Blodhemn

Aussies must feel so cozy and warm that there is a higher power looking out for them.

I was playing on medium or hard, can't remember which and it'd be nice if you could change the difficulty once your game started. It always felt like I was just behind my enemies and then once I got a silver medallion to even it up, something that I never really payed attention to(bleeding resistance) would be what I was lacking, etc.. just went on and on. That's somewhat of a good thing though, it just seemed like once I got the upperhand against monsters then I'd lose it against new ones, but I didn't really level up my silver sword abilities all that much, even though most of the game is dealing with monsters. I was moreso leveling up my steel since I read towards the end of the game there's a lot of humans to fight but really, you're dealing with more monster throughout most of the game so that was a dumb move. Which is why it would've been nice to switch the difficulty every now and then. Well, even though I didn't use Aard much, I wouldn't say to remove it completely since it could be used on some enemies, but using it to unlock passageways was a "feature" that wasn't worthwhile from the start. Because, it took no knowledge to discover what to do.. you'd know if there were something blocking a way and if you were supposed to get through, then use Aard and if you weren't supposed to get through then Aard simply wouldn't work, no matter how small the debris was. It's just a bit cheap.. why can i hurl huge chunks of stone into the air but this small log I can't budge? I'm not saying having everything destructible but like near the end at Old Vizima when there's burning wood littered about, there's only one or two chunks at most that you can remove from using your power, simply because that's the path the designers wanted you to take, all the while there's smaller bit of wood that you can't budge that's to the left and right of you. It's just cheap.

Not really.. you took it a bit too literally. Basically, I don't see a point in having to waste time by going elsewhere to level up. It's just a small thing to make you do extra legwork. Why not just be able to hit one key to bring up the screen in order to do it anywhere? The use of Ardi was too gimmicky. They only allowed you to knock through a few piles of rubble that were set there to obscure your view/path. All the other rubble piles in the game are immovable simply because it'd either conflict with the path they wanted you to take or because that area isn't dark enough, i.e. a crypt, and thus wouldn't fit in with their main reason for having that "feature".

Indeed.. I liked the fact that you could install different languages for voice overs and since being unable to speak those languages you're unable to tell how bad the voice acting is. I dropped the English and went to changing between French and Hungarian. Some of the characters were memorable as well as some of the situations you choose to get involved in and from time to time the story would get your interest. But I didn't like the multitude of fetch quests that made up the middle bulk of the game and there just isn't much variety in the look of the levels. Plus, the way the levels were designed felt very rigid and cheap, i.e. being unable to scale a 6 inch "wall" or rock and having to walk all the way around. I wish you didn't have to find a campfire or bring up the sleep icon in a dialogue in order to level up. It's just annoying having to waste time to find somewhere in order to "meditate", why can't you just do it anywhere? I'm not really a fan of the combat system either. The magic spells are about worthless. All you do is wait for the sword icon to light up, click and possibly load a potion or two. And there's absolutely no logic in not being able to leave a crypt or go into another loading area just because you're in battle mode. Or why can't you use your Ardi to blow almost everything away instead of the select few destructible areas? How come if a building is on fire or if there's fire littered about, you can't meditate there? Why does it have to be a campfire and hell, why can't you make your own campfire? You can make your own potions, why can't you just gather a few sticks and hit Igni over top of em? There's a bunch of little things that don't really make sense. I guess a lot of the game's mechanics are too old school for me.

Yes. Ah, I don't know what the deal is.. Now it's about 3 minutes to load after dying. I've about lost all my patience with this. The game has some good variety in choices to be made, and since I'm pretty much past that point in the game.. all that's left are battles in this boring combat system and it's just far too painful to have to reload after dying. The Witcher = cool choices to make with everything else just being tedious and nothing special.

WTF.. Intel Duo Core 3.0Ghz.. 4GB ram..

*shrugs*.. just have a regular USB mouse.. Are you folks serious about the loading times being ok? I just timed mine... the initial loading to get into the game is 4 minutes and the loading when you die is 2 minutes.. what the hell??

Ahh... I kept fighting a wave of enemies when after a couple mouse clicks on a teleport didn't open it up so I thought I'd have to fight this battle before it'd open but it never did and subsequently the game crashes cause there must've been the remains of 50 or so enemies lying about. Reloading another game and trying it again worked. I don't know if it's my setup or what, but half the time during battle, mouse clicks aren't very responsive. Act IV is refreshing.. Acts II and III together were just far too long for me.

Good God.. just played a Salamandra battle for about 30 mins and the game crashed before a save point. About time to just quit this game..

I patched the original game with the EE version and it didn't seem to make a difference. Should I patch again to a later version?

Looks like it's a regular issue for Vista32 users, and there's a semi fix by upping the memory values with varied results.

Oh, well how come the Witcher is the only game that does it? Virtually none of the other games I play have crashed. Mass Effect might've crashed once.. that's it. I can run Crysis with all settings maxed and it's fine. The Witcher crashes nearly every time I play and the loading times are longer than all my other games put together. Still my system though, huh? Yeah, I don't buy that for a second.

This game is pissing me off. The first time I've ever gotten the blue screen of death in Vista, thanks to the Witcher. It crashes nearly every time I play it. Not only that, but I got an extra 2 gig of ram to try to improve loading times but that didn't do a damn thing. What a piece of ****.

I finally managed to advance to Act III. This is a real slow moving game for me, partly do to the tremendous load times. After I patched to the EE version, load times seem to increase. Does the 1.5 patch have anything to do with load times? That and the millions of times I've had to fetch quest back to the swamp has made this Act II - Act III way longer than it should be.

Ah cool, thanks for that. The visual difference is only a hair off, if that, but it's certainly nice to have a better framerate.

Anyone notice a difference between the DX9 and DX10 versions? Only difference I could make out was that DX10 made for a slightly higher framerate.

Yeah, sorta the same with me. The music, the atmosphere and the art design in Morrowind was pretty nice. Plus going into the editor and finding cool stuff to magically appear on your character was somewhat fun. In Morrowind it was actually nice to roam around because each area was pretty unique and there weren't as many enemies to just flat out charge you for it. Damn, what a difference just a few years make. I was a lot more ill then but also a lot more happy. Now I'm pretty much just floating in toilet water.

Probably one of the dumbest/funniest things I've ever seen in a game was seeing my brother do the VAT's thing in FO3 positioned 10ft away from the enemy. It cut to the kill cinematic as machinegun rounds littered the vicinity of the enemy's face and the enemy keeps charging, not even so much as a flinch. That's just so freakin dumb to have a stats based shooter. A bullet isn't a bullet unless you have the stats for it? Insane.

LOL@talking farts.. Oh hell yeah.. good thread to vent. I played Oblivion once. It was pretty to look at for the first little while, but eventually just ran through the Oblivion gates and beat the game to hurry up and uninstall the boring ass adventure. I played Morrowind till very close to the end - some main character had to follow me and due to dodgy pathfinding and even dodgier terrain I had to redo this mission a few times and then finally got fed up and uninstalled it. Those "quests" are ridiculous. One thing I really don't get about these open world games - why do they make it so damn annoying to explore? Throwing random enemies at you when the combat system is horrible doesn't make me want to explore one bit. And why do game reviewers go so crazy with their scores just because a game is "open ended". Most of them suck and are beyond tedious. Who has time for these games?? Even a potential cool game like STALKER is killed because the exploring aspect is way too annoying. All the designers know is to just throw enemies in your path as a means to push gameplay. I watched my bro play Fallout 3 a bit and yep, same damn thing, tedious empty gameplay of walking around on foot and as you try to explore random ass enemies attack you through a crappy combat system. It's as if all the dinosaur game designers and the current philosophy behind gaming needs to die out for some fresh ideas to come in.

I dont understand, are you talking about more camera angles/modes or something completely different? Something as simple as in Resident Evil, click "investigate" and the camera zooms in on what you're looking at instead of just having a little circle for XP purposes to click on without further involvement. That's pretty lame. The games interface could use something to make it more "first person" if you'd like to choose it to be so.

The side quests tieing into the main story doesn't seem that big of a deal to me. It's not something that really affects immediate gameplay, it's just possibly enhancing something of which doesn't really need improvement on in that sense. Maybe have some side quests where if you go out of your way to do this mission pertaining to a particular character, then there will be more missions involving that character down the long haul - not just the simple, complete the side quest, over and done in 20 mins and that's all you hear of it. One thing that could be improved on with the story is the presentation, especially with Shepard. Why's everything so serious? It'd be good if some things were less forced and your character less concerned about every little problem in the Universe. Oh no, a colony of ants might be scattered across the lands, separated from their families because of some rogue animal going nuts in a field. Basically, less weenie missions of little worth. And how about some interaction in the world? The view goes from a static third person to an up close and personal, in cut scenes only, view. How about some way to implement interaction within the game world other than that?

Ain't that the freakin truth! There should be a Hitch**** silhouette burnt into the screen during that depth of field change. It would be about as useful as that run command. or What about some stores with something actually useful to buy? I don't get it. The universe is loaded to the brim with scattered items and yet the actual stores are barely even stocked with anything worth your time. I think I ended up with $12,000,000 without anything to buy.... heck, it could've been even higher than that. I think most of this stuff would be overlooked if the main part of the game wasn't mainly a run from point A to point B through blocky cooridors. For, instance, it'd be cool if in part of the game your guns wouldn't be used at all, and you were thrown into this world where you have to discover the "vision" through other means. Tons of possibilities there.

Agreed. How about, FAR LESS ITEMS TO PICK UP AND CLUTTER YOUR INVENTORY? or UNIQUE ITEMS YOU OBTAIN FROM DOING SIDE QUESTS? or POPULATED WIDE OPEN CITY AREAS? or SOME PLANETS WHICH TAKE A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO COMBAT? or A FREAKIN JET PACK OR SOMETHING TO DECREASE TIME ON FOOT?

Oh, wtf... that's pretty uncalled for. I don't really know what to think of this game. It seems pretty last gen and redundant.