On May 25 2011 06:07 maartendq wrote: Thing is, a hardcore PC RPG is way more complicated than any First Person Shooter out there. If TW2 had a tuturial, they'd have to make a prologue to the prologue... Half Life 1 was pretty simple if you had ever played a shooter before (moving around, jumping, crouching, primary and secondary fire; there's not much to it if you compare it to The Witcher 2 or even a Final Fantasy game).
Even Blizzard decided to not put the basic tutorials in the campaign...
For what game? SC2? The campaign WAS the tutorial. The first missions were incredibly simple, giving you more units as time went on, and each mission they introduced a new gimmick and ability that you needed to make use of in order to beat it. Simple things like watching the SCV on mission 2 (I think) run up to the Bunker to repair it, or having an entire mission devoted to pummeling the crap out of stuff with Siege Tanks. They teach you the game by showing you, and it's subtle things like that, which were also prevalent in Half-Life, that allow the player to understand the game in an immersive fashion.
I'm talking about the bare basics, unit movement and production and stuff like that. I admit that the whole campaign was basically a tutorial for various units, though.
I do stand by my point that if you want to make a thorough tutorial to a game like The Witcher it'd be a couple of hours long, preferably before the prologue and pretty boring since you've constantly got to break the flow of the game in order to relay information to the player (and there's a lot of stuff new players have to learn).
That said, it feels good that there's finally a game with a higher degree of difficulty on the market. Just trying to clear out all those nekkers already proves to be one hell of a challenge. The fact that there's no compass telling you where the nests are require you to go explore the jungle, which is filled with stuff waiting to kill you. The combat feels in-cre-di-bly gratifying, though. I'm actually playing with a maniacal grin on my face each time I plough through a group of monsters in style. Blood and limbs everywhere! When I'm not in combat I'm generally having a hard time keeping my jaw from falling towards the floor because of how stunning this game looks and sounds. This is basically a triple-A title by a semi-indie dev company. Production values are really through the roof!
I actually hope this game gets released on consoles as well... I really want as much people as possible to enjoy this game.
Seriously, it's got 92 on metacritic... This is CDProjekt's second game and it already ranks second this year, amongst games by seasoned developers like Valve (Portal 2) and The Creative Assembly (Shogun 2). CDP can really be proud of themselves!
On May 25 2011 06:07 maartendq wrote: That said, it feels good that there's finally a game with a higher degree of difficulty on the market. Just trying to clear out all those nekkers already proves to be one hell of a challenge. The fact that there's no compass telling you where the nests are require you to go explore the jungle, which is filled with stuff waiting to kill you. The combat feels in-cre-di-bly gratifying, though. I'm actually playing with a maniacal grin on my face each time I plough through a group of monsters in style. Blood and limbs everywhere! When I'm not in combat I'm generally having a hard time keeping my jaw from falling towards the floor because of how stunning this game looks and sounds. This is basically a triple-A title by a semi-indie dev company. Production values are really through the roof!
Yeah, I enjoyed the fact that this game didn't really hold your hand like most games do these days.
Theres still a varying degree of difficulty too: playing this game on harder difficulties makes every battle a puzzle, while playing in on easy you didn't really have to do much except keep attacking once you got past a certain point in the game.
What eventually just threw my interest off the game was the fighting which I just found really repetitive and BORING to the point that I just felt like the fighting alone made a possibly great game unplayable for me. I just wish they would have focused more on the fighting and added more variety to it.
I totally agree with you here but unfortunately this doesnt just go for the witcher 2 it goes for every RPG/MMO ever pretty much. Id be very interested to know of a RPG/MMO with a great combat system where you can acutally control your movement and strikes, cause i have yet to play one. they are all just click,click,click standing in one spot for the most part. I think your problem is more with the genre then the actual game. Im waiting for the day when an RPG/MMO comes out with a Ninja gaiden black/batman arkam asylum/God of war combat system.
On May 25 2011 04:52 deepfield1 wrote: Witcher 2 or DAO 2?
Need something besides MLG for the long weekend. Thoughts?
well basically you are choosing between a great game aka Witcher 2 and utter crap and Bioware moneymaking aka Dragon Age 2
Ive played fallout 3 the combat system was probably the worst thing about it. Where do you get the impression that the combat system in fallout 3 is anything like any of the games I mentioned.
On May 23 2011 23:47 True_Spike wrote: The great thing is that if the game will sell good enough (and I think it's safe to say at this point in time that it most certainly will) CDPR will be able to afford a much bigger budget (the first installment had a budget of around 27 million PLN, it sold 1,5 million copies, earned 36 million PLN and therefore netted almost 9 million PLN, whereas the second Witcher has a budget of roughly 30 million PLN - but is supposed to earn *a ton* more). The 3rd (and most likely final) part of the series should easily get a 35 million budget (maybe even 40 mil (as of now that's a tad more than 14 million USD), which is a lot for a PC exclusive) once the 2nd Witcher achieves commercial success. Not to mention the money that will come from eventual console ports - and with the next gen coming in the next few years, the 3rd Witcher might get ported, too.
I don't think budget is a good way of estimating how much quality will be put into a game. The trend of basically all companies who grew large put out worse and worse games by the years. That The Witcher 3 will become a good game judging on Witcher 2 sales is definitely an invalid statement. Shit, just look at what happened to Bioware, Ubisoft, SquareEnix, Bethesda or perhaps even Blizzard. Console ports themselves mean more compromises, larger audiences also means more compromises, also less individual devotion put into the product. More pressure from publishers, PR tricks, less adult. In fact, you could more often make the assumption that the higher budget the more the game will suck. Sadly. To use an example. Imagine if Witcher 2 (or even more obvious, the first game) was also made for consoles. Do you really think Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would allow all the nudity, sex scenes and harsh language? Some of it would have to be cut, they'd lose a lot of sales on the age recommendation or other publishing problems.
On May 25 2011 06:07 maartendq wrote: Thing is, a hardcore PC RPG is way more complicated than any First Person Shooter out there. If TW2 had a tuturial, they'd have to make a prologue to the prologue... Half Life 1 was pretty simple if you had ever played a shooter before (moving around, jumping, crouching, primary and secondary fire; there's not much to it if you compare it to The Witcher 2 or even a Final Fantasy game).
Even Blizzard decided to not put the basic tutorials in the campaign...
For what game? SC2? The campaign WAS the tutorial. The first missions were incredibly simple, giving you more units as time went on, and each mission they introduced a new gimmick and ability that you needed to make use of in order to beat it. Simple things like watching the SCV on mission 2 (I think) run up to the Bunker to repair it, or having an entire mission devoted to pummeling the crap out of stuff with Siege Tanks. They teach you the game by showing you, and it's subtle things like that, which were also prevalent in Half-Life, that allow the player to understand the game in an immersive fashion.
I'm talking about the bare basics, unit movement and production and stuff like that. I admit that the whole campaign was basically a tutorial for various units, though.
I do stand by my point that if you want to make a thorough tutorial to a game like The Witcher it'd be a couple of hours long, preferably before the prologue and pretty boring since you've constantly got to break the flow of the game in order to relay information to the player (and there's a lot of stuff new players have to learn).
That said, it feels good that there's finally a game with a higher degree of difficulty on the market. Just trying to clear out all those nekkers already proves to be one hell of a challenge. The fact that there's no compass telling you where the nests are require you to go explore the jungle, which is filled with stuff waiting to kill you. The combat feels in-cre-di-bly gratifying, though. I'm actually playing with a maniacal grin on my face each time I plough through a group of monsters in style. Blood and limbs everywhere! When I'm not in combat I'm generally having a hard time keeping my jaw from falling towards the floor because of how stunning this game looks and sounds. This is basically a triple-A title by a semi-indie dev company. Production values are really through the roof!
I actually hope this game gets released on consoles as well... I really want as much people as possible to enjoy this game.
Seriously, it's got 92 on metacritic... This is CDProjekt's second game and it already ranks second this year, amongst games by seasoned developers like Valve (Portal 2) and The Creative Assembly (Shogun 2). CDP can really be proud of themselves!
Err, I don't think you could call them semi-indie with around 300 employees in a single development studio, equivalent to half of Bioware, who are spread over several studios themselves and working on 3 games simultaneously (DA, ME and TOR are the main ones right now, I think). That's a pretty damn big company.
Yeah, they've done great, but missing the tutorial is a really big downer. It's mind-blowing why they'd even release the introductory part of the game in that state. On top of that there's the repetitive combat and looting parts of the game, which really don't float my boat, so I don't agree with that 92/100. I think a lot of that has to do with a warped sense of what 'old school gaming' was. I mean, do we want to go back to games like this?
I remember playing that and wanting to throw my Amiga out the window. And in the end, that's a 25-minute game that takes you weeks to finish just because its unfairly difficult. I think nostalgia leaves a lot of people remembering that era of gaming in a very strange light.
What eventually just threw my interest off the game was the fighting which I just found really repetitive and BORING to the point that I just felt like the fighting alone made a possibly great game unplayable for me. I just wish they would have focused more on the fighting and added more variety to it.
I totally agree with you here but unfortunately this doesnt just go for the witcher 2 it goes for every RPG/MMO ever pretty much. Id be very interested to know of a RPG/MMO with a great combat system where you can acutally control your movement and strikes, cause i have yet to play one. they are all just click,click,click standing in one spot for the most part. I think your problem is more with the genre then the actual game. Im waiting for the day when an RPG/MMO comes out with a Ninja gaiden black/batman arkam asylum/God of war combat system.
Fallout 3 or New Vegas
Wat?
Seriously, Fallout3 has some of the worst RPG combat systems ever, if you're going FPS on it it just feels bad and unsatisfying, and that VATS stuff is just absolutely boring and bland :|
also it's NOTHING (NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST!) like Ninja gaiden black/batman arkam asylum/God
My quick thoughts after playing the game for 2 hours: Where is the tutorial..? I would have thought that the prologue should have acted the role as such, but i died somewhere around 20 times to that dragon before realizing that there was this godmode-spell called "Quen". The little tutorial there is keeps popping up while I'm busy not dying, and there is no way to change, or even look at, the controls. So I still have no idea what does what and why. "Holding hand" is one thing, but you can't just hand a kid a bow and arrow and expect him to have your dinner within the hour..
The second thing about this game is that it doesn't really look that good. It could be that I messed up the graphics somewhere, even tho it did state that mine should be on "high" when I installed it. There is no way to look at your graphics settings in game either.
This game might get good for all I know later on, but first impressions are not good.
Hmm.. if this game doesn't look good to you then you have messed up your graphics.. or your standards are insanely high, this game is making my eyes happy like no game in a real long time
the opening to the game was very rough, I agree there.. but having played the first witcher I had an idea of what to expect.. perhaps the very first thing you do in this game should have been about teaching the player how to fight properly, since theres some quite challenging encounters so early on
ARGGGG, bought it and I can't remap the up down left right key to my keyboard arrows (yeah, I hate playing wasd, I'm used to arrow for more than a decade now...in fact nearly 2 :D) Anyone knows a way to remap those keys ?
edit : google gave me this IK_Up=(Gamekey=GI_AxisLeftY,Value=1.000000) IK_Down=(Gamekey=GI_AxisLeftY,Value=-1.000000) IK_Left=(Gamekey=GI_AxisLeftX,Value=-1.000000) IK_Right=(Gamekey=GI_AxisLeftX,Value=1.000000)
Having an awesome time with the game so far...the challenge is great actually makes u think although theres certain things u can abuse. Ive already died too many times through act 1 being impatient. Also I dont usually care much for graphics but wow...what cdprojekt did with what mustve been a less than modest budget is simply amazing. This game makes da2 look like a steaming pile of nes crap and bioware prolly has like 3x the resources. If anything though I do wish they couldve released the game on consoles since the control scheme is really console friendly and I dont have as much time to dedicate to PC games anymore
What eventually just threw my interest off the game was the fighting which I just found really repetitive and BORING to the point that I just felt like the fighting alone made a possibly great game unplayable for me. I just wish they would have focused more on the fighting and added more variety to it.
I totally agree with you here but unfortunately this doesnt just go for the witcher 2 it goes for every RPG/MMO ever pretty much. Id be very interested to know of a RPG/MMO with a great combat system where you can acutally control your movement and strikes, cause i have yet to play one. they are all just click,click,click standing in one spot for the most part. I think your problem is more with the genre then the actual game. Im waiting for the day when an RPG/MMO comes out with a Ninja gaiden black/batman arkam asylum/God of war combat system.
Fallout 3 or New Vegas
Wat?
Seriously, Fallout3 has some of the worst RPG combat systems ever, if you're going FPS on it it just feels bad and unsatisfying, and that VATS stuff is just absolutely boring and bland :|
also it's NOTHING (NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST!) like Ninja gaiden black/batman arkam asylum/God
thank you sir! I thought I was the only one who noticed
On May 25 2011 04:55 maartendq wrote:Really, I miss my manuals. I remember my Age of Empires 2 manual.. the thing had 120 pages and extra historical information about literally every unit and research in the game. I must have read the thing over ten times..
If you really want to see the game that (in my opinion) set the standard for what should come in the box, go buy yourself a copy of the original Homeworld. You can probably find it for about $5.00 somewhere, and the money is worth it just for the soundtrack and the manual -- even if you never play the game.
But yeah, I actually sat there and read through the entire manual, looked over the map, and read the little notes etc... before even starting the game. I probably spent a full hour just going over the stuff that came in the box for The Witcher 2. Really brought back some nostalgic memories of when games had production values in every facet.
On May 25 2011 04:55 maartendq wrote:Really, I miss my manuals. I remember my Age of Empires 2 manual.. the thing had 120 pages and extra historical information about literally every unit and research in the game. I must have read the thing over ten times..
If you really want to see the game that (in my opinion) set the standard for what should come in the box, go buy yourself a copy of the original Homeworld. You can probably find it for about $5.00 somewhere, and the money is worth it just for the soundtrack and the manual -- even if you never play the game.
But yeah, I actually sat there and read through the entire manual, looked over the map, and read the little notes etc... before even starting the game. I probably spent a full hour just going over the stuff that came in the box for The Witcher 2. Really brought back some nostalgic memories of when games had production values in every facet.
EA sports used to have everyone stats in the instructions manual. It was great to flip though while you were wating for some friends to finish a game of NHL, or FIFA
That game for amiga looks amazing btw especially for its time.
On May 25 2011 09:45 Excludos wrote: My quick thoughts after playing the game for 2 hours: Where is the tutorial..? I would have thought that the prologue should have acted the role as such, but i died somewhere around 20 times to that dragon before realizing that there was this godmode-spell called "Quen". The little tutorial there is keeps popping up while I'm busy not dying, and there is no way to change, or even look at, the controls. So I still have no idea what does what and why. "Holding hand" is one thing, but you can't just hand a kid a bow and arrow and expect him to have your dinner within the hour..
The second thing about this game is that it doesn't really look that good. It could be that I messed up the graphics somewhere, even tho it did state that mine should be on "high" when I installed it. There is no way to look at your graphics settings in game either.
This game might get good for all I know later on, but first impressions are not good.
Can all the people who are derailing this great topic into a 6 page discussion about the fucking tutorial get banned plz.
The only thing i hate is that u can miss some quests really easely if u dont go talk to everyone in each chapter and that sometimes the eradicate X monster quest are a dam pain and take way too long.
Other than that im loving the game but kinda regreting i put it on normal, because it gets a bit too easy once u get alot of points to put in the tree
On May 25 2011 06:31 DannyJ wrote: Quen certainly is too strong. The absolute only thing you need in the game is that ability. You could probably beat the game with the sword you start out with as long as you have that sign fully upgraded.
One of the testers of the game beat the game with a mining pick. Beat that.
You will be fine gameplay-wise, you will understand less of the lore though, such as why one should not automatically side with the poor suppressed elves QQ, why people hate witchers, why the assassin who tried killing King Foltest at the end of game 1 being a witcher is important, how witchers are made anyways, who Triss is, why you should not be lovesick with her, why Geralt has two swords, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
If you're the kind that pays attention to things like that, you will enjoy the game less. If you just want to know who you're killing and why, the game will sort you out just fine.
EPT
(yeah, I hate playing wasd, I'm used to arrow for more than a decade now...in fact nearly 2 :D)
