Tigranes

The 'easier beginning' stays consistent, but I suppose while making the game they realised it was really boring to have epic level characters and easy combat. MOTB ended up with a couple of 'cheese everything' win buttons anyway (Vampiric Feast, etc).

That's not bad, but it could easily be higher. Are you doing this before a lot of other Chapter 1 sidequests? There's no hurry. Or have you burned a lot of money buying tons of books and schematics and such? They don't throw too much money at you but if you loot even half of what you come across and then not waste the money buying expensive stuff (more schematics than you need, expensive pre-made equipment, etc) you should be able to craft better armour. And yes, make sure you kill all the other endrega before fighting the Queen or it gets annoying. Sometimes a couple will pop up even after the Queen has spawned, just bring them down fast.

On Hard the Endrega Queen and a few other monsters have enough resistance to take negligible damage from fire-related signs/bombs/traps. On Easy, might be different.

The thing with Endregas is that the first few times I thought there was only one way to kill them - Yrden. But I found out you can get them with a variety of strategies, which is quite neat. (1) Yrden, or Cedric's traps. If you want to waste 15 minutes of your life collecting 30 of them then laying them down you can probably one-hit the Queen. (2) Quen then some careful rolling around, esp. if you have level 2 or 3 Quen (reflected damage). This isn't as boring as you'd think because the Queen has a fair variety of attacks including a lunge (which leaves it vulnerable to couple of strong attacks), and because you can pick the narrow areas of the forest to impair her movement. (3) Use lures and lure some random mosnters/elves to the Queen, so that the QUeen is distracted. I killed one Queen within 20 seconds when this worked particularly well, even on Hard. (4) Haven't tried this, but am wondering whether block & counterattack would also work with some talent investment in the relevant skills. Also, I nearly always use the Swallow + Rook combo for potions, achieving small bonus in damage and big bonus in health regen, then the purple oil thing on the sword for extra damage. Seriously, the game gives you a lot of options - of course the difficulty depends on how twitch-proficient you are, but if you are using the full array of traps, potions, bombs, talents and moves available every enemy has multiple ways to kill. I had huge trouble with the kayran in the first playthrough, I was amazed when I killed it in one go this time round. Using the and learning the talent that increases the distance of your rolls made a huge difference - I suspect there are other ways to build your Geralt up for the challenge, such as achieving Quen 2 or 3 for additional protection.

My bad. With th eopportunity to see the total branching in the middle of the game, good stuff. I don't think that much nonlinearity is really necessary or conducive to TW style games, but the content that is there is definitely good. Amusing to contrast the general attitude of the . Got to say that there's only one character who has really bad and annoying voice acting, and that's . Bloody holier than thou, stick up the arse. Fits the character, though.

Roche is awesome, but yes, the part where he lets is probably the one situation in TW2 that doesn't make a lot of sense. If you ask him he explains that he was but still. I have AUS GOG version, a couple of minor mods that don't disturb the packages, and Troll Trouble, but the patch worked all the same. For most cases though, it seems to make sense to restore your game to the original state then patch.

Yep, some people seem to be having troubles with 1.1. Mine worked flawlessly - though not much difference in performance, since my PC shouldn't be able to run it to begin with.

Odd, SCS shouts should have lured that whole group, along with the mage, when you fought the guards at the very start of that level. (Which makes it a glorious clusterfrack where your AOEs can do genocidal damage, but also where it's hard to dodge the mage's spells.) I'd advise using potions of invisibility on characters with fireball potions to hit the mage, or, if you can survive for 2-3 turns, casting dispell then web.

I see scrolls of it around, but I don't know if that's a result of my BGTutu & mods.

True, but generally you don't really feel the forest is the 'dangerous domain of the scoiatael that townies fear to venture to', apart from the odd peasant corpse. And I thought that particular quest had potential but was ultimately disappointing - Consistently, the scoiatael are the Other and they are often made largely invisible, only appaering when they have to. Hoping I get to see more of them properly in Chapter 2, as I will .

I'm assuming what Virumor means is going around collecting them all then laying them out again. Of course, if you're going to waste that much time picking them up then laying them down for an encounter... Noticing more how there are bands of scoiatael wandering the woods then getting into fights with monsters (though the monsters keep winning all the time), which is a nice element to have in addition to traps and such. Would have been nice to have one or two scripted scoiatael encounters too, though.

I don't mind if they develop console versions, as long as the game is good. Consolisation is only ever a problem when it downgrades a game. TW2 certainly could have done with a few UI optimisations, but it's nowhere as annoying as, say, Oblivion. Realised that some monsters of different types fight each other - used a lure object to Awesome.

I'll try the insane ironman difficulty but only when I upgrade, so I get more than 8fps. Though bloody hell, the Kayren would be the gamestopper 99% of the time. My save folder is 2.88gb :D

TW2. But then, I wouldn't touch any of the games you mentioned except Amnesia.

You really want to see "Let's Play: The Witcher II, in the Lowest Settings Possible"? pmp - I can't say for the cancer reference since I've never seen it in my game. Suffice to say that I agree it's a silly and unnecessary line to insert, but I think it's blown way out of proportion, and one or two comments like this definitely doesn't break down the verisimilitude... especially given we have mutagens and the like.

That they know about cell mutation has nothing to do with being able to understand and control it at the level of bio-weaponry. Nothing in TW2 suggests that they have a comprehensive understanding of biology that is analogous to post-18th century development of related scientific knowledge in our own world. I agree that Triss' line about the kayran is pretty silly, but mainly because it pulls in Darwin and such. A pseudo-medieval fantasy world where sorceress uses magic to probe inside the makeup of various creatures and enact purposeful mutations for desired effects? No problem with them knowing about mutation or the existence of cells. Besides which, the world of TW2 makes it pretty clear that this kind of partial knowledge sorceresses have is not exactly listened to or filtered down to institutionalised development of scientific endeavours in the kingdoms of the North. Going from that dialogue line to an expectation of full-fledged modernity is nonsense.

You think bashing each other with swords and knowledge of cell mutation are mutually exclusive? Are we seriously assuming modernity is a linear process that happens in the same package that the West happened to go through historically, and it can't happen in different ways in, I don't know, a fantasy world with magic? The 'science' stuff gets mentioned like 3 times in the game anyway.

We've definitely seen a variety of environments, but few of them have impressed me either as particularly good looking, or creative. For instance, the foundry area that we are told is a cool steampunk-ish mix of things is... your classic lava-filled cave with metal railings that you find in a million other platformers. The city area you walk through just before that is a generic medieval town. The haunted mansion/dungeon place is again a typical blue-tinted affair. I'd be pleased to be proven wrong when we can see the full extent of the variety, but yeah, the only part of DS3's visuals that I've really liked so far is the animations and the beautiful lighting effects. We've also seen this in the preview videos, too. The game looks polished and smooth when you're playing but the dialogue portions look rough and subpar. That said, again - that's not part of the core ARPG experience. I'm mainly pleased to hear that the combat is smooth and the dungeons are interesting.

Sounds like it delivers that main, core experience very very well, but isn't too great outside of that. Suits me. What you really need in an ARPG like this is well designed, appropriately challenging combat, a robust loot & skill development setup and good dungeon design - all of which are getting the ticks. The point about environment/landscape not being so great sounds about right, I thought what we saw of that in the videos were pretty routine and generic. As long as we don't get an AP situation again where hordes of people come expecting a nonlinear sandbox party-based RPG adventure...

Yeah, the Flotsam 'double gates' between town square and Lobinden is a great example of how it does things - even on my piss poor system, actual loading screens or loading hangs are few and far between. It's certainly better than Oblivion was at release with an equally substandard system, where you'd get random loading hijinks at random points running around. In Chapter 1 now, choosing different options at every opportunity to try and see all the content. Enjoyed what happens when you try and attack Roche during the interrogation. I suspect that there won't be that much C&C, being at heart a story-driven and fairly guided experience, but what they do have there is cool. edit: btw, for those who haven't seen it yet, good list of mods. I use zero weight and faster item description scrolling (which really was terrible in vanilla, waiting 20 seconds to preview a formula). Otherwise, half of them are just 'easy cheats', but we'll see.

Ring of Animal Control perhaps? Wand of Paralysis also works well, but yes, that's about the time when you pretty much phase out Sleep. Personally I'd ditch Xan.

There is a perk - Strong Back - which you seem to gain if you . I might be wrong though. I'm using the no weight mod - one thing that really pleases me about TW2 is how you don't end up with a boatload of cash even at the endgame. Cash is always fairly hard to come by, and then they always offer you neat things to sink. We'll see if that changes this time round. Certainly the game has become a lot easier now I'm familiar - first time round I found the stealth part in the prologue awkward and too hard, always getting caught, but this time - well, the controls are still clunky but I'm getting through just fine. Also saw the first big branching - . Very different.

It's Fable, what did you expect? It's kind of funny how the series has turned out - many of its overarching design philosophies are complete bonkers and as a 'proper RPG' it's an idiotic mess, but through that it also achieves some side effects that can be a pretty good source fo enjoyment for a fairly diverse group of gamers, e.g. female 'non-gamers' that just enjoy the freedom and customisation a la Sims in a world that is just serious enough to be immersive but not enough to feel gamey. It's like a comedy of errors from one perspective, but it's also hard to deny it's been a success in some ways.

You can get up to 5 Vigor through the use of talents - you can get 3 vigor pretty early in chapter 1 as well, as its part of the general tree. I do agree that blocking is too weak compared to rolling like a maniac at the moment, theres a skill that makes you use a lot less vigor when blocking and also let you counter, but still. In my personal experience doors were probably the worst bug/rough edge and the only thing to really bother me - I can understand they use them as a 'trick' to handle area transitions, but they are annoying.

Virumor it sounds like everything about it is rubbing you the wrong way at the moment. Obviously I'm biased because I'm in love with the game, but really those are small grapes. In the grand scheme of things calling TW2 a buggy mess is nonsense. But yes, you only start with Aerondight depending on the imported save - otherwise you lose your only silver sword, then you don't have one starting Chapter 1 until you get yourself one one way or the other. This time I was paranoid and equipped the starting silver sword before the dragon scene, which the cutscene then proceeded to lose for me, and I still have Aerondight. I mean, it would be more frustrating if your imported bonus sword was your only silver sword, and was taken away after the prologue (where you never use it).