Reviews are out, and they say it's a pretty awesome RPG game. Looks very nice from the videos indeed. Givin or any others played The Witcher 2 yet?

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - Metacritic.com

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Review - GameSpot.com

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings review - Shacknews.com

I'm behind by 4 years. I just bought The Witcher 1 and I'm really enjoying it

Triss tits FTW?

I just started playing this game and I can't decide if I like it or not. I never played the Witcher 1 and it's been ages since I've played a non-console game besides an MMO. This game is like the anti-warcraft game for handholding and ease of victory. There are gaping holes in the short tutorial on what you need to do to survive, crafting is completely a figure it out yourself set up and I still don't know when I get to pick which of the 3 sub classes of a witcher I get to become and I'm about 6 hours into playing. I'm playing on normal difficulty and I've died about 20-30x already and for a frame of reference I died 1x in the entire Dragon Age II game which included 2 full play throughs.

The crafting system seems pretty cool, but I'm concerned that there is going to be too much micro management once I get deeper into the game. I am in the 1st real quest hub town right now and I've already got around 2 dozen distinct crafting reagents. They are everywhere too, it takes a while to get through an area when you are going through it with a fine tooth comb to get every "goodie" there is.

The story line is interesting so far, and while I am new the the world and lore, it seems to be a rich one that I will enjoy discovering. I do get the feeling this is not a happy world and there is going to be much pain and suffering to go with the storyline. That's neither good or bad, as long as its a good story I'm happy with it.

The combat is real time, there is no pause and give orders system. It's kill or be killed (with the latter happening often!) and I'm still getting used to the controls for parrying and counter attacking, which seem paramount to success.

In the end, this game is probably higher on the difficulty level than what I would consider ideal, but after so many games being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, its not a bad change of pace. Compare that to Dragon Age II, where I actually nodded off midway through one of the key battles, woke up 2 minutes later and had won it. That's the definition of too easy right there.

One last thing to note after playing so many console games is the pita factor of getting it to run. It took about 3 hours to just get it loaded, running and authorized. The game stop code for the special merchant still wont work, but I eventally gave up on it and just started playing. My patience is low for that kind of crap.

6 paragraphs and you failed to mention tits.

How are the tits?

They are pretty ridiculous.
http://kotaku.com/5804769/watch-a-woman ... only-magic

Oh, and there is already a mod that swaps the normal armor Triss wears for bare naked ass Triss.

I'm 6 hours in and haven't gotten to them yet (besides a few seconds in the opening into movie clip). The only thing Triss has done for me so far is make a shield vs elven arrows. Maybe after a few more hours of play time I'll get to that point and write another paragraph. You know what they say...the 7th times the charm.

Can't wait Duke Nukem! I'll hit the strip club in game and never progress past it!

I've decided finally...Too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it. My game bugged and crashed, and now no voices in the game work (even on previous saves). There is a patch 1.1 for the game, but it wont install for me because it keeps claiming I have an unregistered version, which is of course inaccurate. Just too much headache for a game.

Runs without any problems for me and is easily the best RPG I've played, ever. It is a lot like Bioware games, just better in every aspect (and much harder, which I think is a good thing). If you like RPGs buy it, and hope your computer runs it without issues.

There's no excuse for the technical issues this game had on release. Try it again after the next title update, or don't... I blame no one either way.

How serious are the tech issues? I have to say I'm often skeptical about such claims after the fuss over Titan Quest and Vanguard. Both examples ran smooth as silk for me with no hiccups, yet there were huge outcries. Come to think of it, I can't think of one in recent memory that has had any serious bugs(or at least none that required serious workarounds).

Out of curiousity, did you identify the cause of the crashes? How old is your machine and its components?

Funny you mention Titan Quest. I read an interview with one of the head guys of the company that made it and he said they made the game unstable on purpose when pirated. In the end the outcry from people bitching how unstable it was (ie, the ones who pirated it) led to the game not selling and the shutdown of the company. I will try to find that article, interesting read.

Still not a single crash here.

_________________
My stuff on facebook.

- Some users can't run it full-screen (it desktop-crashes on launch, and if you try to switch to full-screen after starting the game, nothing happens)
-- Workaround: Change your desktop resolution to 1920x1080 or below

- Forced anti-aliasing causes it to render nothing at all
- Very low framerate using the 3DVision driver
-- Workaround: If you use a single, one-core graphics device, nVidia has a beta driver out that corrects this. Otherwise, remove this driver if you want to play this game

- Some users can't run in any resolution above 1920x1080
- Sudden desktop crashes with no apparent pattern
- DLC AssetID's are crossed -- pay for one thing, get something else
- Serial key is printed in a font that makes 0 and O identical in some cases
- Really poor-quality transition at the edges of shadows, believed not to be intentional
- Some virus scanners detect the core executable as infected (but ironically, not the cracked one you can get online)
- If you're playing with an Xbox360 controller, some of the controller config is a hand-edit of a config file not mentioned in the manual
- Some users have to change speaker config to 5.1 or lower, or they get no sound
- "Ubserampling" (which is just SSAA, maybe they're after a patent?) is very pretty, but it's a tremendous performance hit; it's only suppose to turn on automatically if you select "ultra" pre-sets, but it turns on if you select any above-average preset
- Quicktime events show prompts for maybe a quarter-second if you're playing with a 360 controller
- Desktop crashes on first launch if the user starting it is not an Administrator on the local machine (probably background DirectX config, which it should have taken care of during setup)
- Some users have reported a memory leak that can chug 2GB per hour
- The game ships configured to use 600MB of your video memory for textures, but it needs way more than that; changing this setting requires hand-editing a config file not mentioned in the manual
- The in-game crafting recipe for the Robust Kaedwani Sword occasionally makes a basic steel sword instead, but still takes your components
- No FPS throttling at all; if you don't have a driver limit set someplace, this game will run at 120 FPS and overheat your video card
- DirectX 9, really?

My machine is a year old and was cutting edge when I got it, so it's still decent. The game only crashed 1x on me, but it corrupted every single save game file when it did, so I effectivelty have to start over. If there is a way to fix it without doing that I haven't found it as my issue does not appear to be one of the common ones listed.

Ouch, that really sucks that it corrupts all save files. I know personally when I'm playing an RPG I have a whole fucking slew of saves from various points in case I screw up somewhere or turn the story in a direction I don't like.

Tranthas' list kinda looks like a standard list of game bugs/annoyances, though. Most of that stuff is workaroundable in a matter of seconds.

There are plenty of virus scanners that give shitloads of false positives, so I'd put money on the idea that whatever virus scanner those people were using that detected the primary exe as an infection would do that same thing for all matter of other games and their files.



Yea, I remember the article being posted up here on the Lanys forums after Ironlore went under. I don't know how true it is that they PURPOSEFULLY fucked the game up for pirates, though. It still makes me sad for the human race that people decided to forgo the game(which was pretty awesome at the time) because of pre-release reports. Even the shittiest developers take a second glance when a major tech issue rears its head before release, and worst-case scenario is that they patch it a week or two later.

Either way, judging a book by its cover always sucks. I'd say its their loss, but when an awesome company like Ironlore goes down because of it, it's really everyone's =/

They made Titan Quest unstable on purpose when pirated. That's getting more common now, but there have always been cases of it. Cracked mentioned in a column last week that some PC games dating back to the 90's were set up to be very subtly un-winnable if the game detected that it had been stolen.

Some of that stuff has workarounds, yes; they're listed in my post anyway because I think that workarounds are beside the point. It's my belief that I should never have to do those things anymore; countless games exist that don't make me do them, and while we accepted it in 1995, I don't think there's any excuse in 2011 for desktop resolution settings and content-catalog-to-billing integrity to be something Witcher 2 or its parents can't handle.

This is one of the best games I've played in a long time. They've out-Bioware'd Bioware. This is what Dragon Age 2 should have been.

Hmm it's that good, joxur?I wonder if there is a demo out on the net somewhere.