the same window you looted it out with now you have to fish it out from a list reordering categories as you go if you ever need to design an RPG interface take note it's way easier to imagine our hero stopping to take a break and flip through a notebook when you have papery sound effects and a referential background image instead of abstract goopy sound effects and an abstract goopy background although I'm totally a Witcher guy this just makes me really jealous that all those Dragon Age guys get to have their own PC interfaces every time they get a game and though that would be nice upon playing this game twice I found that combat and movement now feels a whole lot better with the controller but after making that switch you have to go through the pause menu to access inventory and journals without hotkeys and that becomes a nightmare of dead time adding up and outside of those menus they now have this game using a brawler style control scheme where they nixed away one of three attacks for a two attack + block button hack and slash kind of layout but despite the more action gaming controls it lacks action gamey finesse and responsiveness connecting your sword to a bad guys gut has less to do with your sword actually hitting them than it does to do with your camera being locked on to them which is accomplished with this unwieldly combination of both your own placement and what you're vaguely looking at this is the same way combat targeting was handled in the first game it was just easier to handle because you could directly point and click on who you were attacking without having that cursor the camera has to assume what you want to be targeting and it's oftentimes wrong when it is you see all sorts of weird stuff happening your sword goes right through people or people parry your blows in there standing animations one straight up numerical factor that could have made this combat so much more tolerable is the backstab bonus even though you have to target and lock onto enemies to attack your camera and movement don't lock on to them unlike the targeting in Zelda or Demon Souls you can't side step around enemies or backpedal but without a shield or lots of crowd control options your primary defense here is evasive Ness you have to roll around enemies and run away and that's really the best way to stay alive but you're also turning your back to enemies that get a 200% backstab bonus on you throw more than one enemy into the crowd and suddenly you have fights where the majority of your health goes down within the first few frames thanks to that enormous backstab bonus in the weird collision detection they just kind of have to wave their swords in the air in front of gerelds backside and then they're good to go it's all they need that that's aw that that's not great for the record I've fully played through this game two times with the combat rebalance mod and again without it and neither experience was great between both these first two games neither has combat that's great and that has me seriously worried about how the third game is going to play and feel but the overall production of the second is a marked improvement over the first even if a lot of the witcher's more unique and charming ideas are played safer this time there's still no lack of ambition for wants to do with its characters and its choices though like what it does with the Cranford Reavers in the book these guys are horrible the totally screw over geralt and yennefer but if you didn't read it you wouldn't know that and neither does the amnesiac Geralt in the game so you trapped as brick which you don't remember waste the woods to remind him what old mates that's not the lack of knowing that backstory is an experience shared by both the player and the character the book readers have their opportunity to take revenge on these guys but players without knowledge of them might be fooled but then again without them really harming our character in the here and now does it really count as being fooled your decision on what to do with them comes back around hours later and determines whether the newest Crimson Reaver gets an opportunity to return your favor or not the blood you inadvertently shed there can lead directly to blood on your hands later which affects other characters perception of you one thing leads to another and hours later this same quest line has you summoning up swamp ghosts for a witch in the woods the dedication to long-term cause and effect is the primary selling point of this game the end of act 1 branches the story off into two incredibly different directions that it's more like playing two different campaigns you end up in two different towns then restricted areas from different parts of a third town with different characters living and dying in different borders being drawn in the ground with a multitude of different outcomes gracefully written in and out of each other to account for whatever choices the player makes here and this seems to be what reviewers and fans liked so much about this sequel it had game-changing consequences but the hyperbole over these game-changing consequences a little bit of a misnomer they are all pre-written for you that's it's all pre-planned and the extent to which they push them is in its own way limiting playing it a second time didn't just uncover how much content Ayad missed the first time seriously give it a second go the music and virgon is way better than the kaedwen camp but the second run also uncovered just how much context I had missed like I said in the beginning I had no idea what was going on in this game for my first time through geralt run-in with the creme fit Reavers is just about the last time they make a clever writing play with his amnesia as the game goes on more of his memory comes back and so does his knowledge of lore that the player needs to catch up with he starts tossing around enough lore of his own that stuff your own character can say will be flying right over your own head there's a serious disconnect when that happens seeing this conflict over the pontar valley play out from both sides felt less like a bonus than it did a necessity especially since without this map I'd have no clue where the pontar Valley is in relation to the aggressors fighting over it but Geralt doesn't seem to have that problem whatever room for reactivity they gave this plot doesn't keep this plot from being a mess it's not only convoluted for the sake of all the room for player choices that there is but it's also full of tons of little convenient events that make little sense when you look at the greater picture and this is where I have to spoil everything to explain myself Cedric a drunken elfin flotsam dies after centuries of experience with his last words revealing that Sabrina's curse at virgon in the future will help some amnesiac weirdo who walked into his town two days earlier to recover his memory okay if you take your Visp atthe girl just so happens to find Trish's figurine in the woods because finding the figurine in the nilfgaardian camp where it's supposed to be would be too simple or something Roche looks like he dies on the bridge from the dragon but he doesn't and the only thing that really seems to change is that Geralt can say I thought you died in the beginning mere seconds of this nameless priest appearing in a cutscene turns out to be the crux of a major subplot hours later when you've probably forgotten everything that happened these are just a few of the countless inconsequential little bumps in the road of this plot that you have to remember or else a lot of lines make no sense they don't add much to the plot they're superfluous details that just left me confuse that first time first impressions are pretty important in act 3 if you go after Tris she acts surprised that you don't know about the lodge the lodge of sorceresses is a top-secret organization who might be behind all the craziness going on except that it's not secret at all it was talked about in the first game it had its own journal entry in the first game it's talked about in the second game before it becomes this grand reveal and there is even a book about it being sold on the street in front of where captive lodge members are being held I just do maybe he read about it in the tourist brochure it's a messy overly complicated confusing exposition heavy story and I can't really fault it for any of that it's zigzags its way back and forth all over the place because it's juggling the conflicting goals of our Witcher himself just like in this book his primary motivation would seem to be clearing his name and proving he's not the assassin of Kings but as the two branching stories go on he ends up being implicated in crimes just as if not more sinister and the occasional moments implicating him and those crimes can be very well-written a fee has been hot iron soon enough more pressing goals appear than proving Geralt innocence and in any other story where a clear villain would ground our hero's progress through the whole adventure this story has a reluctant villain who's actually really good at talking his way out of villainy at the very end maybe because he's not much of a villain at all Leto and Geralt find each other at their throats because of bad luck neither of them are really invested in their causes or even each other and that's a really unique and kind of brave spin on the revenge fantasy as Geralt chases after this rival the rival doesn't turn around twirl his moustache and unleash a bunch of dastardly traps he really doesn't want anything to do with Geralt Geralt is actually 100% the aggressor here Leto still considers him a friend and is confused and frustrated by Geralt insistence on hounding him why do you hound me they think I killed Fulton it's your call for playing soldier boy and then once it's all said and done with after they've both been through far worse they have an opportunity to reconsider even after both playthroughs I couldn't bring myself to fight this guy the second book shift of focus from fairy tale subversion to human drama comes with the second game shift of focus to brutally complex pretend politics the plots a mess a coherent but almost incomprehensible series of forgettable minor events that end up adding up to huge consequences on a huge stage we see very little of I'm just thankful that we have some strong characterization at least grounding it and while I understand the appeal of a more mundane or unconventional fantasy story and while I recognize the value that reviewers are going to place on a pretty technically competent polished game that also features exhaustive reactivity and while I empathize with the value of a multi-platform release I'm not sure I like this one and I still consider myself a big fan of these games but even after replaying it it is fascinating as hell but the combat just doesn't feel like it can be mastered two playthroughs on hardmode had me stuck at fights that felt like crap shoots of barely connecting back stabs taking the time to prepare traps and a potion cocktail for crowd control requires you to wade through these slow ass menus and watch this slow ass animation and even then the buffs you get for it lasts just like five minutes for a game emphasizing preparation before combat your preparations don't yield you enough time to properly prepare for anything by the time you have to fight something is too late you can die in quick load and drink up again to account for those precious lost seconds but that spoils the fun of having to prepare for it in the first place they had this stuff figured out in the last game where the buff timings and the alchemy system ended up giving the world a sense of place it was a more honest and complete exploration of what makes this character interesting you had to hunt monsters by their time of day you had to study their tactics and play in potions and poisons according to the specific beasts you had to arrest and prepare an entire hours worth of buffs at the tavern rather than rushing through them all in smaller increments through the wilderness and all of that made you care about where to go when when to go you had to buy out an entire tavern supply of alcohol to make your potions and maybe that's why the innkeeper's don't like witcher so much and maybe that gave you an excuse to get good at gambling you had to chase devourers at night but still leave room open in the schedule to turn the quest in at daytime you really had to go out of your way to be this guy in the first game to a much greater extent than you do in the second it had a level of mechanical role playing to it that made this character feel concrete and real a set of difficult rules and realities you had to experience firsthand from this character's perspective and that's something you can't get from a movie or even from a book and in the process of scaling back on a lot of those lower relevant mechanics they also scale back on the fairy tale mystique of it all there is a troll under a bridge that charges a toll and as it turns out he's been depressed into alcoholism because the town's folk slaughtered his wife and that's freaking great and just about the only time this game really feels like what I at least consider The Witcher to be about I don't know if the later books try this much politicking but without having the charm of centuries-old fairytales on its side The Witcher 2 feels more like a cheaper version of Game of Thrones or a crass er version of Dragon Age than it feels like its own unique brand it's not a bad game overall but it's edge is far more dull it strays from the clever and inventive ideas that make the first game what I think is the better one even though it was a duct tape together Frankenstein creature of barely working features but I really wouldn't mind bringing that with me on a desert island if I had to so now I can only hope that the third game will make the best of both worlds

Channel: Super Bunnyhop

Views: 566,362

Keywords: The Witcher, The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings (Video Game), The Witcher 3

Id: lF860MCMUfQ

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2015