Chasing a Different Tale

Last night was one of those nights where I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I burned the shit out of my hand while making dinner, so after that I sat down to a relaxing evening of retreating ground I very recently visited. I decided to restart Witcher 2 since there are very binary path options that you take through the three chapter journey that I am imagining lead to very different experiences. In the last play through I followed the non-human path and this time around I am going to follow Vernon Roche and see where that leads me. The first time playing I was very much in a rush to see the story, and this time I am wandering around a bit more and exploring all of the side quest options.

My eighteen or so hour play through of the game focused largely on the golden path. I did very little but the main story quests and as a result it was a very short experience. Now I am letting myself chill out a bit and especially now that I understand the lay of the land and the interface of this game the entire experience feels more enjoyable. A lot of the first play through was trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing given that the mini-map system does not exactly give you high quality advisement and messaging. There is a sameness to a lot of the textures and as a result the objects you are looking for to interact with don’t really appear obvious most of the time. I wish there was a fix for the whole having to wait until combat is over before you can begin interacting with things again.

The armor I am wearing in this shot always makes me feel like Beetlejuice. I’ve already made enough different choices to have seen a number of different things in the prologue, so I am really looking forward to watching this first chapter play out. If you are playing Witcher 2 and noticing that my screenshots look way better than the game on your screen, there is a reason for that. About halfway through my first play through I decided to venture forth onto Nexus Mods and look to see what tweaks were available. As it stands I have two different mods installed and I will talk a little bit about both of them.

Better Texture Environment: Enhanced Edition

This is the big one that replaces a good number of textures in the game for higher fidelity alternatives. I swiped one of those before and after comparison images from Nexus mods so you can see the sort of effect the changes have on the game. Prior to the patch playing in higher resolutions made everything feel blurry for lack of a better term. Afterwards the objectives are way easier to pick out because everything feels more in focus and detailed. If you do nothing else than I highly suggest taking the time to download this almost 800 meg archive.

Zero Weight Mod

One of the constructs of games that I hate the most is item weight and encumbrance. If given the option I will remove this from the game because the last thing I want to be doing is playing the game of carefully trying to keep under some number. For some people this adds enjoyment and realism but for me… it just makes me want to curse and throw things. As a result when I noticed a mod that simply goes through the item catalog and sets the weight of every single item to zero… I was completely on board. Now I can loot until my heart is content and just not care at all about trying to keep under some number on my stat page.

The only other mod that really interests me is one that allows for the dismantling of all of your junk items to get raw resources. A number of the mods available are among the more cosmetic variety, adding and removing hoods from armor sets that either have or don’t have them, making Geralt look more like the character from Witcher 3, and of course a truly nonsense number of nude mods because Nexus Mods is apparently thirsty as hell. The two I listed however have greatly improved my enjoyment of the experience and installing mods for Witcher 2 is pretty straight forward. You simply find your Witcher install and look for the “CookedPC” directory and then extract the downloaded files into that. I didn’t bother with a Mod Manager, but I did make a back up of this directory before starting.

I admit when I first tried to play this game I was none too certain of what I thought about it. However now that I have played through it once I am beginning to appreciate the simplicity of it. It is a very straight forward experience and is likely a much better starting point in the Witcher universe than jumping straight into the 3rd game. Witcher 3 deluges you with choices and as a result I bounced from it originally just because there was too much going on and too many things I had no clue about. Witcher 2 still uses the veil of Geralt still having amnesia to do a better job of introducing characters and concepts, whereas Wild Hunt just sorta expects you to have played all of the games and read all of the books to understand the context of what is going on.

I think my next goal after having played both paths is to decide which one I liked better and import that save into Witcher 3 and replay that game.