The Witcher 2

Overview

The Witcher 2 is a single-player fantasy role-playing game by CD Projekt RED, starring Geralt, the hero from the first game released in 2007. Geralt is a witcher, a ghost-haired mutant that can wield swords and magical powers to dispatch foes. Expect a large cast of characters to interact with, plenty of ways to upgrade and customize Geralt to suit your play style, and at least one boss fight against a giant tentacle beast.

From what's been said about the game so far, The Witcher 2 is enormous. The official word is 40 hours long, though it's unclear how much that may vary if you decide to take part in all the side quests and minigames. Like in the first game, your actions while playing affect what happens later. In the sequel, this may mean you'll miss entire towns (as well as the associated storylines and side quests) on your first playthrough. According to the game's official site there'll be four different beginnings and 16 possible endings. CD Projekt RED is using an entirely new engine for the sequel, which basically means The Witcher 2 looks significantly prettier than the original, which utilized a modified version of BioWare's Aurora Engine.

Combat has also received a significant overhaul. Gone is the restrictive timing-based system used in the original, replaced by a more free-form system that should be more familiar to those who play third-person action games. You'll be able to equip lots of different armor pieces this time, as well use weapons, spells and alchemical components to kill your enemies. From what I've played for preview it all works really well, and hopefully that holds true when I start playing the game for review.

I will try to avoid story spoilers wherever possible.

Initial Combat Impressions

After playing through the first few hours of the game a few things are clear. First, The Witcher 2's production values are far higher than its predecessor's. The animations, voice acting and general level of detail are much improved. The menus are still a little confusing at first, but don't require quite as much time to learn as the combat. When you start a game you'll get four difficulty settings right from the start. There's easy, normal, hard and insane. I would strongly recommend staying very far away from the insane setting on your first time through, since in it if Geralt dies, it's game over. No reloading, you simply lose and need to restart the whole thing.

The Witcher 2 begins with a flashback sequence as Geralt recalls the events that led to his imprisonment. It's an exciting scenario, but not one that does a great job explaining how everything works. There are tutorials built into your journal, and you should definitely spend some time checking those out. The initial encounters, even on normal, are challenging only a few hours in. If you're not taking advantage of everything at Geralt's disposal, expect to spend a lot of time reloading saves.




How good is The Witcher 2?
The most important thing to be mindful of in combat is your command wheel, which can be brought up by holding the Ctrl key. Bringing this up slows time and allows you to select one of Geralt's magical signs, as well as switch between combat items. As much as you might want to slice up enemies with Geralt's blades, it's simply not effective for encounters with more than three enemies in heavy armor or armed with shields, of which there have so far been many. Using the magical signs is a must. Even before they're powered up through leveling, these abilities can set enemies on fire, stun and root them in place, knock them down and a temporarily dampen incoming damage. You also can't overlook things like bombs and fire traps in your inventory, since these can be supremely useful against clumped-up bunches of enemies, dealing damage and stunning.

Unarmed enemies are fairly easy to bring down. It's best to use Geralt's steel blade against humanoids and the silver one for monsters. Geralt's active target is painted with an icon, letting you know who you'll strike with an attack. After the initial sword strike lands, a properly timed weak or strong strike will result in a swift follow-up hit. Against shielded foes you'll need to find a way to stun them or circle around behind to land strikes that deal a decent amount of damage.

While it's a system that can be frustrating initially because of how little is explained, once you get the hang of using the Ctrl menu and swapping between powers on the fly, it's much more satisfying. I look forward to seeing how it develops as I level up Geralt and unlock new abilities.

Performance

The Witcher 2 looks great. Only hours in you'll be treated to stunning views of enormous, sweeping vistas from the side of a castle under siege. Nearly every scene is populated with plenty of characters, the animations are more realistic than the first Witcher game during conversations and combat, and effects like fire and magical electricity are well done. The problem so far is The Witcher 2 doesn't seem to perform particularly well.

Pretty sights, but at what cost?

In fact, I've had to restart the game a number of times to get its erratic framerate issues under control. I'm playing the Steam version of the game, and have tried out Geforce GTX 580 and Radeon 6970 cards on a system with a Core i7 975 CPU and experienced the same issue in both configurations. I crank the settings, keeping SSAO off, and everything seems fine and runs smoothly. Then when a new scene loads, occasionally the framerate plunges into near single digits. I save, quit out of the game, change none of the graphics settings, and when I reload the game everything runs fine. That strikes me as an issue with the game, not my hardware. Am I alone with these issues or are others having problems as well?

Update: After some further searching and installing, I think I may have found a fix for the performance problems. I'm using a GeForce GTX 580 now, installed the beta drivers Nvidia posted, followed advice found on message boards to uninstall 3D Vision drivers and turned off SSAO and Supersampling in The Witcher 2's configuration menu. The result is gameplay that runs at between 50 – 60 frames per second with everything else cranked. Whew. I can't say what a proper fix might be for AMD card users though.

GAME PLAY

  

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