The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Critique (& Story Commentary)

Defining a role-playing game with any degree of certainty is nigh on impossible. I generally go with the “I know one when I see one” mantra, however, I must confess that so many modern games have incorporated RPG elements that I don’t always know how to explain why, for example, I consider The Witcher 3 to be an RPG but not Watch Dogs 2. Both have pre-defined protagonists, both are open world games, both let you make various character builds, etc. Every game wants to lay-claim to RPG-elements now, but most games only include those RPG aspects at a surface level, treating it more as a box-ticking exercise than any real desire to let the player role play. Take skill trees. A more action-oriented game like, say, the new Tomb Raider games, offer you a choice of where to spend skill points, however, those skill trees are often bland and disappointing. The starting point always seems to be stripping away skills you should have at the start and then making you buy them with skill points, almost as a way of expanding the tutorial. I also find these games give you enough skill points to buy most of the major skills in one playthrough, which means you don’t create a build as such. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey came closer than most to giving your character a particular style such as assassin or melee, but even then, I never considered any options to be closed-off to my character. They just leaned one way or another. Levelling systems are all over the place now, but again, that group of not-really-RPG games largely miss the point. Higher level enemies aren’t a higher level because they are inherently tougher, for example, enemies with power armor in Fallout, or the progression from rats all the way to dragons in traditional fantasy games. Instead, you’re simply told that one enemy is much tougher than another identical looking enemy in the same gear just because of a number. Enemies often auto-level to match yours anyway, adding another element of pointlessness to it all. It should also be noted that this swing can go the other way. More and more, RPGs want to be exciting to play in their own right, and develop fun combat systems, sometimes at the expense of compelling storytelling. I find this a touch depressing, because for me, player choice is the most important aspect of an RPG and I feel like we’re moving away from that slightly. If there is a good definition of RPG it has to include player choice and those choices should have a major impact. If they don’t, then it probably isn’t an RPG. The length of a game’s script can easily double or treble in size as a result of providing this player choice. It’s a lot of work. I’ll use Odyssey again as an example, because it went to a lot of effort to include options, from the male or female protagonist choice, to character dialogue, and even who lives and who dies. Ubisoft didn’t quite go all-in though. There isn’t much variance in the story or ending regardless of your choices. The choices that seemed major at the time, barely affected anything going forward. I’d be willing to bet most people remember conversation choices in Odyssey mainly as the mechanism for getting people into bed. Player choice doesn’t make a game an RPG, but it is a necessary requirement to be an RPG in my book. Unfortunately, the more expensive games become to make, the less meaningful player choice we see in big budget RPGs. Video games are simply too expensive to make to justify spending millions on environments, scripts, voice acting, enemies, and cutscenes that not every player will see. The player can choose not to complete content if they like, so, for example, you don’t have to do all the companion missions in Mass Effect 2, but you don’t get locked off from doing them. In the original Mass Effect, you chose whether to save Ashley or Kaiden, but notably they did not have loyalty side quests of their own that you risked missing out on. Games are structured in such a way that it takes a conscious effort on the part of the player to exclude themselves from content. There are exceptions of course. Baldur’s Gate 2 had an entire map that you could easily miss based on what appeared to be a relatively minor decision, and Bioware went even further with Dragon Age: Origins, which had 6 different origin stories to playthrough depending on which race you chose to play as. It was these different intros, not the Bioware name, that first convinced me to buy the game. I foolishly told myself that I would play through Origins multiple times maybe even 6 just so I could see all the variations on offer. Of course, I didn’t. I barely completed it once. I was playing on the PS3 and had a bunch of performance issues and bugs that made it a chore to get through. Plus, it’s, like, quite long. When Origins released, I remember hoping this variety in playthroughs would become a big part of the future of gaming, especially RPGs. That never happened. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who failed to take advantage of all those different intros so Bioware decided it wasn’t an exercise worth repeating. Clearly other developers felt the same. Instead of gaming developing to a place where we could play through the same game with different stories and environments each time, it ended up becoming a place where stories are an afterthought and you repeat the same content time and time again in the same environment. And then you have CD Projekt Red. Not content with following the usual sequel trappings of bigger and better, it went in a completely different direction, not just from its previous game but from games in general. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings forces you to make a choice early on that results in you missing out on entire cities and significant storylines whatever you choose. There are two main routes with different missions, different people, and vastly different outcomes. The Witcher 2 doesn’t just encourage multiple playthroughs; it demands them. This must have been a huge risk for CD Projekt Red. Two separate playthroughs means that each is shorter, coming in at around 25 hours instead of around 40 for the first game. Players are used to RPGs being fairly lengthy and people do dollar to hour calculations before deciding whether to buy a game. For example, I’ve definitely seen people concerned about the supposedly short length of the upcoming The Outer Worlds on the basis that it’s only 20 to 30 hours for a single playthrough. Obsidian has been at pains to point out the potential replay value, but you don’t have to look far to see people put off by the thought of paying $60 for a game that they expect to be upwards of 50 hours. Reviews could have been negatively impacted as well. Due to time constraints, reviewers often only get time to play a game once through. Best case scenario, the reviewer doesn’t mind the shorter length. Worst case scenario, they think it’s too short and don’t understand what the hell was going on because they only got half the story. I respect CD Projekt Red for taking the risk. And it was a risk. With hindsight, we know it paid off, but it had to because CD Projekt Red wasn’t in a position where it could withstand failures. The success of The Witcher gave CD Projekt Red the time and money to increase its team size and, crucially, to develop its own engine. As discussed in my video on The Witcher, CD Projekt licensed Bioware’s Aurora engine for that game but it wasn’t a great fit and about 80% of it was changed in some way by the time The Witcher was finished. The new engine, called the Red Engine, took about a year and a half to design and was the result of collaboration across the entire company to make sure that the engine wasn’t just suitable for luscious environments and an action combat system, but could also take into account branching story paths and easily incorporate changes to dialogue. In a behind the scenes interview, CD Projekt acknowledged that there were far too few distinct character models in The Witcher and added a modular system that could easily generate new character models, or change clothing, accessories, and hairstyles. Faces were a little trickier, requiring a digital sculptor to craft them, and as you might expect, the more important characters were given special treatment. Unfortunately, you can often see the line separating the head from the neck on many of them which can be a little distracting. CD Projekt Red incorporated a bunch of middleware into its new engine, taking the approach that it isn’t worth reinventing the wheel, especially when you don’t have a huge hammer and chisel budget. Path engine was used for navigation and Havoc for fluid animations, for example. During early development, CD Projekt Red correctly noted that PC gamers were largely playing on multi-core CPUs and so it developed the RED engine to use threads. This helped cut down on loading screens because one thread could focus on gathering tasks for the graphics card while another could be used for streaming game assets. Playing on a modern system, transitions between the small, but densely packed, city regions and the large forests and fields are almost entirely free of loading screens, although CD Projekt does incorporate a lot of double door set ups where you must pass through small empty areas before completely transitioning, however, this looks fairly natural and doesn’t add much time. Mind you, moving through doors is annoying when with an NPC because they go first and shut the door in your face. Sometimes you can sneak through at the same time as them but it requires perfect timing. Other niggles include the choice to have the interact button and attack button be the same, leading to lots of swinging swords at doors. The interact button also means Geralt has a tendency to light fires when he should be fighting or opening doors. On its release in 2011, The Witcher 2 was one of the best looking games of the time and still looks fairly impressive today. All the characters look and sound so much better than they did in the previous entry. While I hate to sound superficial, the improved fidelity of the characters is a huge reason why it’s easier to relate to them this time around, although credit must also go to the improved voice acting, voice direction, and localization work. Crucially, the actors now sound like they understand the context of their lines and deliver them accordingly. Dandelion now sounds like the cheeky poet you expect from the books; Zoltan is a noble dwarf who doesn’t hesitate to call out bullsh!t when he sees it, and Triss is a woman you can imagine Geralt wanting to settle down with. Even on a modern PC, there are still a bunch of issues with aliasing for background assets that can lead to a blurry or shimmering look and you get a bit of flickering too. The high detail assets also have a tendency to drift in late, so you can see flowers appearing right in front of your feet as you walk. The major test of the new RED Engine would be the console ports. As discussed in my Witcher 1 video, CD Projekt Red outsourced production of a console port for the original game, which would have been subtitled Rise of the White Wolf, however, production didn’t go well and CD Projekt Red eventually cancelled it. Things would be different this time around. Well, for Xbox 360 owners at least. The PS3 version was quickly written off because the different architecture of the infamous Cell processor required too many resources to develop for, whereas the Xbox 360 effectively ran on PC architecture. The console version needed an entire rewrite of shaders, materials and post-processing effects. The Xbox version was more likely to be played on TVs instead of monitors and therefore CD Projekt Red also had to adjust output colors and the gamma curve. A Eurogamer article on the making of The Witcher 2 states that in many ways the lighting looked better on the console version. While I haven’t played the Xbox version myself, this sounds believable because the lighting is one of the few visual areas I wasn’t especially happy with. Cutscenes have a tendency to look oversaturated and often have a strong orange glow about them. That orange hue is visible in gameplay as well, often changing over to a blue glow depending on the exact region. In some places, you get both the overly harsh orange and blue look in quick succession, leaving the game resembling every movie poster from the last ten years. CD Projekt also had a few issues maintaining 30 frames per second for the xbox version and opted to cut the resolution down to 1280 by 672, which was 93% of the targeted 720p resolution, and then upscaled it vertically to fit. While compromises had to be made to get The Witcher 2 running on the xbox 360, a fair few compromises were also made to the PC version to make the game more console friendly, namely the user interface. The first Witcher game had a fairly ugly UI, but it was useful, presenting a bunch of information on one screen and not requiring many clicks to get things done. This system wouldn’t work on console and I would have liked some tidying up regardless, but CD Projekt Red went way too far in the other direction with this collection of tabbed menus and sub menus. Just navigating the screen is a pain because the mouse sensitivity in-game and in the menus can’t be changed separately, meaning you either have to accept slow mouse movement in the menus or put up with a camera that flicks all over the place during gameplay if you so much as think about moving the mouse. The tabbed menus are annoying but I can live with them, however, there are many other quirks that show mouse users were secondary when it came to designing the menu. Items in lists are large and you can’t scroll down with a mouse wheel, instead needing to use W and S or drag the small scroll wheel at the side. When dealing with multiple items, there’s a cumbersome dial that you need to adjust to sell, buy, or drop specific numbers of items. Worst of all, there’s the annoyance of constantly switching between using enter and space to confirm selections, like pressing enter to open up the list of mutagens, space to select which one you want to apply, and then enter to confirm it again. Xbox users got slightly screwed over in some ways as well, notably the weird way you have to select signs on a controller. Holding down left bumper slows down time and brings up a wheel with signs on the left, except the signs aren’t actually part of the wheel. You first have to go left to select the signs and then move up and down through a list. I’m not sure why it was done this way. There’s easily enough space on the wheel to include the five signs without needing to go through a sub-menu first. The Xbox 360 version came out nearly a year after the release of the PC version and included new content which was ported back to the PC via a free enhanced edition update for all owners of the original. In amongst what I’m sure were a whole host of bug fixes, there were over 30 minutes of new cutscenes and four hours of new gameplay. I never played the original and was unable to spot which quests were new just from playing the game so they don’t stand out too much. Having looked up the changes, it appears that the major new quests were added in the third and final chapter which would have been quite short otherwise. If you see reviews stating the third act felt rushed then that would be why. A new intro sequence was added showing Letho, the main antagonist, killing King Demavend which otherwise is an off-screen event. The console port likely played a huge part in the overall success of this release. I can’t find an exact sales figure, however, we know that The Witcher 1 and 2 had sold 8 million copies between them as of 2014 and The Witcher 2 generated four times more revenue than The Witcher. This puts a conservative estimate at around 6.4 million, and you can probably add a couple more million to that given that the phenomenal success of the Witcher 3 likely led to a few sales of the older games. Poland was so proud of the game, it gave Barack Obama a copy when he visited Poland in 2011. While gift-giving between countries often makes for nice light stories and photo ops, US Presidents are not allowed to keep any gifts they receive. Gifts given to presidents in their role as president are deemed to be given to the country and given to the National Archives and Records Administration. Any gifts of food or drink are destroyed. Once they’ve left office, the gifts form a part of the presidential library for that president. The president can opt to buy the gifts at market value if they like, but in 2014 Obama admitted that he wasn’t that good at videos games, so I doubt he bothered. Wwe probably have the console port to thank for the vastly improved combat system in The Witcher 2. The first Witcher had a weird rhythm game combat system that could at times look great, but it never played great. You might at times look like a badass witcher pirouetting all over the place, but you rarely felt like one in fights because Geralt’s on-screen antics had little to do with your button inputs. Success in fights was nearly entirely based on stats. Sure, you had to choose the right sword and stance and keep a vague rhythm, but it felt a bit set and forget. I ended up sleeping through most of the fights. You technically could dodge and even flip over enemy heads, but it would break your combo and was more hassle than it was worth. The Witcher’s combat system was very much that of a traditional RPG, with a coat of paint and over-the-shoulder camera view. The Witcher 2 released in May 2011, also known as May of the year 2 AAA, 2 years After Arkham Asylum. The new combat system responds directly to player inputs...most of the time, with quick and slow attacks, plus a heavy focus on dodging and back stabs. There’s even a block and riposte system. It certainly feels a lot closer to an action game than its predecessor, however, after only a couple of hours it begins to feel like it’s sitting in an awkward middle ground. Not a pure stat-based system, but not a pure action game either. The basics of the combat system are easy enough to understand. You have a light and heavy sword attack, or fast and slow if you prefer, plus you can block and perform a dodge roll. If you successfully dodge an attack you won’t take any damage. Blocking is easier however even a successful block results in minor damage. Geralt can riposte by blocking and then attacking just before the enemy. I’ll get onto all the sign stuff shortly, but first it’s worth looking at the problems with the core swordplay that stop it from being truly satisfying in its own right. The most obvious gripe is that there isn’t really a system of hit detection in place. This is where I wish I was more educated on how games actually work so I could talk about this technically and accurately, but I don’t so instead I’ll just describe how the system feels like it works. You never know, I might get lucky and be correct about a few things. The best way to sum it up is by saying that the animations and character models feel largely irrelevant. Most of the time, when a sword makes contact with a character model, there will be a hit registered, however, far too often there won’t be, or there will be when there shouldn’t have been, or you won’t get credited with a backstab when you should have, or your sword is deemed to hit an enemy shield when it clearly didn’t. That kind of thing. It happens often enough that you stop trusting the animations themselves and instead focus on playing by the rules. Don’t worry about whether your sword connects with an opponent's back; worry about whether Geralt is standing directly behind the opponent. No matter how you think you can time dodge rolls, don’t bother. You aren’t going to roll elegantly under an oncoming attack; you’re going to get hit. I’m fairly sure there aren’t any invincibility frames. The roll isn’t there to dodge attacks; it’s there to put distance between Geralt and the enemy so that when the computer runs the numbers on the next attack, the enemy is deemed to be out of range. This can work the other way around. For example, if you are in range and you roll towards the enemy, you still get hit because of the lack of iframes. However, you are out of range and roll in to the enemy you won’t be hit even if the animation connects because you were out of range when the attack started. The system is a lot closer to something like the real time turn based combat of Baldur’s Gate than it first appears. For all I know, this is how most games work, but the point is that the games with truly good combat systems make you forget that it’s all a bunch of numbers and think that the hit you’ve registered on the enemy is because Batman’s fist connected with the goon’s face. Like old school CRPGs, whether or not you hit or are hit by an enemy in The Witcher seems to be based on a calculation at the start of a designated turn and what happens after with the animations is redundant. This is made glaringly obvious if you have the combat log turned on. Damage to Geralt will appear when the enemy is still in the first frame or two of the animation, long before the attack hits you, and that’s if it hits you at all. I knew this was a problem, but it wasn’t until I went back and looked at the footage frame by frame that I realized how bad it can be. During just one fight, there were more than enough examples of how broken and frustrating the system is. In the heat of the moment and in the more frantic encounters, you might not notice. There will be the odd death that felt like it came out of nowhere, but in the moment, you put it down to your own mistake. Perhaps you missed a status effect that was draining your health. However, this happened so often that I started making notes and, sure enough, when I went back to the footage, the deaths ended up looking incredibly cheap. Where the real time turned based model starts looking really silly is fighting multiple enemies, because no matter how many enemies Geralt swings his sword through, he isn’t deemed to have hit any enemy other than the one the game decides he is aiming for. Technically, there is a hard lock-on system for you to lock on to specific targets, however, even if you don’t do this the game locks on for you. Talking of looking silly, Geralt does the thing where he leaps huge distances to attack a distant enemy who is well out of range, but he won’t always do it, so as often as not, he swings the sword through thin air instead. While the lock on determines who Geralt hits, Geralt’s movement isn’t affected by this lock-on. If you move back towards the camera, Geralt turns before walking towards it instead of backstepping. Likewise, he doesn’t strafe, he runs in the direction you press. If this sounds like a minor issue, then it’s time to point out the backstab system which by default results in 200% damage when Geralt is hit on the back. As discussed, if you want to avoid damage you need to put space between you and the enemy and the best way to do that is to roll away from them. However, doing this means turning your back on the enemy and if you are hit during the roll, because there are no iframes, it counts as a backstab and does double damage. You can eventually reduce the backstab damage to just 100% with a few upgrade points if you like, and that ends up feeling like a necessity on hard difficulty where a backstab can end quickly end a fight out of nowhere. The disconnect between Geralt’s movement and the enemies he’s locked on to also contributes to making the roll ability probably the most overpowered part of the game once it’s levelled up. Levelling up a roll sounds like an odd concept, but it plays a huge part in proceedings. With just two skill points, you can triple the length of Geralt’s roll. What’s more, you have control over Geralt during the roll. It looks and feels absurd. You can go from being face to face with an enemy, to rolling to the left or right and ending up behind them. The move looks and feels like when Samus becomes a ball in the Metroid games. It really is one of the more bizarre moves I can remember in a game otherwise going for a fairly traditional swords and shields fighting style. The weird dodge rolls are especially egregious when you consider that Geralt’s fighting style is supposed to be built around the use of graceful pirouettes that make him look like a dancer not a bowling ball. The first game incorporated these pirouettes, even if they were performed automatically and without input from the player. It’s a shame there isn’t a basic pirouette move that acts a bit like a spot dodge, with the roll being saved either as an alternative or as an upgrade for late game. CD Projekt Red doesn’t need to be a slave to the books by any means, but this dodge roll does feel ridiculous. As things stand, the dodge roll is so useful that you’re deliberately handicapping yourself by not using it or upgrading, and it makes a mockery of any attempt at decent sword and shield combat. Why bother blocking and taking a bit of damage, when you can just roll around the enemy, potentially avoiding taking any damage at all, and then get a backstab in for double damage of your own? Once I got used to the lack of hit detection, I would occasionally block just to avoid getting hit during the roll, but on balance, you’re usually better off taking one hit if it puts you in position to then backstab an enemy on the next turn. This process would be even easier if the game properly registered those backstab attacks. As I said, the game isn’t looking to see where hitboxes and hurtboxes interact. It’s looking at your relative positions when the turn is taken. This means Geralt can be to the side of an enemy and swing the sword into the enemy’s back but have it not register as a backstab because Geralt wasn’t in that specific spot directly behind the enemy. Conversely, of course, you can be standing behind the enemy, swing the sword into the side of the enemy and have it credit you with a backstab. Things get really frustrating when the game insists that an enemy has blocked an attack with their shield when they clearly haven’t. Again, it has to be a position thing as opposed to looking at the swinging of the sword. There are rules, and those rules are applied consistently, but that doesn’t make them fair or fun. There’s a basic armor subtraction system at play for both Geralt and human enemies. Geralt can equip four pieces of clothing to provide armor protection plus other stat benefits, however, it’s only the chest piece that notably improves as you progress. Enemy damage scales roughly in line with your armor score so long as you’re making a vague effort to find new pieces, so the subtraction method didn’t make combat too easy or too hard on either of my playthroughs. Fortunately, there’s a lot more to The Witcher 2’s combat system than just swinging a sword around. Right from the start, Geralt has access to the five major signs, which are essentially spells, and a sixth one might become available depending on how you apply skill points. In my video on The Witcher 1, I discussed how I didn’t bother all that much with signs, finding them fairly unnecessary, with the possible exception of quen and a bit of igni. You certainly could spend skill points based around signs if you wanted to, but right from the start it always felt like swordsmanship was the way to go and it didn’t steer me wrong. The signs are much better this time around and I’d now say the opposite situation applies in the sequel; while you certainly can create a build around swordmanship, you’d be crazy to ignore the signs, especially on the harder difficulty settings. A couple of immediate improvements stood out when comparing the two games. Casting the yrden sign sets a trap relatively quickly now whereas in the first game I think Geralt’s traps involved digging a huge hole and covering it with leaves because it took so long to perform. Once upgraded, Geralt can use multiple traps at the same time and even connect them, although I must admit I found aard more useful most of the time. Both yrden and aard do minor damage and a bit of stun or knockback to interrupt attacks, however, aard is not only quicker to use and capable of being directed towards an enemy, it also has a chance of stunning the enemy for an instant kill. This instant kill even works on massive creatures like trolls regardless of how much health they have left. Of course, Yrden has the advantage that it can be placed in advance of an enemy attack, so you don’t have to wait for enemies to get close, but still, aard has the edge for me. Axii is a lot more useful as well, although that might be more to do with some of the combat flaws discussed earlier, particularly the inability to damage more than one enemy at a time early on. Taking control of an enemy, or multiple enemies, is almost essential because you fight a lot of groups, and whereas the first game had a special group fighting style, this one doesn’t until you get the upgrades, and even then it isn’t as powerful. Turning a few people over to your side can make a big difference in the more hectic moments. Igni is still igni. If something moves there’s a good chance it’s weak to being set on fire so you might as well use it when it doubt. When it came to attacking, I must admit, I fell back on Aard quite a lot. It’s simply too useful to ignore. Even at a basic level, it halts an enemy in its tracks which not only stops an incoming attack, but gives you a free moment to tuck and roll and before you know it, you’re behind the enemy for a backstab. When you get lucky and the opponent is stunned, you get an instant kill, complete with a gory animation during which Geralt is invincible. For defense, there’s quen, which brings up a shield that will deflect one hit. Once levelled up, the shield will last for roughy ninety seconds instead of thirty, and will do damage to multiple enemies when it’s broken. It might sound horrendously overpowered and for a while I assumed it was. However, after playing around with other builds in my second playthrough, and digging into the combat logs a little more, I found that there are quite a few drawbacks to using quen that punish you for being overly reliant on it, however, we need to get into the nitty gritty a bit to understand why. Signs can only be used if you have enough vigor. YOu start with 2 vigor points, but can increase this if you spend skill points in the right places. If you’re going with a sign build, you’ll want to increase this to at least four, after all, what’s the point in being good with signs if you can never use them? Geralt regains vigor relatively quickly and there are ways to increase recovery speed via spending skill points or drinking potions. However, Geralt does not recover vigor while quen is active. In a typical encounter, you activate quen right before going into battle or when there’s a bit of distance between Geralt and the enemy. Quen takes just long enough to activate that if you do it in the middle of a group, you’ll likely get hit the second it’s up which makes the whole thing pointless. Once quen is active, you’ll have one vigor point left unless you’ve acquired a few extra of course. I my case, I typically used that vigor point to try and stun someone with aard and then that’s it. I have no more vigor points left. When the quen time limit expires, or more likely, the shield is destroyed, you quickly regain a point of vigor, but you want to put your shield back up as soon as possible. I’ll discuss difficulty modes a bit more in a minute, but suffice it to say that Geralt can’t take many hits on the harder settings he’s incredibly vulnerable when quen is down. I would reactivate quen the second that vigor point came back. With quen active again, the vigor stops regenerating. In other words, if you keep this pattern up, and there’s a good chance you will, you’ll only get to use one other sign per combat encounter. The situation is eased slightly once you’ve acquired a few more vigor points, however, by that point combat is of course tougher and you’re more reliant on all those powerful signs you’ve been upgrading. Having five or six bars of vigor, but not having them regenerate during lengthy bouts with multiple enemies makes a large part of your build useless after you’ve depleted the initial use with a few aard and igni signs. However, the inability to repeatedly use signs isn’t the biggest drawback of having quen active. The real problem is the hidden fatigue system. There’s no mention of fatigue in the manual and it isn’t explained in the game that I can see, however, if you choose to have the combat log visible in the bottom right of the screen, which I suspect most people won’t, you can see that the damage number is multiplied by a fatigue percentage to reduce the actual amount of damage dealt to enemies. For example, if Geralt’s attack does 40 damage less 4 for the enemy’s armor, you have damage of 36. If fatigue is at 25%, your damage will be multiplied by 75%, and to make this worse, it’s the damage number before reduction for shields. In this case, the damage number of 40 will be reduced to 30 for total damage of 26. The fatigue percentage is based on vigor. If Geralt has no vigor remaining, fatigue is 50% which is the highest it can be. The exact impact vigor has on fatigue is determined by the maximum vigor points. If you only have two vigor points, then fatigue can either be zero if you still have both vigor points available to use, 25% if you have used one, or 50% if you’ve used all of them. If there are 4 maximum vigor points then it will go in increments of 12.5% down to 50%. Now let’s go back to looking at the impact of quen. You don’t regenerate vigor while quen is active, so the second you use quen you’ve reduced the damage output by possibly 25% for the entire combat session. Use another sign and you’re down to dealing 50% damage and that number won’t even start coming back up again until you’ve lost the shield at which point you’ll probably reactivate the shield and be back to 50%. That defensive barrier comes at a huge cost to your attacking output and for that reason, I don’t consider quen to be particularly overpowered. It has some appropriately huge drawbacks. Now, that said, I can’t imagine playing on hard without quen, because avoiding all that damage is absolutely crucial. I just don’t think that means it’s OP. Oh and one minor issue is that the shield remains visible for a second or two even after it’s been deactivated which can catch you out. There’s also that sixth sign, heliotrope, which is a late option in the sign skill tree and is available when you fill up a new adrenaline bar which can take quite a while. It’s not worth it. The slow time effect slows Geralt as well which mitigates the advantage, but worst of all, enemies are still completely capable of turning on a dime in a split second to block attacks. It makes the whole thing largely useless. The biggest problem with signs overall is a bug, or at least I assume it is, because I’ll be damned if I can find the reason for it. Every now and again, the signs just don’t work. Geralt will stand there completely still while you hammer away on the appropriate button. To state the obvious, this has nothing to do with a lack of vigor. It is also not because I just used a sign and there is a cooldown period. It’s not because Geralt has just gotten up from a roll, or just taken damage, or is suffering from a status effect. I’ve looked at all the footage for this problem and tried to replicate it but cannot find a single consistent issue that causes it. It’s not input lag. I noticed that was a problem with the game on release, but I’m talking about the complete inability to use signs here. I’m kind of hoping Joseph Anderson has this problem as well because he’ll no doubt figure out what’s causing it. He’s a smart arse like that. Outside of signs and swordplay, The Witcher 2 offers a third option to focus on upgrading and that’s alchemy. Broadly, the alchemy branch focuses on making potions and bombs a more desirable part of your strategy. Without any upgrades, I found the bombs to be of minor use only. It doesn’t do any harm to have a few on you, but I wouldn’t exactly go out of my way to craft them either. In the first game, potions offered substantial benefits in combat, so creating a build around them sounded interesting and potentially game-breaking. However, The Witcher 2 treats potions a lot differently to the previous game and as a result, you’d have to put a lot of upgrades into that alchemy branch before you start to see noticeable benefits and even then it’s not worth the opportunity cost from not using those points elsewhere. Before getting to the negatives around potions, it’s worth looking at some good changes made between games one and two. First of all, while I don’t love the UI changes, when it comes to crafting potions, oils, and bombs, the larger icons make it a lot easier to understand what you’re doing and ingredients are automatically collated together so you can quickly knock out all the potions you need. You’re also told exactly what effect the potions you drink will have on Geralt’s toxicity. As with the first game, potions don’t typically require specific plants; rather they require a particular ingredient type from 9 in total. I never engaged with this part of crafting in previous game and I didn’t here either. I just made sure to collect enough plants in general so that I always had the required ingredients on hand. There’s definitely something to be said for offering some flexibility with the choice of herb used, but it’s clearly an afterthought here. The categories are shoved in the top right of the crafting screen and I wouldn’t be surprised if some people played through the entire game without noticing them. I also like how you now have to meditate to drink potions. You always had to meditate to make new ones, but you used to be able to drink them wherever including in combat. Geralt was also invincible while drinking potions so that could look a little silly. Strangely, you don’t have to meditate to apply oils to your sword; this can still be done during combat. I’m not sure why it’s different. You could argue that potions take a more physical toll on Geralt whereas oils just need to be rubbed on a sword, however, I think a focus on preparation should be encouraged across the board. Potions still give powerful buffs, such as swallow which regenerates health during combat, rook for increased sword damage, and Tawny Owl for increased vigor regeneration speed. Investing in the alchemy build will increase the duration of your potions, let you drink more, enhance the benefits, and mitigate the negatives. So why isn’t it worth creating an alchemy build? Well The Witcher 2 does not encourage preparation via potions and oils anywhere near as much as its predecessor and this is probably the most disappointing aspect of the game. The duration of the potion effects has been drastically cut back from between 30 minutes to an hour to around 5 or maybe ten minutes at the outside. Potions go from being something you might have active while you explore a monster infested area, to something you specifically wait to drink until you know exactly what you’re about to face. Five minutes isn’t a long time. Whenever I ventured outside of Flotsam to explore the nearby forest, I was typically wandering around for half an hour at a time, hunting different types of monsters and completing side quests. Stopping to drink potions every five minutes makes a mockery of the way witchers are supposed to prepare for fights. Not to mention, you’re going to get through a lot of potions and ingredients this way. I ended up only activating potions and oils for well-signposted major encounters, or fights I was having trouble with. Potions and oils definitely tip the edge in a fight. Basic stuff like health regeneration and 10% extra damage dealt to human enemies is a big deal, however, instead of making sure I had these active in dangerous situations, I ended up waiting until I died in the same spot a couple of times and then giving in and resorting to potions as if they were a type of cheat code, not a crucial part of Geralt’s kit. Potions and oils are no longer about preparing for what may lie ahead; they’re for reacting to what you know lies ahead. Even for those major boss battles, it’s easy to miss the window to take the potions or take them too early. I remember the first big fight against a monster called the Kayran. You have to meet a sorceress called Sile and then go and fight the monster together. When do you take the potion? Right before you speak to Sile? That would be wrong because you still have some walking to do. Right after you’ve jumped down from this ledge? What about this one? You’re expected to know exactly when the fight will start and yeah, most of the time you have a fairly good idea, but it’s annoying on those occasions when you don’t. But that’s nitpicking compared to a silly but major problem. If I wasn’t playing the enhanced edition 8 years after the release of the original game, I would have assumed this was a bug that would be promptly fixed, but it’s still in the game, so I guess not. The timers for your potions and oils do not stop during any cutscenes or conversations. You can prepare perfectly, taking potions at just the right time, only to be confronted with a lengthy cutscene or conversation that wipes out all the benefit of the potion. This mechanic encourages you to skip cutscenes and conversations because the quicker they are over, the more time you’ll have left on those buffs. This is absolutely baffling. The same problem could have been in the first game as well, however, with such lengthy timers it’s less likely to be a problem and I didn’t notice it. When the potion only lasts five minutes, those exposition dumps start to be irritating instead of interesting. If this potion stuff sounds annoying, then don’t worry because you can largely ignore it, even on the harder difficulty settings. For some reason, CD Projekt Red abandoned one of the stronger aspects of the original--the monster fights that captured what it means to be a witcher, namely preparation. First a quick reminder of how the typical monster hunting quest worked in the original. When entering a new area, you would find a notice board with a bunch of quests that boil down to kill x number of drowners or whatever monster was local to the region. There’s nothing stopping you going straight out and attacking those drowners, however, it paid to do research first because you don’t know what you’re about to go up against. You’re best bet is to buy a book all about the monster in question. This will tell you what type of sword you should use--although that’s usually obvious--what style works best, any particular attacks they might use like exploding with a burst of poison on death, and whether any oils do extra damage. To be clear, you didn’t need to do any of this to kill the enemies. You could guess most of the answers by applying a bit of common sense--small enemies were usually best fought with the swift style and most monsters were weak to fire--and a bit of trial and error could get you the rest of the way. However, there was an added layer. If Geralt didn’t understand the monster in question, he wouldn’t be able to harvest the rare materials from their bodies after he’s killed them and of course the quests usually demanded those rare parts. It was a decent system that let CD Projekt Red use what are effectively bread and butter repetitive RPG quests but inject them with more life. There’s a big difference between being The Inquisitor destined to close the rifts and bring peace to the land, but not before killing 10 goats because some people in the nearby village need some new jumpers, and being a witcher, a monster hunter for hire, literally created for the task of protecting humans from monsters, who is hired to kill monsters that are threatening nearby humans in exchange for a reward. CD Projekt Red has a built in excuse for including a bunch of simple kill quests to pad out the game time but for the sequel it opted against doing so. I suppose I should admire its restraint. There are only a handful of kill the monster quests in The Witcher 2. Roughly two in each of the three regions. Quality over quantity and all that, but the quality isn’t that good either. Here’s how the monster hunting quests work in The Witcher 2. They start the same. You find the quests on notice boards in each of the three main regions. Actually, that’s where the similarities end. In my first playthrough on hard, I didn’t buy a single book about monsters. I had a book on dragons, but only because it was given to me during a quest. After about 15 hours, I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen a bestiary. There is one though. It’s tucked away in one of the sub-menus, but you don’t need it. Even if I did have the books, they wouldn’t be that useful, because the potions and oils themselves aren’t that useful. Unlike the original, this time around, you don’t need any knowledge of the monsters to complete the side quests. Instead, you gain knowledge automatically by killing them. For example, in Flotsam there are quests to put an end to the local nekkers and endregas, the two major monster types roaming the nearby forest. So, you wander out into the forest and kill a handful of nekkers. Suddenly the mission log is automatically updated to tell you that to eliminate the nekker threat and complete the quest you must destroy their nests. Much the same happens with the endregas. You kill a few and are told that you need to destroy their cocoons which brings out a queen for you to kill. You don’t need to think at all; you just follow the instructions. The most frustrating part of this is how close the system is to being genuinely interesting. First of all, I take no issue with the game crediting you for figuring something out yourself. Let’s say nekkers are weak to fire, but you don’t officially know this yet. So you try igni out in combat a couple of times and see that it does a lot of damage. Perhaps after you’ve used it on nekkers three times, the game could recognize that you’ve exploited the weakness and add it to the bestiary for you. In the context of the missions here, the nekkers should keep spawning until you either destroy a nest on your own initiative or you get a hint from a book or NPC conversation. Once you’ve blown up one nest, the quest log can update to let you know you’re on the right track. This would give the player the best of both worlds; preparation and research gives you the edge, but if you want to save money you can take a stab at it yourself. The approach taken instead is unsatisfying and not in keeping with the spirit of witchers so well established in the first game. The lack of interesting monster quests is disappointing because fighting monsters is a lot more interesting than fighting humans who quickly get repetitive with the same mixture of light fodder, heavy armor, and shield guys popping up in most fights. Overall, despite my complaints, the combat is clearly better than that of The Witcher. It does sit a little awkwardly between two different systems, but for the most part it’s functional. There are now five difficulty settings: easy, medium, hard, dark, and insane. Insane sounds much the same as dark except there is permadeath. That is 100% not my cup of tea, so I immediately wrote that off. I ended up going with hard for my main playthrough but on balance I regret not stepping it up to dark. I always use the second playthrough to experiment with different difficulties and generally don’t worry too much about the challenge. I just take in the story. That first playthrough on hard though...it was good. As with The Witcher 3, the difficulty works on an inverse difficulty curve, getting easier the more you play. Some of those early encounters had me wanting to drop the difficulty more than increase it. Seemingly innocuous moments, like killing some guards around a ballistae during the prologue, become a sequence of endless deaths at the hands of the most insignificant soldiers. Perhaps it’s appropriate; after all, in the books, the infamous Geralt is finally killed by a peasant who owes 3 crowns at the local pub and was only weilding a pitchfork. A common theme to all the challenging encounters is the number of enemies you face. Even the toughest enemies can be a breeze if the encounter is one on one, but the second you have to deal with multiples, you are in trouble. Remember, early on you won’t have the ability to hit multiple enemies during combat because you haven’t bought that skill yet. These encounters can end up a little frantic and often the difference between victory and defeat is whether or not you manage to roll to safety to refresh quen or whether you get stuck between enemies. Comparatively, nearly every fight against just a single opponent is fairly easy, because you can nearly always refresh quen inbetween hits. The fight may take a while, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly tough. Compare that to those fights against large groups where it often feels like luck as to whether you get surrounded or manage to escape the crowd before a bunch of backstabs deplete your health in seconds. The big problem with this system is that it has a habit of making the big, epic fights feel anything but. Given a choice between fighting a group of nekkers or the final boss battle against Letho, I will take the Letho fight any day. He went down first try on both playthroughs, whereas those nekkers could be a real pain. Take the harpies as another example. By themselves or in small groups of two or three, the harpies are some of the easiest enemies in the game. They are weird enemies actually. They can fly and will often swoop down on you for that first hit, but after that they will only hover, even if it means following you around a path instead of flying to take a shortcut. Perhaps I was just overleveled when I first encountered the harpies, however, I never had any trouble with them in my first playthrough on hard, and I must have killed at least fifty of them. Fast forward to my second playthrough, where I undertook a mission in an underground cavern and was regularly attacked by harpies. This area is fairly rough; the harpies clip straight through walls and appear from nowhere. Anyway, at one point, Geralt is ambushed by a huge group of them and there isn’t much space to run. You can’t just leave the area either, so you need to kill them all. Even on a lower difficulty, this fight was incredibly tough because Geralt quickly gets surrounded and the game can be a little temperamental about when you are allowed to roll through any gaps between opponents. I ended up finding a spot where the harpies wouldn’t go and would then dash in and out with the odd swipe of a sword until I eventually defeated them. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this fight, on medium, was tougher than anything in my first playthrough on hard. I remember having a similar issue with The Witcher 3 where on death march difficulty, the toughest fight in the game ended up being against three human opponents in a small pub. I suppose it shouldn’t matter too much where the challenge ends up coming from so long as the challenge feels fair and appropriate for the difficulty, but I would much prefer the toughest fights to be the big epic battles and not random encounters with huge mobs. I mentioned that I slightly regret not playing on dark difficulty because there are a couple of gear sets that are only available on that setting. Had I known that before playing, it would have been enough to convince me to play on dark difficulty, however, the Witcher 2’s onboarding is a little odd. The enhanced edition added a new tutorial area called The Arena. As the name implies, you go into an arena and are slowly taught the basics of combat and given enemies to test your skills on. I died once near the end of this tutorial. I was messing about with throwing knives to test their range and effectiveness. Dying didn’t overly concern me, I assumed I would be able to restart that part of the test. That’s not what happens. On death, you’re kicked from the tutorial and told to choose your difficulty. To really add insult to injury, you’ve given a recommended difficulty based on your performance in the tutorial which in my case was uh easy. That was quite the come down. Obviously I wasn’t going to play on easy; I 100% don’t care what difficulty you play on, but I can’t really critique a combat system like the one here when playing on easy and missing out on most of the challenge. I did experiment with easy mode on that second playthrough and can tell you that among other things shields do not actually work on that difficulty. Geralt always swings right through them. You definitely get a different experience. For me, it came down to a choice between hard and dark, and here’s the kicker: on this screen, the game doesn’t give you any information about the differences between the difficulties, which means I didn’t know that dark mode had extra content. I assume this was an oversight as part of the additional content in the enhanced edition. Whatever the reason, I figure it’s worth pointing out, because most people playing The Witcher 2 for the first time will go through the tutorial and then be faced with this screen. For what it’s worth, I recommend you play on either hard or dark but, of course, the most important thing is to select the difficulty you enjoy because let’s face it, the Witcher games are about the story and this is where The Witcher 2 excels, with a tightly focused political narrative that feels perfectly in-keeping with the books. The story of the first game didn’t really fit with the flow of the books. That’s not to say it was bad, just different, if you’ll excuse the cop out. In some ways, the first game perfectly captured the version of Geralt we see in the short stories of The Last Wish because he went on regular monster hunting expeditions, however, the game also included an epic tale about a threat to the entire world, not to mention the dire future the Grand Master had planned for non-human races, and even many humans. It was like CD Projekt combined the short stories of The Last Wish and the epic five book Ciri saga and did it all in one game. For the most part, it succeeded. The story of the first game was excellent, and I still believe the ending is hugely underappreciated. While the Witcher 1 offered a few hints about the Wild Hunt, it was a largely stand alone story, far more so than say Mass Effect 1. Both games end with a fight against a somewhat modest and vulnerable opponent--Saren or the Grand Master--except in Mass Effect 1, Saren was working for the reapers and it was always abundantly clear where the real threat was coming from. In The Witcher 1, the Grand Master gets a late reveal as the big threat and if you hadn’t read the books or played the third game, you’d be forgiven for thinking the references to the Wild Hunt were nothing more than worldbuilding. While that makes the overall story of the Witcher trilogy a little less cohesive as a whole, it also avoids the need for the awkward middle chapter that plagues so many trilogies, including Mass Effect 2, where my controversial opinion is that the main story is pretty bad, and it’s only the companion missions that save it from mediocrity. The Witcher series tells three fairly distinct stories, although the second game definitely puts a lot more thought into setting up a sequel when compared to the first one. To use an easily relatable example, it’s a bit like the original Star Wars trilogy. The first movie told a standalone story that ended with victory for the heroes and everything could have ended there. The next two movies retroactively made the whole thing a trilogy, with episodes five and six being closely connected but still separate stories in their own right. Despite a significant change in storytelling style, the Witcher 2 still manages to be consistent with the books, just with different books this time. After The Last Wish, the witcher books transitioned from being a bunch of short stories to part of an epic Ciri saga. The Ciri saga is generally considered to be contained in five books (Blood of Elves to Lady of the Lake) however, it starts in Sword of Destiny which lays a lot of the groundwork. Sword of Destiny probably offers the best comparison to The Witcher 2. The story contained within is interesting in its own right, but it’s on a smaller scale to what comes later. Before starting, you can import your save file from The Witcher 1, although it doesn’t make a huge difference. On my first playthrough, I imported a save where I sided with the Order of the Flaming Rose in the big fight at the end. In the second playthrough, I didn’t import any save and the main thing I noticed was that Geralt was assumed to have killed Princess Adda when she became a striga again at the end of the first game, whereas in my playthrough I saved her. She’s not in this game either way, so it’s a minor difference. Near the end, you’re treated differently by the Order of the Flaming Rose depending on whether you sided with them or not, but that’s about as significant as it gets. Geralt isn’t in a relationship with Shani anymore. There’s a brief journal note explaining that they split up on good terms with Shani going to Oxenfurt for a teaching position. One nice touch is that if you obtained any of the special weapons or armor from the first game then they are carried forward. That meant I had the silver sword aerondight from the start. Of course, the sword and armor can’t be too good or they would break the balance of the entire game, but conveniently you end up losing it all anyway when you are captured at the end of the prologue. Before getting into the story of this game, I want to take a few moments to discuss parts of the first game’s story in reaction to a few comments on the video. First of all, I mistakenly referred to Shani as a sorceress when in fact she’s a regular healer. I’d been sure that the three women who helped Rusty at the Battle of Brenna were all sorceresses but alas that wasn’t the case. Fortunately, it doesn’t have any impact on the video or story discussion. There’s a section near the beginning where Geralt wakes up in Triss’ bed and overhears her talking to a sorceress who I still can’t identify. It doesn’t look like Philippa. It could be Keira Metz. Whoever it is, they are a member of the secret Lodge of Sorceresses. The sorceress in the mirror says to Triss “never let the witcher guess what you’re hiding from him” and in the video I said that the game never answered this mystery. I got a fair few comments along the lines of “Anyone who’s read the books should clearly know that the secret Triss is keeping from Geralt is his relationship with Yennefer. How can you have missed this?” etc etc. I disagree with this conclusion. Or conclusions, I guess I should say, because despite the absolute certainty with which people corrected me on this, those people were not consistent with their certainly correct answers, with the other main suggestion being Triss’ membership of the lodge. For the Yennefer answer, I don’t buy it because it would be silly for Triss to try and keep Geralt’s relationship with Yennefer a secret. Dandelion and Zoltan know about it for a start, so he could easily find out at any time. Plus, Geralt’s relationship with Yennefer was hardy smooth. Dandelion describes it as toxic at one point. If Triss really wanted to deceive Geralt, she could tell him about Yen but say it was a bad relationship and that he was better off without her. Finally, Triss and Geralt are described as being in an open relationship. They’re both adults and aren’t going to mess about with secrets like this. During The Witcher 2, Geralt does indeed find out about Yen and his relationship with her and Triss is incredibly supportive. Sure, it could all be an act, but I doubt it. As for it being about her lodge membership, I don’t agree with that either. As we’ll see later in the game, the Lodge is up to some dodgy stuff, but Triss wasn’t part of that, and in the books its goals were modest enough that it wouldn’t have bothered Geralt. He already knows sorceresses hold a lot of sway over kings and control the future of the realm. It’s never bothered him before. Really though, the obvious reason that the big secret can’t be Geralt’s relationship with Yennefer is method used to impart the information to the player. Remember, nearly everything book related in The Witcher 1 was tucked away in journals that you could easily ignore. CD Projekt Red didn’t ignore the books, but it certainly avoided drawing attention to them and didn’t want people who hadn’t read them to feel left out. Yennefer and Ciri aren’t even mentioned by name. They are conspicuous by their absence. Therefore, I don’t buy for one moment, that this conversation, included in a prominent cutscene between chapters, is solely there for people who have read the books. The Witcher 1 told its own story; it wouldn’t have devoted a cutscene to something only book readers would understand and is then not dealt with in the rest of the game. If that is the answer, then it’s bad poor storytelling from CD Projekt Red. If it’s something else, well, even after two games it’s still not clear so it’s probably still bad storytelling. And then there’s the issue of the Witcher code. I had a couple of pleasant conversations with people in the comments about this and we ended up agreeing to disagree which I think is fair given the ambiguity. Geralt often references this witcher’s code, either directly or indirectly. For example, in the Witcher 2 he states that witchers don’t kill dragons which in turn is based on something he said many times when tasked with hunting a dragon in Sword of Destiny. As Dandelion notes in one of the journal entries, Geralt has claimed the code is his own invention and that it is for him alone. This would make it not so much a witcher’s code as Geralt’s code. However, Dandelion goes on to state that he’s not convinced Geralt could have come up with it by himself and I’m inclined to agree. I’m not suggesting there’s a written code carved in stone like the ten commandments or anything, but I do believe that the code is shared among witchers. In support of this, there’s a paragraph in the book “The Art of The Witcher” which states that the code is rigerously ingrained during training and that the provisions of the code itself are considered secrets. This might be why Geralt claims he made it up himself, because he’s not supposed to go around talking about it. I’m not sure if this book is considered canon or anything, but it supports my position so I’m going to claim it is. Of course, it isn’t really all that important and it’s not something to stress about. In another of the journal entries, Dandelion states that “it matters little if this code is fiction or not” and I’m inclined to agree. By the way, I absolutely shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to anyway: if you want to discuss any issues from this video or any other, my discord server is probably the best place to do it. I need YouTube comments to feed the YouTube algorithm but the comment system is terrible for keeping conversations going. It’s easy for me to see new comments and reply once, but after that it is absolutely terrible. I think you’d be surprised at how bad the comment system is on the creator end. It’s ridiculous and this isn’t even a big channel. With that out of the way, let’s get stuck into the story. The Witcher 2 starts with some enhanced edition content showing Letho, a big beefy witcher, assassinating King Demavend on his ship and killing the entire crew in the process. There are a hell of a lot of kings to keep track of as we play. Demavend is, or rather was, one of the important ones. Demavend was king of Aedirn and his heir is Prince Stannis who plays a big role later. Another intro cinematic is an excerpt from the opening cinematic to the first game, where we also get a little bit more info about what happened to Geralt when he was supposed to be dead. In the last video, I theorized that Ciri took him to the Isle of Avelon from the Arthurian legend. That made sense in the context of the books and I discuss it more in the Witcher 1 video. I initially thought I was wrong because the flashbacks refer to it as the Isle of Avellac’h. I had to look this up because I had no clue what that was referring to other than that it was clearly an elven word. Turns out Avellac’h and Avelon are the same thing but that doesn’t get confirmed until the Witcher 3, so I’ve spoilt that for myself. I actually wonder whether my guess was influenced by a lingering memory from when I played The Witcher 3 back in the day. My memory is terrible but it also likes to trick me, so you never know. The prologue is framed via a conversation between Vernon Roche, the head of King Foltest’s special forces, and Geralt. You play out the major scenes as Geralt tells the story of how he came to be crouched over the dead body of King Foltest, covered in blood with no-one else to be seen. It all started during a battle between the armies of King Foltest and the La Vallette family. King Foltest had an affair with Baroness La Valette and fathered two children, Anais and Boussy. Foltest plans to recognize the children as his heirs. Princess Adda is either dead or married to King Radavid, so Foltest needs some heirs. This part confused me a bit at first. Usually a family is happy when bastard children are legitimized as it means the family will gain a more prominent place at court. I couldn’t entirely understand why this situation led to war. I think the Baroness demanded to be made Queen and Foltest refused, but I’m not 100% sure. It sounds like the war is an especially brutal lover’s tiff. Geralt has been working for Foltest ever since an assassin tried to kill Foltest in the post credits scene of the first game. This seems to be a fairly sweet gig for Geralt, giving him plenty of time to lay in bed with Triss and he presumably doesn’t go hungry. Although it does somewhat go against his whole “no politics” thing which he feels passionately about. As Dandelion puts it, politics is as interesting to Geralt as last winter’s snow so to see him as a glorified bodyguard does feel odd. Geralt does at least make it clear that he plans to go his own way soon. He’s just going to do this one last job for Foltest. Talk about tempting fate. As Kings go, Foltest is fairly likable. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still a ruthless asshole prepared to risk the lives of thousands for his own personal gain, he thinks he’s better than everyone else, and he is working with the Nilfgaardians, but by the standards of this world, he probably counts as one of the good guys. For a start, he doesn’t sit back and direct battles from the comfort of his command tent. He leads from the front as his army storms a castle, and gets his hands dirty alongside the common folk. Foltest keeps calm under pressure and knows how to work a ballistae. He remembers random soldiers from previous battles and you can see his little pep talks inspire confidence and respect in those he commands. Foltest even gets angry at his children being referred to as bastards. By all modern moral standards, Foltest does terrible, unforgivable, inhumane things but he looks like a saint compared to others in positions of power. Anyway, as Foltest’s army attacks the castle, Geralt comes face to face with Aryan La Valette who challenges him to a one on one duel to save the lives of his men. You can also talk La Valette down so that no one has to die. Geralt and Foltest then meet up with Vernon Roche as they attempt to rescue the children being held in a chapel. The highlight of the prologue is a dragon attack. Dragons are thought to be extinct in the world of the witcher. They are certainly rare enough that the sight of one swooping down from the sky raises a few soon to be singed eyebrows. . Unfortunately, the scenes with the dragon in are fairly bad. There’s a chase on the bridge infested with QTEs--which would have come as more of a surprise if there weren’t a pop up beforehand telling us how to avoid the incoming attacks--and a scene where you have to avoid fire by running under wooden shelter, which goes about as well as you might expect. It’s hard to tell which parts of the fire damages you and which harmlessly clip through the scenery. Speaking of dragons, a major part of the Sword of Destiny book has Geralt joining up with a hunting party who are going after a dragon. Geralt doesn’t kill dragons, but he also doubts it’s a dragon they’re chasing anyway because dragons are thought to be extinct. The golden dragon turned out to be real and Geralt let it live. The hunting party included a group of mercenaries known as the Crinfield Reavers who wanted to kill the dragon themselves and at one point they successfully captured Geralt and Yennefer. Of course, Geralt can’t remember any of this when he meets the Reavers again in Foltest’s camp. The Reavers say more than they should, but are at pains to point out that they probably wouldn’t have r@ped him. Just Yennefer. Even after hearing all that, you can still help the Reavers if you like. A new recruit, literally just called Newboy, has obtained a magical amulet that he thinks will see him safely through the battle, so long as he doesn’t wear any armor. The amulet is definitely magical, although it’s unlikely to work as he hopes. If you tell him this, he’ll suit up and help you out at a later point in the prologue. Despite the dragon attack, the assault goes well, and Foltest captures the town near the castle. In case you need a reminder that nothing is black and white in the world of the Witcher, you come across some of Foltest’s troops murdering and generally tormenting the innocent villagers. Geralt can step in and help and if he does, he will be thanked and offered a reward either here or in the town of Flotsam that you go to in Chapter 1. I made Geralt turn down the reward in this case. Even though witcher’s generally aren’t shy about accepting payment, it didn’t seem right given that he had helped Foltest’s army with this invasion in the first place. Geralt was merely cleaning up his own mess. After breaking into the chapel, Foltest is reunited with his children who look a little nervous around him but are encouraged to go to him by a kindly blind monk. Geralt gives them some privacy, at which point the monk’s blindfold falls to the ground and he drops the disguise just before he slits Foltest’s throat. The blindfold was likely there to cover his distinctive eyes, because this murderer is also a witcher, as was the assassin who tried to kill Foltest back at the end of the first game. The witcher, a man called Letho, escapes with the help of some scoia’tael, leaving Geralt as the only one in the room when the guards arrive and subsequently the main suspect for the murder of the king. It’s worth noting here that the cutscenes have improved a lot. The cutscenes in Witcher 1 were badly directed and didn’t have the desired impact. In the Witcher 2, they are, if anything, over produced, perhaps being a little too flashy. Generally, though, I like them. This one looks like it’s from an Assassin’s Creed game with the way the background goes black as the king is killed. Geralt is even wearing a renaissance style outfit. There are a few bad ones still, for example, the scene with the dragon destroying the bridge clumsily makes it look like Vernon Roche is killed when he’s clearly not. I found Foltest’s death in the prologue to be a little strange, but I think that comes from playing the first two games in quick succession. The first game ends with a witcher attempting to kill Foltest, but Geralt comes in and just about saves the day. The second game starts with a witcher attempting to kill Foltest and Geralt is not quite in time to save the day. I already knew Geralt would be framed for killing a king. That’s one of the few things I remember from the Witcher 3. My memory is terrible. When I first watched the epilogue at the end of The Witcher 1, I expected Foltest to be killed and Geralt to be caught standing over the body, but that didn’t happen. I have to wonder whether this scene was the result of some uncertainty over the direction of the story at the end of the Witcher 1. The game could have ended with the assassin being successful and Geralt looking like the killer. The sequel could then have started in much the same way except without the prologue. In the behind the scenes documentaries, CD Projekt admits that it didn’t have the sequel’s story planned out during production of the first game and I think it shows here. Alternatively, the cutscene at the end of the first game could have been used to show Letho’s murder of King Demavend. Perhaps there could also be a cutscene showing Letho meeting a shadowy figure and being given the order to kill a king and then it would cut to the assassination of Demavend. There could even have been a few lines like the shadowy figure stating “you’ll have to deal with the White Wolf” and Letho replying “I can handle Geralt of Rivia.” Fade to black. The murder of Demavend would give Foltest enough reason to panic and hire Geralt as a bodyguard and the rest of the prologue could play out in much the same way. The current similarities between the epilogue of one game and the prologue of the next are a touch odd, but like I said, that could be because I played them close to each other. Anyway, Vernon Roche believes Geralt’s story and helps him escape the prison. Along the way, you meet either Baroness La Valette or Aryan La Valette depending on whether or not you killed him in the earlier battle. Geralt’s only lead on Foltest’s killer is the scoia’tael he saw helping Letho so, along with Vernon Roche and Triss, he heads to Flotsam where Iorveth, leader of the Scoia’tel was last seen. Sure enough, Letho and Iorveth are spotted together. In a remarkable bit of good timing, Geralt strolls into Flotsam just as Dandelion and Zoltan, plus a couple of elves we don’t know, are about to be hanged. If you include the events of the books, this is actually the second time Geralt has arrived in the nick of time to save Dandelion from the hangman’s noose. The other time was in Toussaint, when he got overly friendly with a local duchess. The leader of Flotsam, a vile man called Loredo, agrees to let Zoltan and Dandelion live for the time being, but only if Geralt captures Iorveth. There’s also a bit of bother with a large beast called a kayran that has led to the closure of the ports. You won’t be going anywhere until that mess has been dealt with. The merchants guild has already hired one person to help with the situation: a sorceress called Sile de Tanserville. Geralt agrees to work with her, although he makes sure to negotiate his own fee first. The kayran has a deadly poison attack, so Geralt is encouraged to find the ingredients for a special potion that offers ridiculous poison protection. A friendly elf known as Cedric helps you craft special traps for use in the fight. It’s the rare monster battle that you actually need to prepare for. When you’re ready, Sile keeps the Kayran in position with her magic while Geralt risks his life on the ground. The concept is simple enough, but the execution is terrible. Geralt needs to cast yrden traps on the ground and then wait for the kayran’s tentacles to crash down and get stuck in the traps, giving him enough time to hack them off one at a time. If you crafted the special traps, you can put those down in designated places instead although you will need three of them, something that I didn’t realize before going into the fight. It’s probably not worth crafting three of the special traps. The only notable advantage is that it might be quicker to recast quen in some instances because you haven’t used vigor on yrden but that wasn’t a huge deal. The main problem with this fight is that it’s the typical shitshow I’ve come to expect from bosses with massive flailing limbs in a game where hit detection has to be placed between quotation marks. There were a lot of questionable deaths here. The magic barrier that Sile casts around the kayran seems to damage Geralt if he gets too close. I incurred multiple one hit kills, even with quen active, Geralt occasionally got stuck in place with no way to avoid two hits in quick succession, and the hit detection is terrible. When restarting after death, you have to move before the game has fully booted up because otherwise you’ll get hit with an attack, and, in my case, the game crashed every time I got booted to the game over screen. There are some bizarre design decisions as well. The kayran has four limbs marked with the distinctive red weak spot, and sure enough, when you cut off the fourth limb, you initiate a bunch of quick time events. Failing these quick time events results in instant death. It’s fairly easy to fail them because the QTEs are displayed in orange and don’t stand out that well. After failing this QTE the first time, I went back into the fight, except this time the QTE started after I had destroyed only three of the limbs. This happened on a subsequent playthrough so it wasn’t a fluke. Once you have the pattern down, the fight is fairly easy, subject to a possible freak hit with those flailing limbs, however, there was still time for one more death. After the QTEs, the bridge collapses on the kayran and he appears to be trapped. There’s a big red area near what might be his mouth so I ran towards it and a combination of flailing limbs and Sile’s forcefield somehow killed me. Instead of finishing off the kayran in what seems like the most logical manner, you must head up this unmarked piece of rubble and run to the end which initiates a cutscene. It’s terribly signposted. You’ve been fighting the kayran from the ground the entire time and everything about this scene suggests you are supposed to run in and finish him off from the same position. Once the Kayran is out of the way, the major story in Flotsam becomes the conflict between Iorveth and Roche. Come the end of chapter one, you have to pick between these two sides and from there on out the story splits in a huge way. Iorveth is basically this games version of Yaevinn. He’s in charge of the scoia’tael and is an extremist. Elves are usually glamorous creatures, however, CD Projekt Red made the wise decision to portray Iorveth and the rest of the scoia’tael as the guerilla fighters they truly are. As discussed in the last video, the scoia’tael should be an incredibly sympathetic bunch because they are fighting for their freedom after having been displaced by humans. However, leaders such as Iorveth make no secret of their hatred for humans, or dh’oine as they call them, and don’t care how many innocent people die in the process of reclaiming their land. If Iorveth is the equivalent of Yaevinn then Roche is the game’s version of Siegfried. Siegfried was far from perfect. He had noble goals, but he clearly saw non-humans as beneath him. There was a youthful naivety about him which almost made his flaws forgivable. The Order of the Flaming Rose was practically a cult as well as an armed militia, so it always felt like his problems stemmed from ignorance more than arrogance. I found the decision to side with Siegfried almost a non-decision and criticized the game for that. Roche is wiser and more experienced than Siegfried, being the commander of the Blue Stripes, the special forces of the Temarian military. Iorveth and Roche hate each other with a passion. Roche hates Iorveth because he sees the scoia’tael attacking innocent humans and Iorveth hates Roche because Roche hasn’t been afraid to get his hands dirty when it comes to putting down uprisings. If either of these characters gets to be described as the good choice, then it’s Roche, although that’s more because you don’t see or hear about the atrocities he’s been a part of unless you go digging. The main reason not to side with Roche is that it’s hard to understand his motivations, especially here in Flotsam. Roche is mainly concerned with the future of Temeria and he sees Loredo as a threat to that future. That’s about it. Whether a region like Flotsam--pretty much the dictionary definition of an RPG starter town--is worth worrying about on such a grand scale is debatable. Iorveth’s motivation, freedom, is a lot easier to understand at least. You know what Iorveth is fighting for from the moment you first meet him and, regardless of how you feel about his methods, his goal is not complicated. CD Projekt is now infamous for the quality of its side quests and that quality is on full display in chapter 1. In fact, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between side quests and mandatory quests. There are quests in the later chapters that I genuinely thought were part of the main story until I looked a little closer at the journal. The first major side quest I completed involved a twist on a familiar trope. There’s a troll under a bridge who demands a toll to let you pass. The locals accepted the presence of the troll because he maintained the bridge and the toll felt like a small price to pay. However, recently the bridge has fallen into a state of disrepair and the troll is still demanding payment even though it’s impossible to use the bridge to cross. Geralt is asked to kill the troll although another group asks him to spare it because the bridge is so essential to trade. The troll has an alcohol problem. He took to drink after his wife was murdered by one of the local townsfolk. You can either kill him or look for the murderer. If you do this quest early on in the chapter, it’s incredibly annoying because you essentially have to go in every house looking for one with a troll’s head mounted to the wall. Fortunately, one of the main quests ends up taking you to the right building, so you will find it eventually if you’re patient. Once you’ve killed those responsible for the murder of the troll’s wife, the troll agrees to give up alcohol and fix the bridge. Another side quest of note concerns a hospital for the mentally ill. While exploring the forest, Geralt stumbles upon Rupert who is worried for his friend Gridley who went missing in the hospital. It’s not so much a hospital as a dungeon, however, it was used a place to treat the mentally ill. A ghostly figure appears at regular intervals to guide you around and you stumble upon notes revealing that the medical staff experimented on the patients. When you find Gridley, he confesses that he and Rupert wanted to torture a Nilfgaardian prisoner for information on the whereabouts of some treasure. The priest looking after the prisoner refused to torture the Nilfgaardian, so Rupert and Gridley killed the priest and tortured the Nilfgaardian to get the information they needed. After that, they burned down the entire facility to cover their tracks however the Nilfgaardian still haunts them. The ghost refuses to relinquish the curse unless Geralt brings him Rupert and Gridley. Geralt can indeed trick Rupert and Gridley into returning to the dungeon and surrender them to the ghost or he can try to trick it by handing over someone else’s hearts and eyes. If you like, you can use nekker organs. You probably have a bunch of them on you anyway, so this is the easy way out. If you do this, the ghost will notice they are not human and attack you. The only way to successfully trick the ghost is to return to town and buy pigs’ organs which he will believe belong to Rupert and Gridley. Before you make the big decision and choose whether to support Iorveth or Roche, Geralt has a flashback which reveals another part of his missing memory, specifically his time on the Isle of Avellach. He sees the Wild Hunt appear on the island and capture a woman he was with. He remembers chasing after the Wild Hunt, but doesn’t remember the woman, who of course is Yennefer. Triss tells Geralt she’ll help him get his memories back if he can get her a rose of remembrance, which seems like the sort of ingredient she could have mentioned earlier, but oh well. The good news is that Geralt does slowly start to get his memory back during this game, unlike the first one which barely revealed anything. Chapter 1 gives you two chances to side with either Iorveth or Roche, however, only the second decision has a major impact on the rest of the game. Iorveth admits that the scoia’tael did work with Letho and is initially reluctant to give up the man they see as a useful ally. However, Geralt proves that Letho was willing to betray Iorveth by trying to strike a deal with another scoia’tael and so Iorveth agrees to help. Iorveth pretends to be Geralt’s prisoner so that Geralt can get close to Letho. Roche’s men attack during the meeting and you can help either Iorveth or Roche during the fight. Geralt then fights Letho, although the fight ends at half health and Letho escapes. When Geralt returns to Flotsam, it is either full of people celebrating victory over the Scoia’tael if you helped Roche during the fight, or complete chaos as the humans form a mob to attack all the non-humans living in the city if you helped Iorveth. The fighting is largely instigated by Loredo and once again you can help out the innocent people being harrassed. Geralt goes to find Triss but she’s gone missing. The next scene shows us something interesting about how the different paths work in The Witcher 2. Obviously, your choices have consequences. You’d expect that. However, your choices also change things completely unrelated to those choices and the consequences that flow from them. It’s not a butterfly effect thing either. It’s random things changing in the two different playthroughs and we’ll see more of it later. Triss was last seen going into Sile’s room, so Geralt and Dandelion go to the whorehouse where Sile is staying. The room is a mess, with a dead body and blood all over the floor. Fortunately, for reasons best left unexplored, there is a peephole between this room and the next, and it just so happens that the madam and her lover were in the next room saw what went down. If you sided with Roche, you meet Derae who tells you that she saw Triss and Cedric enter the room, kill the guard and then use Sile’s megascope, which is basically olde worlde skype, to contact a mage called Dethmold. In this version, the madam, Margot, is later found downstairs having killed herself before people can find out she was feeding information to Iorveth. On the other side, if you helped Iorveth during the earlier fight, you instead speak to Margot who has not killed herself but is instead mourning the murder of Derae who was killed in the riots because she’s an elf. That part makes sense and is a natural consequence of your decision. What doesn’t make much sense is that in this version, Margot reports seeing Triss talking to Philipa Eilheart over Skype, not Dethmold. There’s no reason for this conversation to be different. I don’t necessarily mind these differences all that much, but it’s worth pointing out that you don’t play two sides of the same coin in these playthroughs which we’ll see again soon. Geralt tracks down a dying Cedric who tells him that Letho burst in on them and forced Triss to teleport him to Aedern. Cedric’s dying moments are incredibly touching. The animals approach and Geralt remarks that the forest is saying goodbye. It’s a lovely moment for a relatively minor character who we barely speak to and when we do he’s usually drunk because that’s all he can do to block out the visions that haunt him. It’s a sign of good writing and direction when you care about a character death for someone who’s barely interacted with you. Now it’s time to make the final choice. Regardless of what you did earlier, you can elect to side with either Roche or Iorveth. Roche agrees to help Geralt find Triss, but only if Geralt kills Loredo. On the way, you kill Loredo’s mom who has been making the drug fisstech and finally you kill Loredo. Loredo was keeping a pregnant elf captive. You try to escort Moril to freedom, but she goes into labor. Ves, Roche’s second in command, helps the woman deliver the baby, however, Moril kills herself soon after. On that gruesome note, Geralt leaves Flotsam for Aedirn to track down Triss and Letho. Alternatively, if you side with Iorveth, you once again pull the old fake prisoner trick and sneak onto the ship to escape. You’re told that there are too many guards for the scoia’tael to attack directly, however, they do so anyway. Loredo ensures his escape by setting fire to a building which serves as a distraction while he escapes. Geralt saves some elven women from the fire, despite Iorveth’s cold statement that he needn’t bother because they are prepared to die for the cause. From here on out, The Witcher 2 is significantly different depending on your route. My main playthrough was with Roche, so I’ll focus on that for now. Chapter 2 starts with a weird device that CD Projekt Red uses a couple of times throughout the game and that’s putting you in the shoes of someone else, in this case King Henselt of Kaedwen. It never adds a lot to the experience and most of the discussion could just as easily be handled through cutscenes. If anything, it harms the experience because you have to choose conversation options for a character you know nothing about. Henselt is king of Kaedwen and has been trying to claim the pontar valley region of Aedirn for himself for a few years now. Henselt believes he has a claim on the land and there was a huge battle between Henselt’s and Demavend’s armies a few years ago. The battle ended in a draw after Henselt’s sorceress Sabrina Glevissig cast a spell that rained fireballs down from the sky, killing soldiers on both sides. Sabrina cast the spell because Henselt was going to win the battle and even though she was pretending to be on his side, she was secretly working against him. Henselt ordered Sabrina’s execution as punishment. As she was dying at the stake she managed to cast a curse on Henselt and then used magic to convince one of the soldiers to end her suffering early. That soldier ended up becoming the Visionary, the leader of a group who started to worship Sabrina after her death. When we take control of Henselt, he’s on his way to a meeting with the Aedirnians to see if they can settle the dispute without bloodshed. This is one of those situations that changes based on which side you chose earlier even though it probably shouldn’t. On Roche’s side, you meet Prince Stennis, Demavend’s son, and a woman called Saskia. Saskia is the leader of a peasant revolt in Aedirn, and she wants the Pontar Valley, specifically the nearby city of Vergen, to be independent, and a place where dwarves, elves, humans, and everyone else, can live together peacefully. Henselt challenges Saskia to a fight, during which a priest tries to interrupt and Henselt slams his head into a stone. All hell breaks loose. The priest’s blood on the stone unlocks the blood curse that Sabrina cast just before her death. The curse brings back all the soldiers of that battle to fight for eternity in ghostly form while a deadly mist surrounds them. Fortunately, Geralt arrives in the nick of time and Henselt’s new mage, Dethmold, is able to keep Geralt and the king safe within a circle of magic as they slowly make their way towards the Kaedweni war camp. The mist separates the Kaedweni and Vergen war camps. If you sided with Iorveth here, you control Prince Stennis instead of Henselt, and for some reason, it’s Stennis who ends up in the fight with Henselt and not Saskia. When the curse breaks out, you are escorted back to the Vergen camp by the sorceress Philippa Eilheart who can assume the form of an owl. There’s a hell of a lot going on in chapter 2. Geralt wants to find Triss and Letho of course. You also need to clear the mist or you’re stuck here. These main quests in chapter 2 aren’t inherently that complicated, but the journal does a terrible job showing how all the different missions link together and intertwine. I mentioned earlier that side quests are so good they are often indistinguishable from the main quests, but another reason you can’t tell them apart is that many of the main quests get broken into small pieces that aren’t clearly dependent on each other. Instead of having a main quest with a bunch of requirements that you must fulfill first, you have a main quest that’s something huge like basically, win the war, and then there are a load of other quests that are part of that but listed separately. Clearing the mist is part of a big quest called The Eternal Battle where you have to change the course of the battle that took place three years ago; the one the ghosts are acting out in the mist. Before you can enter the mist to do that, you need for symbols of war representing hatred, death, faith, and courage. Four quests are added to your journal for this. The symbol for faith is King Henselt’s medallion, but he won’t give that to you while there is still a curse on him, which means you need to remove the curse and that is in turn a separate quest with its own separate sub quests that aren’t listed as sub-quests. You won’t find the symbol for courage until you start doing a quest where you investigate a conspiracy against the king, separate from the curse, which ends up leading you to a hidden area where you fight for a piece of magical armor from the original battle. Ultimately, if you do all the main quests you’ll be fine, but it’s not always clear which ones need to put on hold while you do something else. The journal’s saving grace is that it’s a joy to read. The journal is written by Dandelion and gives a detailed account of what has happened so far, sometimes pointing out when Geralt should temporarily put the quest to one side and wait until later. This is the sort of in-game journal all RPGs should have. Please tell me I’m not the only one who forgets what the hell is going on after taking short breaks from games. Once Geralt is ready, he plays out the big battle and tries to change the outcome to remove the mist. This is when we find out why Sabrina brought the fireballs down from the sky. Sabrina was a member of the lodge of sorceresses, the mysterious group who operate outside the political council and magical conclave to try and manage the realm. There are even a couple of Nilfgaardian sourceresses in the lodge. Kings, and sometimes queens, may appear to be in control, but the lodge decides who will be king in the first place. The lodge is worried about another war between the Northern Kingdoms and the Nilfgaardians to the south and the Pontar River is an area that the north really needs to retain control of. Sabrina and the lodge believed that if Henselt were to win the fight against Demavend’s troops, the overall security of the north would be at risk. Henselt looked like winning, so Sabrina brought fireballs down from the sky to kill both sides. Sabrina knew she would be executed as a result, but deemed it to be the best thing to do for the benefit of the realm. The deaths of soldiers don’t weigh on the consciences of the lodge members for long. Well, not most of them anyway. Triss is a member and she clearly has a conscience. Phillipa Eilheart, however, is stone cold neutral. She lacks any kind of compassion and will do whatever it takes for the realm. Every decision is a calculation for her. During Chapter 2, you meet the soldier who killed Sabrina with the spear. He now calls himself the Visionary and worships Sabrina as a sort of God. The visionary asks you to go on a quest that involves taking a bunch of drugs. It would be an utterly unremarkable quest if it weren’t for Dandelion’s journal entry where he makes the whole thing appropriately poetic. According to Dandelion, the large mushrooms Geralt sees while hallucinating are phallic symbols representing the father he never knew and the waterfowl is his mother, the giver of life and death. Geralt can’t reach the waterfowl in the dream just like he can’t reach his mother in real life. Oh, and the pecking motion represents lust somehow. It’s all nonsense of course, but I appreciate Dandelion’s effort to put a spin on things. Geralt does meet his mother in the books at one point when she nurses him after an injury. There’s no big emotional reunion. Geralt accepts who she is and moves on. Anyway, to remove the curse Sabrina placed on Henselt, Geralt has Henselt form a pattern on the ground near where Sabrina was executed which then summons the ghost of Sabrina. Henselt must destroy Sabrina at just the right moment to lift the curse. This quest ended up being a disappointing way to end Sabrina’s story. For starters, getting Henselt to move to the right places is unnecessarily awkward. You need to copy the instructions from a map however it’s not clear which way is up in relation to Henselt. I assumed Geralt was standing at the bottom of the chart however when Henselt moves the camera angle flips the other way which suggests the opposite. Then Geralt forms a circle and tells Henselt to be careful not to break the circle which he immediately does anyway, forcing you to fight a bunch of wraiths while Sabrina repeats the curse again and again. Henselt is supposed to stab Sabrina at just the right part of the curse, but clearly this event is triggered not by the curse but by Geralt killing a set number of wraiths. This was another of those fights that was quite tricky due to the sheer numbers involved so Sabrina went through that curse quite a few times. One of the most impressive things on this side of the mist is the Kaedweni war camp itself which feels like an actual war camp. The whole place is muddy and depressing. The common soldiers, who are kept separate from the important people like King Henselt, look either utterly fed up with the war or drunk enough that they don’t care. One quest has you reuniting a bunch of drunk soldiers and many of them are swept up in a conspiracy with square gold coins marked with fish, which believe it or not was specifically mentioned as part of Sabrina’s curse. Pieces of the wood from Sabrina’s execution are treated as valuable relics and believed to contain special powers. The soldiers are a superstitious bunch and you can’t blame them given the horrible realities of war on display here. This actually looks like a random area that an army made into a camp and not a temporary village like they so often do. There are other nice touches as well, like how quest givers move around the camp so they aren’t always in their designated places waiting for Geralt to speak to them. They have shi!t to do, after all. Geralt does venture through the mist at one point and gets to meet some of the opposing characters, such as Yarpen who book readers will know as one of the dwarfs who Geralt briefly teamed up with while Triss was sick. Most of Vergen is locked off if you’re on the Roche playthrough, so you need to side with Iorveth if you want to see it all. While Geralt’s here, he briefly meets up with Saskia who agrees to give Geralt the sword belonging to Vandergrift, one of the commanders of the battle, which represents hatred. Geralt also needs to explore some nearby catacombs to collect the standard of the dun banner which represents death. If he wants to claim the banner without a fight, he must demonstrate his knowledge of the battle through a bunch of somewhat tricky questions. If you’ve been paying attention you should be able to answer them, although I recommend you don’t tackle this quest too soon. You want a chance to pick up on the clues. For example, Geralt is asked who the commanders were in the epic battle and there’s a temptation to pick Demavend and Henselt. After all, they were the kings of each army. However, kings often don’t take charge themselves and in this case the commanders were Vandergrift on Henselt’s side and Seltkirk on Demavend’s. The Triss storyline is fairly weak on this side. The only lead on Triss pops up when a group of Nilfgaardians happen to attack Roche’s blue stripes. Roche spots a small statue with the Nilfgaardians which he thinks is in the shape of Triss. Geralt goes to the Nilfgaardian camp however he’s too late. They’ve set sail for a place called Loc Muinne. The other major loose end is Letho. During a meeting with King Henselt, two assassins show up to try and off the king but Geralt is able to kill one and injure the other enough that he runs away. Dethmold uses necromancy to show Geralt an old memory from the dead assassin which lets him track them back to their hideout. Of course, by the time you get there Letho has gone however you’re able to speak to the dying assassin who it turns out is also a witcher. He has a few big reveals for you. First of all, Sile is working with Letho and the other two assassins. Sile would have had plenty of opportunities to kill Henselt herself as she is one of his trusted advisors, but it makes sense that she wouldn’t want to leave any magic-related clues around and it looks better if the attack comes from random assassins. With his dying breath, the assassin mentions how they didn’t want to leave Geralt behind and he references how close they were to the Wild Hunt. This triggers another flashback for Geralt. He remembers passing through areas that had just been attacked by the hunt and witnessing the destruction they left in their wake. The Wild Hunt is journeying south. It’s taken 23 people so far, all of them between ten and twenty, except for Yennefer. Chapter 2 is also home to some decent sidequests. There’s a dark story called little sisters, which starts when you stumble across a soldier being bullied for sh!tting himself. Mavrick claims he panicked after spotting a specter and after investigating the area and a nearby hidden room full of magic paraphernalia, Geralt meets the three wraiths who claim that Mavrick killed them and they are now haunting him in return. Mavrick denies this and it turns out that the three specters were his sisters and it wasn’t Mavrick that killed them, but their father Malget. Mavrick then killed the father. The sisters wanted Mavrick to join them in the afterlife which seems a little selfish on their part, but oh well. This quest had a little too much running back and forward between two locations, but otherwise I enjoyed it. On the silly side, there’s a quest where you’re asked to collect harpy feathers for a guy who is supposedly selling them on to a collector. He asks for more, and then more. I ended up needing to get about 75 of them, although he is at least right next to a spot where a bunch of harpies spawn, and some of them drop two. If you go back later, you’ll find out what they guy really wanted the feathers for. When you’re ready, it’s time to change the course of the eternal battle. To do this, Geralt possesses the form of key individuals for short segments of the battle until you get to a big fight against the Draug representing Vandergrift, the leader of the Kaedweni army. The fights where you control random soldiers are incredibly annoying because you don’t have access to any of Geralt’s abilities, not even a roll. This was pretty much the only time I bothered to block incoming attacks because that was the only way to avoid being hit when you are so slow and cumbersome. Once the battle is complete, Geralt has another flashback, which fills in a lot more gaps about Geralt’s actions after leaving the Isle of Avellach. Geralt came across Letho who had been poisoned by a slyzard’s tail and was close to death. Geralt saved him and teamed up with Letho and the two other, now dead, assassins, Auckes and Serritt, both from the School of the Viper. Letho knew where the Wild Hunt was going, so together they headed south to chase them. I’m a little surprised CD Projekt decided to add in a huge chunk of backstory for that five year period during which Geralt was assumed dead. There are already a bunch of books that many people playing the game won’t have read. The first game was close to a fresh start and didn’t require much knowledge from the book, but the second game needs to deal with the fact that not everyone played the first one, what with it being a PC exclusive. When you already have so much backstory to explain to your audience, you’re kind of creating problems for yourself by adding in more where it’s not strictly needed. The reason is obviously to give Geralt a connection to Letho, however, for me as the player, that relationship fell completely flat. I didn’t particularly care that Letho had helped me in the past, just as I didn’t care that Berengar was a fellow witcher in the first game. It’s also a little odd to think that Geralt was roaming the world for so long without word getting out. Geralt is a distinctive looking guy and his adventures are well documented. When he turns up in towns, people often recognize him by name and appearance. I’m surprised word didn’t spread. Chapter 2 on Roche’s side ends when you return to the camp with Roche only to find that King Henselt ordered Dethmold to murder all of Roche’s men and Henselt himself raped Ves after he found out that Roche was one of the men conspiring against him. Roche is guilty of conspiracy. It was all part of his master plan to somehow keep Termaria strong. Roche’s whole story and motivation is incredibly tenuous throughout the game really. I guess he’s a guy who knows a lot of secrets, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he knows what he’s doing. The conspiracy against Henselt is separate from the curse against him, although the lines did cross a lot and I became fairly confused during that first playthrough. Despite Roche’s involvement, the rest of the Blue Stripes knew nothing of the conspiracy and clearly didn’t deserve to be killed. Sile is the main link to Letho, so Roche and Geralt head to Vergen which Henselt’s army is attacking. Roche and Geralt bump into Henselt and you can let Roche kill him if you like. It’s worth it just to hear his dying words which reference a phrase he muttered earlier. It has this excellent amateur shakespeare play vibe to it. The final destination is Loc Muinne, but before going there, let’s have a quick look at how all this would have played out from Iorveth’s side. After escaping the mist, the major players in Vergen hold a War Council, during which Saskia is poisoned and left perilously close to death. Saskia is the people’s champion, with a bunch of other nicknames such as the Virgin Queen and the dragonslayer, because she supposedly defeated a dragon. Weirdly, the journal entries conclude that Philippa was the one to poison Saskia however I’m fairly sure the man who put it in motion was Olcan, the priest who Henselt slammed against the rock to bring about this curse in the first place. Stennis was likely involved as well, or at least he knew it was happening and let it slide. That’s one of the interesting parts of the journal. Dandelion writes what he knows or what he thinks he knows, so if you arrive at the wrong conclusion, it could still get presented as the correct one. Philippa Eilheart gives you a shopping list of ingredients she needs for a cure. One of the ingredients happens to be a rose of remembrance which is the flower that we gave Triss back in Flotsam. Triss is missing, of course, however she happens to have left her red scarf nearby which contains the rose of remembrance. Very convenient. You also need royal blood. The obvious choice would be to get the blood from Prince Stennis, or King Stennis as he is now calling himself. Stennis is facing a peasant rebellion because they suspect him of poisoning Saskia. Geralt can get some time alone with him, but, in my playthrough at least, he wouldn’t give me any of his blood. He ends up being arrested to face trial and yet you still can’t take a bit of his blood. This seems a bit ridiculous, but it gives Geralt an excuse to cross the mist to the Kaedweni camp where you can get some from Henselt. There was a big eyeroll moment when Philippa applied the cure to Saskia because the rose of remembrance isn’t simply an ingredient for the recipe. It’s placed on Saskia’s lips and Philippa kisses her. I couldn’t help but laugh at Zoltan’s lesbomancy line soon after although I had the distinct impression someone came up with the joke first and then had to find a way to use it. I was wrong, well probably, because there is a lot more to this kiss than initially meets the eye. When you explore Philippa’s house later, you find out that she didn’t need the rose of remembrance at all when making the cure. The rose of remembrance and the kiss were part of Philippa’s plan to control Saskia. We’ll find out why later. Meanwhile, you still need to worry about clearing the mist, just as you do from the other side, although this time you don’t need as many items because Philippa already has one and getting the sword from Saskia is obviously a lot easier this time. There’s an interesting side quest here where you briefly get to control Dandelion. Again, there’s not much point to this brief switch of characters, but at least Dandelion isn’t a complete random. Dandlion lures out, and then is promptly infatuated by, a local succubus who has supposedly been killing men after sex. The succubus claims that this is all a lie spread by a man who simply wants her for himself, although he denies this. I couldn’t get a straight answer from either of them and ended up killing the succubus. I’m fairly sure I made a mess of this quest and I never did find out the truth. The major disappointment on the Iorveth side of things is the final battle when Henselt’s army attacks. It’s really bad. It doesn’t in any way look like a grand battle. More like a high school production of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Geralt’s role is limited to standing on a roof and hacking down kaedweni soldiers who climb the ladders that no one thinks to knock down. The only good part is that the aard sign sends enemies flying. Someone at CD Projekt Red thought this battle was so interesting they made us repeat it three times. Iorveth and his scoia’tael turn up late to save the day. Saskia forces Henselt to begrudgingly surrender any claim he may have had to Vergen and she orders the execution of Dethmold. Iorveth thinks the execution order is a little out of character for Saskia, who he’s in love with by the way, so you follow Saskia and Philippa and find out that Philippa has Saskia under her control. Unfortunately for Iorveth, he doesn’t have a chance with Saskia. Turns out she’s into dwarves. Everyone important goes to Loc Muinne for the Summit of Mages that will decide the future of the Northern Kingdoms. Loc Muinne has an interesting history. It was once home to an ancient race of reptilian creatures known as the Vran. On Iorveth’s path, you can dig into the history of the Vran and find out that they were wiped out by a bacteria created by elves. The Nilfgaardians are especially interested in things that can committ huge acts of genocide, so they send a little expedition to try and uncover the secret. In Roche’s playthrough, and depending slightly on your actions in the first game, you are welcomed to Loc Muinne by Siegfried, the new Grand Master of the Order of the Flaming Rose. Chapter 3 really struggles with a lack of purpose and I can imagine this area being a huge disappointment before the new content was added in the enhanced edition. The big chase after Triss is a big anti-climax because you don’t actually have to rescue her. You can if you like. You fight through a bunch of Nilfgaardians and eventually find her in a prison cell where thankfully she was returned to normal size. However, both playthroughs offer another option, one that is arguably more important in the grand scheme of things. Roche asks you to rescue Anais, the daughter of Foltest and one of the two children we were trying to rescue from their loving family back in the prologue. Anais has royal blood and can play a big part in determining the future of the kingdom so we should probably rescue her over Triss. Although I didn’t. Iorveth wants you to save Philippa. She was captured by the Nilfgaardians after being tricked by her lover Cynthia. While I have no love for Philippa, she is put through hell here. King Radovid visits her in the dungeon and vents his frustration at the times Philippa was overbearing towards him while he was growing up. Philippa was controlling, no doubt about it. The sorceresses who work alongside kings nearly always have their own agenda, and as discussed, Philippa is worse that most. However, she probably didn’t deserve to have her eyes plucked out. She also happens to be standing right next to you when you’re asked to choose between her and Triss, so leaving Philippa here would be a touch silly. There’s no punishment for not saving Triss. If you leave her with the Nilfgaardians then Letho, the man who kidnapped her, rescues her himself. See, he’s not all bad. The extra quests that come with the enhanced edition, fill in a few gaps around Foltest’s children. After the whole Foltest assassination thing, Anais and Boussy were sent to Loc Muine to be used as bargainning chips in the negotiations. On the way there, the wagon transporting them was attacked and Boussy was killed. Anaise survived and is now being held at Loc Muinne. The two main suspects in Boussy’s murder are Kimbolt and Maravel who both have a valid claim to the Temarian throne and therefore have a motive for killing Foltest’s children. They’re both guilty. Kimbolt paid a bunch of mercenaries to kill the children on the way to Loc Muinne. They failed, but only because the route was changed at the last minute, with the order coming from Count Maravel who planned to kidnap the children and give them over to the Nilfgaardians in exchange for their support in his efforts to claim the Termarian throne. You can accuse either or both of Boussy’s murder, however, Natalis, the man in charge here, only has enough armed forces to lock up one of them and their men which feels like a bit of a cop out. This is another one of those quests that you can get wrong and never realize it. In Roche’s playthrough, Geralt and Roche met up with King Radovid and Roche admits that Radovid would be the best ruler for the future of the North and Roche convinces him to help Temeria should the Nilfgaardians invade. Radovid is granted control of Anais. While the multiple powerplays form a big part of the story, Loc Muinne is most memorable for having a lot of puzzle sections, some of them quite challenging. I enjoy a good puzzle in an RPG, however, I must admit in some way shape or form, I got stuck on nearly all of them here. This is a shame because they are very nearly excellent. One quest has you going to a bunch of Gargoyle infested areas to find some secret treasure. Once you’ve defeated the gargoyles, you have to solve a puzzle which needs you to interact with logos in the correct order. To do this, you first need to know the meaning of the symbols: time, animal, sky, and art, and then press them in the correct order based on a nearby poem. I found most fairly obvious. One of the poems had me completely baffled so I had to brute force it. Perhaps there’s a translation issue or my own reading comprehension, but I didn’t understand it even once I knew the correct answer. Your reward is a manuscript which, when translated, is a diagram for a magical elven sword. In case you’re curious, the manuscript is written in ROT13 and is the opening few lines of Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility. Kind of surprised that they didn’t use text from one of the Witcher books, but there you go. Likewise, I couldn’t quite follow what the hint was getting at when it came to mixing an oil that will reveal hidden writing. I could make a decent argument for different permutations based on the information given. Again, I got there in the end, but I couldn’t tell you why my other attempts were wrong. Another puzzle requires you to remember a very specific and slightly strange clue to then provide the correct words in the correct order when challenged. Fortunately, I took a photo of the clue before heading over there because I had a feeling the game wouldn’t let me look at it again and sure enough it didn’t. If you go on the quest with Cynthia in Iorveth’s playthrough, there are a lot of incredibly challenging riddles, and once again there was one where I got stuck and still don’t entirely understand the answer. This doesn’t necessarily mean the puzzles are bad of course, but they certainly can be a little cryptic. When you’re ready, Geralt attends the Summit of Mages and gets the whole “fate of the realm” thing sorted out. The exact nature of the meeting varies depending on your choice to support Roche or Iorveth, plus a bunch of other more minor decisions, but it always seems to end with Sile accused of the murder of King Demavend and Foltest, and the dragon returning at the last second to whisk her off to safety. Before taking on the dragon, Geralt meets up with Sile who admits that the Lodge was behind the murder of King Demavend, seeing his death as crucial to the future of the realm, however, she insists the Lodge had nothing to do with Foltest’s death. The Lodge used Letho to kill Demavend, but Letho tricked them just as he tricked the scoia’tael. He’s working for someone else. Triss is a member of the Lodge, however, she was left out of all discussions concerning the assassination of Demavend, being seen as a bit too soft compared to the rest of them. Geralt can choose whether to let Sile live or die. She tries to teleport away but one of the stones in her teleportation device has been replaced. You can remove the stone to save her or let her die. Geralt then faces off against the dragon. The fight doesn’t get close to the epic scale you’d expect from fighting such a huge beast. The first half of the fight has Geralt inside a room with the dragon sticking its head in and then it moves to the roof. The dragon will swoop down occasionally, but most of the time it just moves its head around a lot. After a QTE laden cutscene, the dragon ends up impaled on a large stake. Geralt can leave it be or finish it off. If you leave the dragon alone, it keels over but is still breathing, it’s fate an unknown. The dragon appearances are consistent between the Roche and Iorveth playthroughs and yet the dragon manages to be one of the most memorable differences between the two playthroughs. In Roche’s playthrough the dragon is largely a mystery. You don’t know anything about the dragon beyond that it’s under Philippa’s control and it’s possibly the world’s only surviving one. However, if you do Iorveth’s playthrough, there’s a lot more to uncover. First of all, the dragon is the daughter of the golden dragon that Geralt encountered back in Sword of Destiny. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the dragon is Saskia. The golden dragon could change forms at will and Saskia, or to badly pronounce her proper name, Saesenthesis, inherited part of that ability although she can only change into one form. In Iorveth’s playthrough, you can save the dragon by using a dagger you steal from Philippa earlier in the chapter. Geralt found out that Saskia is the dragon when they were clearing out a tunnel beneath Vergen and she transformed to save Geralt. It was one of those annoying scenes where you win the fight but lose in the cutscene. Finally, it’s time to confront Letho. As you’d expect, Letho fills in a few gaps alongside more returning memories for Geralt. Letho, Auckes, and Serrit, were witchers from the school of the viper. As far as they know, they are the only remaining witchers from that school. Given how easily Geralt dispatched Auckes and Serrit, I’m not sure the School of the Viper compares to Geralt’s School of the Wolf. It was a viper who tried to kill Foltest at the end of The Witcher 1. Along with Geralt, the four of them chased the Wild Hunt and eventually they caught up with them. The Hunt agreed to let Yennifer go, but only in exchange for Geralt’s soul. Geralt agreed, which means he briefly became a member of the Hunt himself before escaping which I believe leads directly into that prologue right at the start of the first game. We know a little more about the Wild Hunt now. The Wild Hunt is an elvish race from another plane. Many of the monsters in Geralt’s world are originally from other planes which collided around 1,500 years ago in an event called the Conjunction of the Spheres. The Conjunction may also be the reason magic came into the world. Outside this event, travel between the planes is considered impossible, however, this race is somehow able to send spectral versions of themselves from their own plane to this one. As we know from the books, Ciri also has the ability to travel between the planes and even without playing the third game, it’s a safe bet the Wild Hunt is after Ciri. After Geralt sold his soul to the Hunt, Letho, Auckes, and Serrit, did their best to look after Yennifer, but she was a handful to say the least, constantly getting them all into trouble, not to mention hitting on them. Letho eventually lost Yennefer and the three remaining witchers ended up working for the Nilfgaardian Emperor himself. They agreed to kill the kings of the Northern Kingdom in exchange for the Emperor’s promise to rebuild the school of the viper. The Nilfgaardians are determined to unsettle the Northern Kingdoms as a prelude to an invasion which we get a brief glimpse of in a post-credits sequence. The Nilfgaardians correctly predicted that with a few careful assassinations, the Northern Kingdoms would end up turning against each other. Six years ago the Northern Kingdoms came together for the Battle of Brenna, but they got lucky and the Nilfgaardians predict history won’t repeat itself. The Nilfgaardians are also keen to sow distrust between the sorceresses and the kings. The first war between Nilfgaard and the Northern Kingdoms--not the one that ended at the Battle of Brenna, the one before that--ended at Sodden with a brave final stand from the sorceresses, thirteen of whom died in the process. Triss was originally thought to be one of the dead, although as we can see, that’s not the case. Still, the Nilfgaardians have good reason for wanting the sorceresses out of the way this time. Geralt can either let Letho walk away or fight him to the death. This fight is much easier than the first one. There’s a bigger arena and Geralt should be much more levelled up at this point. Letho uses much the same tactics as before. Compared to the ending of the first game, and the events of the third, the conclusion to The Witcher 2 can certainly feel a bit anticlimactic and this led to criticism that The Witcher 2 was just treading ground and setting up a sequel. I disagree. I found the story incredibly appropriate for the character and the world that was originally built up in Saplowski’s books. Kings are being assassinated all over the place and dragons are breaking up meetings between mages, sorceresses, and royalty that determine the entire fate of the Northern Kingdoms, and yet, during all this chaos, Geralt remains focused on what affects him and those he cares about. That is the Geralt from the books. Geralt was dragged into all this mess because he was framed for Foltest’s assassination and he never forgot that. Letho got him into this mess, so a confrontation with Letho has to be how it all ends. It’s true there is a bunch of discussion about the Wild Hunt who we know go on to be major players in the third game, but to say that this story is only setting up the next one does it a huge disservice. And yes, most of what went down was orchestrated by the Nilfgaardians who also feature heavily in the next game, but the slow build up of major threats should be seen as a good thing. As for all the stuff between the various kings and sorceresses, and the lodge, council, and conclave, with treaties and disputes popping up all over the place, I have to admit, I found it confusing. A map would have helped. I purchased The Witcher 2 on GOG and within the bonus goodies there is a decent map, but it’s not included in the game. I’m not sure whether xbox owners got a physical map with the game or not. I highly recommend keep a map close by while playing to keep track of things. The story may have also benefited a little from cutting back the number of characters a bit. Prince or later King Stennis felt either useless or at least easily replaceable in both playthroughs. In Iorveth’s playthrough, you have Iorveth and the scoia’tael forming a temporary alliance with Saskia and they are trying to deal with Henselt’s army on the other side of the mist. I’m not sure Stennis was really necessary; it just added another king and another faction to the chaos. He spent most of my playthrough in prison anyway. The big Summit at the end was a mess and I didn’t even recognize some of the major players there. The second playthrough helped me understand a lot while also making some things even more confusing, however, even with that 2nd run, if you’d have paused the screen during the summit and asked me to name all the characters and why they were there I would have likely struggled. This is where it’s going to sound like I’m making huge excuses for the game and I probably sound like a hypocrite, but here goes: I don’t think the confusing, and at times, badly explained, nature of the story is that big a problem. There was infighting and petty politics galore and I didn’t follow half of it, but you know what, neither did Geralt. Dandelion isn’t at the big meeting near the end, so for the purposes of the journal, he has to rely on Geralt to explain it for him. Except it largely went in one ear and out the other. According to Dandelion’s journal, “Geralt forgot half the speeches and misremembered the other half.” Geralt really doesn’t care about politics. I mean Capital P politics in this context. I’m not trying to suggest Geralt gets angry every time his favorite theater troupe casts a minority actor in one of the roles. Mind you, he does go on a lot about ethics in monster hunting. For Geralt, politics is something that happens around him. Regardless of whether the witcher code is his own invention or not, it’s clear that witchers are supposed to stay out of politics and he takes that to heart. I felt much the same. Like Geralt, I had nowhere near enough knowledge to know who was good and bad, who deserved support and who didn’t. If you’ll excuse the cliche, most characters in this world are shades of gray and there are few who would be considered good people in our own world. Foltest seemed like a good leader, but he also led his men into an unnecessary war. At times, I sympathized with Henselt, especially as he watched on helplessly while his men burned to death because of Sabrina’s spell. But he also raped Ves and let Dethmold kill a bunch of innocent men. Whenever you start thinking, this guy seems nice, they go and prove otherwise. Geralt’s personal story was easy to follow and relate to. Geralt wanted to clear his name which meant finding Letho and he cared for Triss so he obviously wanted to save her. Plus, she could help recover his memories. It’s a minor goal in the grand scheme of things, but that’s nearly always how Geralt operates. The first game is an outlier in how grand the story was with Geralt at the center of things for the entire journey. Events revolved around Geralt and what he did, which is the case with many protagonists, but it wasn’t the case in the Witcher books. In the books, even in the midst of the Ciri saga, when the fate of the Northern Kingdoms hung in the balance, Geralt only cared about finding Ciri. He moved from place to place with a single-minded determination to find her no matter the cost. Kingdoms fell around him. Wars were won and lost and yet if we only looked at Geralt’s actions we would hardly know it. For as much praise as I’ve heaped on it, the dual nature of The Witcher 2’s story does fall down in a few places. I enjoyed completing two separate playthroughs, but the lack of complete information in each could be frustrating. The differences between the two runs meant I also wasn’t sure exactly what was going on with the characters I didn’t see. Did everything with Saskia’s poisoning and Philippa’s imprisonment still playout in the same way during Roche’s playthrough? Did Geralt’s absence from Vergen change things in other ways? It’s not clear which differences are the result of Geralt’s actions, and which are just random differences. I’d like to understand exactly how I contributed to the final outcome, but I don’t. It’s not fair to label either one of the playthroughs is the main playthrough. Both sides have moments where situations feel more or less natural depending on who you sided with. On balance, Roche’s route feels like it might have been given a little bit of priority, but not always. If you’re with Iorveth, you stumble upon a dead Nilfgaardian soldier who has a small statue on his person. Geralt picks it up and is later caught by the Nilfgaardians who search him and discover the statue. Within that statue is another that resembles Triss who has been shrunk due to artifact compression. This is how Geralt knows the Nilfgaardians have Triss. On Roche’s side, you get the same information from Roche who just tells you he saw the Nilfgaardians with a statue that looked like Triss. That’s it. And that doesn’t even really make sense because the statue wouldn’t have looked like Triss because it was hidden inside another statue. Conversely hunting down Letho makes much more sense from Roche’s side because, well, you actually hunt him down and find out that he’s going to Loc Muinne via a dying confession. On Iorveth’s side, you’re just casually told he’ll be there. The mission to clear the mist also fits in better on Roche’s side. Henselt is the attacking army. Of course he needs to clear the mist to attack Vergen. On Iorveth’s side, you don’t need to get all four items because Philippa already has two. This might be a concession to the additional fetch quest you need to do here to cure Saskia. It might have been better to just remove the need to clear the mist when in Vergen. After all, Iorveth, Saskia, and Co are the defending side. They don’t plan to attack Henselt, so why bother clearing the mist? On Roche’s side, Geralt needs to cross the mist to get the dun banner and it’s an excuse to show you a tease of the city you’re missing. From Iorveth’s side, your excuse to cross over is to get Henselt’s blood which is a weak excuse when you have another King close by. The big battle in Vergen also feels weak from Iorveth’s side. That said, I found Philippa more interesting than Dethmold and finding out that Saskia is the dragon makes a huge difference. The biggest distinction is in Loc Muinne where on Roche’s path you can freely explore the city but with Iorveth you’re a wanted man. Roche’s path also offers more opportunities to get stuck into the political squabbling. With Iorveth, you spend a lot of time in the sewers. There are also traces of late changes to the script or ideas that got dropped. For example, there’s a scene where Triss and Geralt fall into a bath after a fight with bandits. After the inevitable happens, you can wander around the small room and find a wall that is clearly waiting to be broken down with aard. Annoyingly, it’s one of those situations where you can’t just use the sign as normal. You have to use the interact button for some reason. When you do this, Geralt does indeed break the wall, except we then skip straight to a conversation with Triss where the wall remains in one piece. Roche then breaks it down from the other side. As you might remember from The Witcher 1, a plague has spread across the Northern Kingdoms since the end of the war. This is mentioned again at the beginning of The Witcher 2 and yet the plague is never mentioned again and I didn’t see any sign of its presence this time. It definitely would have reached Flotsam and Verden given how close they are to Vizema. It also looks like there was going to be a rain mechanic which would affect the use of signs, but it only rains briefly and then never again, so I guess this idea was largely dropped. With so many factions and important players involved, it’s tricky to say what is an error or omission on CD Projekt Red’s part or my own lack of understanding. For example, I was never entirely sure why Sile De Tansarville was in Flotsam at the beginning. I doubted she was there to kill the Kayran out of the goodness of her heart. Eventually, in the second playthrough, I discovered that she needed ingredients from the dead kayran to create a potion which would cure Henselt of his infertility which in turn I guess would help him secure his kingdom and that then helps the realm. Sure is lucky that the rare monster turned up at just the right time and in the same place as Geralt was hunting Letho. There are also some annoying moments where puzzles or doors can only be opened in one particular playthrough with no way of knowing that in advance. Take the puzzle on the roof on Philippa Eilheart’s house. I know from the Iorveth playthrough that this puzzle can be solved by rescuing Philippa, lighting a bunch of candles on the roof in the correct order, and having her cast a spell. She ends up tricking you and escaping, but you can still claim the dagger from the chest. The problem comes if you reach the roof during Roche’s playthrough. You can still explore Philippa’s house and find the solution to the puzzle, except you won’t be able to light the candles. The interact button doesn’t work, nor does using regular igni. If you haven’t played Iorveth’s playthrough yet, you’re left wondering whether you’re missing something you need for the puzzle or even if it’s bugged. There’s a better built in solution for this. After lighting the candles, you need Philippa to cast a spell. Why not just have Geralt light the candles as normal and then comment that he needs Philippa herself to cast the spell? This way it would be a lot more obvious that you can’t progress any further for the time being. There were also glowing rocks that I think open a locked door but I never figured out what to do with them. Once you know that some puzzles can’t be completed during your playthrough, there’s always that element of doubt in your mind when you get stuck on another one. In the end, I got through the locked door with a key during Iorveth’s playthrough. On a more minor note, the game occasionally has trouble tracking all the possibilities during conversations, so for example, Geralt acts like he doesn’t have the Dun Banner standard when he already does. At least these issues are understandable due to the ambitious nature of the story. Other niggles are more frustrating, and are probably the result of a rush to get the game finished. Take the persuasion options for example. Occasionally, during conversations, you are given the choice to try and persuade someone round to your way of thinking. Typically, this means you get more information if you succeed. The persuasion options include using the axii sign, intimidating, or the vague persuade choice. The success or failure of these options may seem random however there’s a hidden stat system whereby Geralt’s ability to do any one of these options depends on how much he’s used it. If you always stick to the axii sign when offered then it will gradually get stronger and more reliable, but beware because some characters are immune to axii completely. Unfortunately, you aren’t given any way to keep track of what you’ve used and how strong that ability is. It also doesn’t appear to relate to your build, so you could have a pure sign build with maximum axii skill and still fail the persuasion attempts. Weirdest of all, many times my persuasion attempts would supposedly fail and yet it would look a lot like I’d succeeded. The screen would say fail but the NPC would act like they’d been persuaded and spill their guts. I barely got into crafting at all beyond a couple of swords. You need a diagram before you can craft new gear. The diagrams sold by venders only offered incremental improvements on what I had and they were a bit pricey. You can find diagrams in the wild as a reward for exploring, but you can also find actual ready-made gear, and some of it is excellent. The Witcher 2 is by no means a loot based game, but exploring every corner of dungeons and sewers does occasionally pay off with new gear. By doing that, I rarely needed to craft anything. Of course, with crafting systems you never know when you will need to craft something, like that special elven sword you can make in Loc Muinne. So you’ll still collect resources just in case. The problem here is that they weigh a fair bit. I regularly had to go into my inventory and dump three quarters of my iron, leather and cloth, because they took up a ridiculous amount of Geralt’s carry capacity. I don’t understand the need for restrictions like this. Yes, ore and leather are heavy, but we aren’t talking about a realistic inventory system here anyway. I’ve talked about this before, so I don’t want to belabor the point. It’s just annoying. The Witcher 2 looks and performs so much better than the first game that it’s easy to overlook the issues when playing the games back to back. That said, on my second playthrough the problems started to shine through a lot clearer. Most of it is minor, nothing gamebreaking, just in the category of minor annoyances that can build up. NPC movement, whether they are supposed to be following you or leading the way, is incredibly janky. They get stuck in place quite a lot and have that annoying habit of being a lot slower than you meaning following them involves a lot of stop and start. The music still has a tendency to drown out speeches, including a couple of important ones, and Geralt’s comments during combat are often laughably out of place. For example, he’ll make comments like “how many of you are there” during fights with possibly the only dragon in the world. Then there’s the rare moments during a couple of boss fights where Geralt spits out a few lines that sound strangely not like Geralt, as if they needed a few more lines at the last minute and got someone else to do them. I doubt that’s it; more likely they just didn’t get the same post-processing treatment as other lines. The mini map breaks at times, so it shows you as being in a completely different place to where you actually are. It also shows enemies as still being present long after you’ve killed them. Oh, and this isn’t really a bug, but the main map itself is terrible when outside of towns and cities. Paths are shown as open when they aren’t and some points that you’d assume are inaccessible actually aren’t. I also noticed enemies disappearing out of existence a few times, the stairs near the dragon fight at the end can be random instant death zones if you accidentally clip into the wrong place, and if you get caught during stealth sections, the enemies have no clue what to do. They stand around as if broken and only go and attack you one at a time. They’ll even engage you in combat while still quoting the same lines they use while looking for you. CD Projekt Red loves its mini-games. The fist fighting and dice return, plus there’s arm wrestling now as well. It’s all bad and somehow CD Projekt Red made the dice game worse than the last one even though it’s essentially the same game. There’s one small change in dice poker and it’s a disaster; you now have to throw the dice yourself and there’s a risk that some dice will bounce off the board. The chances of at least one die bouncing off are about 100%. It’s insane. You’re encouraged to move the mouse before throwing so that the dice don’t just fall flat except any movement at all sends them straight off the board. Fist fighting returns except this time it’s all done through slow and tedious quick time events. Occasionally things get really exciting and you have to press two buttons one after the other. The button presses don’t correlate at all to the type of move Geralt does, so pressing D on the keyboard doesn’t mean you attack from the right. It’s just a QTE with no meaning behind any of the button presses. Finally, there’s arm wrestling which works, I guess. You move the mouse or analogue stick to stay within a bar and win. You can probably lose as well, although I doubt you’ll ever find out. Actually, that’s not quite true. There is a nigh on impossible to win fight against a guy on drugs near the end, but once you convince him to lay off the steroids, or take some yourself, he’s easily beaten. It’s a little odd though. Geralt gets on his high horse about this guy being on drugs when Geralt is a mutant with a bunch of built in advantages for arm wrestling. I guess people know they are arm-wrestling a witcher so it’s not as deceptive, but it felt incredibly hypocritical. The arm-wrestling is so easy it has the potential to break the game’s economy. In chapter two of Roche’s playthrough, you can wrestle the toughest guy in camp for 100 gold each time. You’ll win every time so the only limit to how much money you can make is your own patience. This isn’t really a mini-game, but I might as well point out that there are some stealth sections which are of about the same quality as most stealth sections in non-stealth games. Let’s just leave it at that. By my usually cynical standards, I’ve been quite positive about The Witcher 2 which reflects how much I enjoyed playing it. Twice. Despite that, it’s easy to see why it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste. While the combat has improved a great deal from the first game, it’s still not a system that’s inherently enjoyable on its own. It’s just easier to put up with. I’d also argue that you need to be more invested in the world and major characters than is the case with most RPGs. For all its problems, the first game told a fairly meaty story, with big cities and fairytale locations to explore, before a suitably epic and drawn out finale. Most RPGs do this to some extent. It’s easier to motivate players to see a game through to the end when the stakes are huge. To a neutral observer, the fate of the future of mankind is more interesting than whether Geralt can find Letho and clear his name. The Witcher 2 forces players to get invested in a couple of major characters and the politics of a world they may not know or understand. That isn’t easy, especially with those who haven’t played the first game or read the books. Even as someone who has, it’s still tough to care about all the political squabbling at times. I honestly can’t imagine what it was like playing this game as your introduction to the world of the witcher. That so many people clearly enjoyed it regardless, is a testament to CD Projekt Red’s strong writing. The nature of The Witcher 2 being the middle game in a trilogy does make it a tough game to recommend even though I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t have liked it as much as I did without having read the books, and I would have liked it even less if I hadn’t played the first game. Basically, I’m telling you to devote 100 plus hours to the books and the first game and then play this one. Easier said than done, I know. With that said, I’ll wrap this video up. If you enjoyed the video, please consider hitting like, subscribing, and letting me know what you thought in the comments and in my discord server. I also have a patreon where you can sign up for a dollar a month which gets your name in the credits and a patreon role in my discord server. As for September videos, that’s a little up in the air right now. I owe you all more Splinter Cell videos. I was hoping to squeeze them in alongside other projects, but for a variety of reasons that hasn’t happened yet. I may take a month or two off the isometric CRPG series. I’m in the mood for something a little different and have a couple of ideas floating around that I’ll do instead just to keep things fresh. And of course, a video on The Witcher 3 is coming as well. I may do separate videos for the base game and the DLCs because trying to do two playthroughs of the entire thing in one month may be too much. Besides, the DLCs are long enough to justify a video of their own. Okay, thanks for watching. Until next time. Cheers.

Channel: Chris Davis

Views: 218,927

Keywords: the witcher 2 assassins of kings, the witcher 2, the witcher 2 critique, the witcher 2 retrospective, the witcher 2 analysis, the witcher 2 assassins of kings critique, cd projekt red, cd projekt, the witcher 2 story discussion, cd project, witcher 2 review, witcher 2 pc, witcher 2 pc review, witcher 2 analysis, witcher 2, witcher 2 story summary, witcher story summary, witcher 2 assassins of kings review, witcher trilogy story, witcher trilogy review, witcher review

Id: -kNPjLhnY_Y

Length: 130min 1sec (7801 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019