The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings [Enhanced Edition]

A very impressive, very ambitious, and very flawed sequel. I'm giving this a thumbs up because I enjoyed it, but I also have a lot of complaints.

Firstly, this is qualitatively a different kind of game from the first Witcher. It still has an RPG heart, and many of those lovingly intricate game systems are still present. But it targets consoles as well as PCs, and perhaps consequently emphasizes action a bit more. Also, though it's still very much an open-world game, there are also many linearly sequenced episodes.

It also has full gamepad support. This in itself is great, but the gamepad-friendly UI has been poorly designed. It's not always clear what is being selected and what a button press would actually do. It's easy to make mistakes and create an frustrating mess in your inventory. I finished the game without ever getting used to it.

The biggest improvement is in the "choices matter" system. The first Witcher was excellent in this respect, but here it's beyond a system: it's a paradigm. Indeed, you will be playing an entirely different chapter according to choices you make early on, moreover you'll constantly be hitting forks in the narrative road, with decisions you make having epic consequences on the world, key historical figures, and your relationships. I guess not everybody will like this, because it's impossible to experience all the game content in a single playthrough. But isn't this what role-playing is supposed to be about? Cut your own path through the thicket! Own it.

Whatever choices you make, the story is going to be exciting and told well through diverse narrative devices, including scenes in which you play characters other than the protagonist. The dialog writing and voice acting have matured since the first game, and sometimes the script is as good as anything you'd find in pulp literature. The side quests are no less gripping, and there are just so many wonderful characters you meet along the way that make it worth the ride. Things do get a bit too thick around the middle point of the game. I haven't read the books, so I got a lost among all the names of characters and their political goals. Which king wants to conquer which part of the valley and why? And the sorceresses are intervening because of ... reasons? To the game's credit, my bewilderment made me want to learn more about its world.

"Choices matter" also happens on a smaller scale, but that doesn't work as well. For example, in chapter 2 there is a whole series of interdependent quests in which insignificant choices on your part (e.g. who to talk to first) can mean that some side quests simply cannot be completed. You need to follow a walkthough very carefully if you're a completionist. Unlike the big decisions, this arbitrary nonsense comes off as petty and unfair.

Another big improvement over the first game is its production values. Witcher 2's design is a stunning achievement, obviously a labor of love with meticulous attention to detail. Graphics aim for realism and immersion, with superbly rich textures and artfully structured environments. Forests are especially atmospheric, inviting, and enchanting. Animations are also improved, though still awkward at times. Perhaps most impressive is the portrayal of the world as living and breathing: people go about their everyday business, chat with each other, and routines vary by time of day and even the weather. The first Witcher was also good at this, but here we also get interactivity between world elements. The world is almost like a character in this story. For example, my jaw dropped when I saw farmers picking herbs in a forest while guards armed with crossbows walked around, vigilantly protecting them, and also interacted with me as I walked by.

Great, huh? So, let's talk about the flaws. The combat system is a special kind of hot garbage. Kudos to the animators for making it look super cool, but whoever designed the controls needs to apologize. Whenever you attack you also move, and the direction of that movement depends on which enemy you are targeting. Randomly, some of these attacks-plus-motion become long animated sequences that you can't stop. You can end up quite far from where you intended to be, and very possibly in a fatally dangerous situation. You can switch targets manually before attacking, but the targeting system is awkward and imprecise. (Even out of combat it is frustratingly hard to target the item you want if several items are close together.) Add to that that this is "realistic" combat, in which a single enemy attack causes a lot of damage. Moreover, attacks from the back cause significantly more damage. In summary, combat combines two key features into an utterly rage-inducing, contradictory whole: false moves can lead to misery, but movement is often arbitrary. Expect to die a lot. Expect to have to repeat combat sequences a lot (you can't save during combat). It feels unfair. And that's pretty much the worst thing one can say about any game system.

But, let us try to be fair: at certain moments the cinematic combat can look and even feel amazing. It's like you're an elegant, efficient artist of monster death. A witcher. There really is a great intention at the core, but what a shame about the implementation. What a spectacular failure.

There's really only one winning combat strategy: separate enemies so that you can deal with them one at a time, use magic ("signs") to incapacitate or slow them down, attack and retreat and attack, and hope that nothing attacks you from behind because that will almost certainly require a game load. All the intricacy of the combat design boils down to the same old grind and a lot of clownish rolling around.

But I do have some good news. The game is "top heavy", much harder in the early stages than the later ones. If you grit your teeth and soldier on it will become less frustrating. Or, just play on "easy"! "Normal" is actually hard. And save often. Save all the time.

Except ... be aware that as you accumulate saves the game load screens get much slower and you might even experience crashes. I did. Lots of frustrating crashes. So, again we have a contradictory system: save a lot, but also make sure to delete old saves. Oh, and you can't overwrite old saves: every save is new. Fun, right? It's like a game within a game! Deleting old saves from within the game is extremely tedious, so I recommend using "Steam Cloud File Manager Lite" (it's on GitHub). The AppID for this game is 20920.

It's also worth pointing out the auto-save system is unreliable. Often it doesn't auto-save when you think it should. So, again, just save save save save all the time and delete old slots.

Note that you can load one of your last slave slots from the first Witcher when you start. Cool, right? The swords you worked so hard to get in the first game are still here, as well as a few other items! Unfortunately those awesome swords are pretty crappy in this game. It's disappointing, but also doesn't make sense: this is the same world and a continuation of that story. What gives? It's such an immersion-breaker that I might recommend starting from scratch.

Another contradictory game system is the result of a contextual limitation: you can only drink potions when you meditate, and you can only meditate outside of combat. Trying to understand what the designers intended here makes my brain hurt. Often I would have to load one or two previous save slots in order to reach an earlier point where I was actually allowed to meditate and "potion up" for the difficult combat I knew would be coming up after a few cutscenes. An intrinsic, necessary system in the game requires you to do save-slot cheating. Bottom line: potion alchemy is so broken that it's not worth using, which is a real shame because it's otherwise a very detailed system. Then again, it's not any worse than combat...

This all sounds kinda bad, right? Well, another annoyance from the first Witcher is repeated here: back-tracking. It's not quite as prevalent as in the first game, but you still have missions that require you to move back and forth multiple times between the same two areas. Who looks at such a mission design and approves it? Fail. At least moving around is tolerable: the world and the graphics are so beautiful that one can almost enjoy going down the same path ten times. Almost.

Oh, and sex. It's still here, but it's handled better than in the first Witcher. We no longer get those insulting collectible cards that made me feel like a predator in the first game, and generally sex isn't treated as much as a reward for good gaming (except in one case in which it is explicitly a reward). You can even buy sex from prostitutes without any kind of quest manipulation. Sex is just a matter of fact in this game and its world. On that note, be aware that this game does increase the amount of vulgarity in dialogs quite a bit. It's not a game for those with delicate ears.

Finally, kudos for all the little Lord of the Rings easter eggs and jokes. I got them. I appreciated them.

Tech tip: This game is taxing even on high-end GPUs. I strongly suggest disabling "Ubersampling". Even with that, on my 2080 Ti 4K/60FPS/Ultra was impossible. Went for 1440p with NVIDIA sharpening/scaling.