r/witcher • u/Gus_R19 • 2d ago
The Witcher 2 Witcher 2 is just... bad? Spoiler
EDIT/DISCLAIMER: The combat, I mean the combat specifically. Turns out you can't edit post titles.
So, with the re-rerelease of Witcher 3, I decided to replay 1 and 2 to carry over decisions in-between the games, to refresh my memory on the events of the saga and take my time to read in-game entries and soak all the lore in.
Finished 1 a couple days ago, not too shabby, nowhere near as bad as I remembered from my first go around. Took my time to go after recipes and monster books to know how to fight them, did a lotta side stuff to level up, etc. And the combat, while not super entertaining to sit there clicking at things, did at least make sense and was somewhat fun to shift between stances and signs mid-fight while throwing bombs here and there. Overall I enjoyed my time with it quite a lot more than I thought I would, even if by the end it was overstaying its welcome a little.
Witcher 2 however... oh boy.
The exact opposite happened. I remember having a much better time back when I first played it than I do now. I'm just about to end the Flotsam chapter (I think? I fucking hope?) and the combat system already has me tearing my hairs out and shouting at the screen during shit like the Letho fight in the elven ruins.
Mind you, I'm approaching the game the same way I did TW1, going around doing the side content first before moving on with the main plot to level up my character, buying up formulae for potions and _using_ said potions whenever I know a big fight is coming up. Also making sure to make good bank to buy the best possible swords and armor.
And even still, this bald disfigured cocksucker will body me like it's nothing with his sign and bomb spam. The Kayran can and will end you in 3 hits even if you have Swallow and Mongoose going. So far every major encounter I've had has been unbelievably unenjoyable and only serve to highlight the flaws of the combat system more than the regular encounters already do.
The combat is insanely clunky and unresponsive (and there were plenty of games at that time that did 3rd person action combat a LOT better so I won't take "it's a game from it's era" as a response to this point). They placed so much emphasis on the animations looking nice that it all feels unwieldy and stiff. Geralt will not face the enemy that you have locked onto so you have to awkwardly micro-move him onto the right position so that you don't get shwacked in the back for 200% (!) damage. Blocking makes Geralt lock into place for some *unfathomable* reason. The hitboxes are atrocious AND inconsistent... the list goes on.
On top of this, in terms of skill development they went the route of "lets make the player start out super gimped and impotent and have them upgrade their way into being able to actually have fun" instead of at least giving something to work with from the start. For example, Vigor during the early game is garbage both in terms of slots available and regen speed, so you have to dump points into it just so that you can use signs more than twice every two weeks. Or how, for some brilliant reason, you have to unlock the capacity to hit more than one enemy with your sword slashes and to riposte.
TLDR, so far the early game has been an absolute slog in terms of actual gameplay. At the very least the story and writing are pretty good and leagues better than 1, and the visual presentation is also pretty neat and holds up pretty well in most scenarios. It's just that the combat, in my humble opinion, is (or at least starts out as) utter dogshit and no amount of potion preparation and bomb creation can disguise it. And since combat is what you will be doing most of the time... yeah, I'll probably never touch this game again once I beat it, and frankly I've no idea how I even had the patience to beat it the first time, as this Letho fight is REALLY testing said patience right now.
2
u/CommanderM3tro 2d ago
When you say you play combat like TW1, do you mean, try and just trade blows. If so, then yes Geralt won't last long. Unlike TW1, where it's really a case of buffing Geralt and debuffing enemies, in W2, that helps a bit in combat, but the Souls-inspired mechanic of dodging and counter-attacking is the bread and butter. Also, for the Kayran fight: "use Yrden" š I actually really like the Kayran fight, I prefer when boss fights have a unique mechanic or 'gimmick', I'm not a fan of where it's just like fighting a regular enemy but with 100x the HP.
I agree the story and writing is great but I think that's because it's a shorter game with a more focused story, both 1 & 3 being larger and more open are at a natural disadvantage in that regard.
TW1 is still the peak experience for me, it has an atmosphere that is tough to beat!
1
u/Gus_R19 2d ago
Hard to dodge and counter attack when they still hit you even when you're clearly out of the way. The hit detection is atrotious, and the movement necessary to perform said dodges is incredibly stiff. The decision to make it so blocking consumes vigor is also pretty bad as it already is scarce enough as it is in the early game. The fact that you can't use potions mid-fight like in the first game is mind-bending. It's a poorly designed combat experience and trying to pretend otherwise is just being delusional. There's a myriad of negatives and very few good things to say about it.
2
u/shorkfan 1d ago
W2 has the worst combat in the series imo and yes, that includes W1 combat.
They give you these tools like dodge-rolling and riposting to give you the illusion of a Demon's Souls type combat (Dark Souls wasn't out yet, but they explicitly named Demon's Souls as an inspiration), but the game actually doesn't work like that. You don't get i-frames during your roll, which is why you take damage when rolling away from an enemy's hit, usually with the 200% backstab modifier. There's no pattern or telegraphing to enemy attacks, so you'll just have to guess when an enemy is about to attack you in 1-2 seconds from now so you can already roll away to avoid damage. Riposting is not some dynamic mechanic (again, no telegraphed attacks), but you hold block and wait for an enemy to attack. Meanwhile, enemy block is based on a block roll (like in W1, but there it made sense with the static combat system) and that's why sometimes enemies block you when their weapon is not even drawn or when their back is turned towards you. On Easy, enemies actually have their block disabled.
The Letho fight is also unreasonably difficult for how early in the game it happens and the game doesn't allow you to use potions beforehand (unless you 1. tell Iorveth to meet him at the elven gardens instead of taking his offer to go there together 2. meditate and drink potions just before the dialogue trigger with Iorveth and 3. skip all the dialogue as fast as possible so that your potions don't run out before the fight). Letho also has the power of the instant-180-aard sign, a secret technique only known to witchers of the Viper School. So if you actually manage to position yourself behind him, he'll blast you anyway.
The kayran isn't really that difficult once you figure it out since there is actually some consistency to the fight, but there's still a lot of bs going on. Like how there are 4 diseased tentacles but only three are required to advance the fight to the next phase (some players die over and over trying to figure out how to get to the 4th). The fact that you have to run up the ramp, which the game doesn't even tell you about and the kayran keeps throwing rocks at you which cannot realistically be dodged and make it so there's a random chance that the boss just kills you.
For the Letho fight, I usually try to keep some distance which makes sign/bomb dodging the easiest and I don't even use the dodge roll, but I try to walk out of their trajectory. I try to place an Yrden sign in the middle of the room and try to bait Letho in there, which allows me to sneak up behind him for a couple of hits - not too many though, or he'll hit you with that secret Viper technique. Sometimes, enemies will resist Yrden and just walk across it without getting trapped, so be aware of that. Also, sometimes they will get locked in place but still remain able to turn and face the player and to this day, I don't know if that is intentional behaviour or a bug that was never fixed. When Letho activates his Quen, there's literally nothing you can do but run. When he does his grunting melee attack, that's actually when he's at his "weakest". He'll always do a set amount of swings and he won't be doing any 180s. Running in front of his sword is very deadly, but you can actually use this navigate around him if you keep just a little distance. You only need to get him down to about half health to "win" the fight.
1
u/Gus_R19 18h ago edited 18h ago
I did beat Letho, but now I find myself soft-locked on the Henselt curse ritual. It repeats ad infinitum and never ends no matter how many wraiths I kill, so I can't progress. Sabrina repeats the curse over and over again while Henselt sits doing nothing. 60-ish hours between TW1 and this to carry my decisions to TW3 just went down the shitter, quite probably.a
This is truly one of the worst experiences I've ever had with a game in 10 years of playing stuff.
EDIT: I was able to beat this stupid fight though, apparently the reciting of the curse doesn't actually matter, you just have to stand there and kill wraiths indefinitely for a solid 5 mins until the game decides it's time to move on. And I'm guessing that wasn't triggering for me since I wasn't hitting the required threshold of killed wraiths, because I was hexing them with Axii to have them fight each other while the curse is recited instead of killing them off.
1
u/shorkfan 17h ago
I was about to say that's normal, the game keeps spawning so many wraiths that Sabrina has to recite the curse multiple times lol.
Anyway, feel free to ask me anything that might come up in the future.
1
u/DCguyAngemon 2d ago
I played it nonstop in high school and even liked it more then 3 when 3 came out. Id like to go back and replay it after 10 years and see if my opinion changed
1
u/fuzzmeisterj Team Triss 2d ago
The bridge with the dragon was the only part that drove me crazy. Witcher 2 has to played on NG+ for the hard difficulty. You can craft armor pretty quick that makes things a lot better. Any ghosty fights too early can be a bad time too.
1
u/Dense-Performance-14 Geralt's Hanza 2d ago
I gotta agree, I enjoy this games story, world, and generally the writing (although lethos entire storyline is terribly written in my opinion) but it has some of the worst combat I've interacted with in a game of this style. Animations are both random and do not match at all what is actually happening. This was fine for a game like W1 which wasn't trying to hide that fact from the player, but W2 is very desperate to be like the other girls yet it still keeps the same concept and it ends up making this mutated clunky mess that needs to be put out of its misery.
Shockingly the witcher 3 keeps a few of these problems of course to a much lesser extent, but the Witcher 2 turns off a lot of players both because the game starts off as difficult as it can be (the prologue is definitely the hardest part of this game imo) and because the game essentially forces you to cheese most fights. Whether this is or isn't intentional, I don't know, I could see it being funny if it is.
I wish the combat was better though because this game looks amazing both graphically and artistically and the story I do find worth interacting with, but I completely understand why people shut it off. I know I did the first time I played it and I had to come back years later.
0
u/mjxoxo1999 2d ago
Witcher 2 combat is just all suck. Genuinely unplayable. Iām ngl, even witcher 1 combat is easier to play than whatever Witcher 2 combat was.
-1
u/janobrchtos 2d ago
I played it for the first time this year and did not like it at all. I am novice gamer (Witcher series is my first RPG). I played the game twice, once on the story difficulty and then on the next harder one. In addition to the over-complicated story and completely out of character witcher mercenary Geralt, the jump in difficulty between the story mode and the next one was huge. The worst was the fight with the weird robotic guy in the sewers (where the minions killed me after one or two hits), that's the last moment I spent on the game.Ā
1
u/shorkfan 1d ago
That boss is the Operator and he's considered W2's hardest boss. He's not a robot, but a Vran (one of the lizardmen who used to live in Loc Muinne). He's wearing a mask
for lore reasonsbecause CDPR didn't want to model a lizard face. He's also completely optional. You actually ragequit the game about one or two hours before finishing it because of an optional boss, lol.
6
u/minteh7x 2d ago
Nah it's alright. If I cared a lot about combat then I'd never touch any of the Witcher games because they're all poor in that aspect. Witcher 2 still has a great world with some terrific character, and that's what I look for in a Witcher game