Witcher 2

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.

• Mod Link from Nexus Mods

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.

• Mod Link from Nexus Mods

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.

Last night I finished my first play through of Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings and I have to say I rather enjoyed myself. As compared to the Witcher 3 it was a vastly different sort of game, and as a result any direct comparison is somewhat difficult. Witcher 3 is this gigantic open world experience that has you tackle tasks in whatever order you want, with significant freedom to keep going back and revisiting areas without never truly feeling you are done there. Witcher 2 on the other hand in comparison is super linear and is comprised of Prologue, 3 Acts, and an Epilogue each effectively containing a boxed area that once you have passed can no longer be explored.

Each one of these “gates” when crossed forces the player to make some rather world changing decisions, in that you are effectively going down a very different path because of them. As a result I am deeply considering seeing what the other major path structure would look like, because at the end of Act 1 you are asked to choose someone to ally with and as I understand it this kicks off a very different Act 2 and Act 3 depending on the choice. I enjoyed the act greatly because it was deeply focused on the plight of the non-humans, but the other path also involves some characters that I greatly enjoyed interacting with in Witcher 3. To be honest when I did the “simulate choices” option at the beginning of the third game I was mostly just making decisions without knowing what they meant.

I mostly just powered through the main story, because there is a not insignificant amount of tedium in doing the side quests for Witcher 2. Now had I played this game at the appropriate time when it represented one of the best possible experiences I could be playing… I would have probably gobbled up every side adventure. Playing it now and seeing how much better Witcher 3 does at presenting a world with interesting side stories, it more or less ruined the experience for me. The game however is still very much worth playing to present you with the story behind events that will ultimately resolve in the third game.

I made another attempt last night to get into the original Witcher game and even after installing a pack that supposedly fixes and tweaks a bunch of stuff I found the experience miserable. There is another mod out there that re-balances combat, but it does so in a manner I have no interest in trying. My hope was that it would take away the weird hold to attack and then play whack-a-mole system, but instead it just appears to make everything harder. Again this is a situation of if I had managed to play this around the time it was released, I might have been able to get used to it. Now however it just feels bad and my brain rebels against it every time I try and force myself to experience it.

I am guessing that CD Project Red understands how frustrating the first game is because at some point they released the above video as a recap. I guess I will accept that this is the only version of the original game that I will be experiencing. One of my favorite parts of Witcher 2 is when they show one of Geralt’s memories rendered in this same art style. So I am perfectly okay with watching that same animation style summarize the original game. The second game however is perfectly playable and I am really wishing I had started there instead of just picking up with the 3rd game. So were I to update my advice on how best to get into this series…

1. Watch the Netflix Series – while this deviates from the novels a bit based on my experience so far, it does give you a pretty good primer into the world of The Witcher and will at least allow you to understand some of the core conflicts.
2. Watch the Above Recap of Witcher 1 – you may not be as turned off by the original game, but the above recap video gives you enough detail to understand the events at the beginning of Witcher 2.
3. Play Witcher 2 – while it feels like an older style of game experience it is still very much a good game. There are UI quirks that I wrote about in another post, but if you can get past them the game and story and world are rich enough to keep you engaged. Also it is fairly easy to golden path this game and only care about the main story beats.
4. Play Witcher 3 – then of course import your Witcher 2 save into Witcher 3 and have a continuation of the world state you left in the second game. Once I determine which path I like better I am probably going to do this and play through the 3rd game again.

I’m also still working my way through the novels. I finished Last Wish last night and made it about three chapters into Sword of Destiny last night. I believe I am following the suggested reading order as Last Wish and Sword of Destiny are both effectively a bunch of short stories about Geralt’s adventures and also appear to be what the Netflix series is heavily drawing upon. Blood of Elves follows up next and begins the first of the proper novels. I am not entirely sure why I am seemingly so obsessed right now, but I am enjoying myself and am just going to roll with it for the time being.

I continue to slowly prod my way through the Witcher 2. This was probably an excellent game when it came out in 2011, but it has not aged terribly well. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the ways that the original Mass Effect just felt outdated and a little cludgy. The prime example of this is that too many things are tied to left clicking on objects, and often times your intent gets lost in the shuffle. Left and right click are both attacks in this game, and when you are in combat that takes precedence over anything else as it probably should. However lighting torches, opening doors, and looting bodies are all also tied to the left click action meaning that you can’t do ANY of these things while in combat. In practice this also means that more or less items don’t show up as lootable until you have been out of combat for a bit, meaning you have to keep retracing your steps to make sure you didn’t miss something interesting.

A lot of these problems can be summed up as this game being built before we had somewhat agreed upon what the ideal user interface was for this sort of game. We had some of these same problems upon playing Tron 2.0 for the AggroChat game club because it had a bunch of non-standard controls from an era before “FPS Game Controls” had effectively been codified and universalized between all games. The thing that kills me the most is the absense of a standard “confirm” button or options for selecting dialog choices with number keys. This means I am constantly moving between keyboard and mouse in a deeply uncomfortable way. While you can hit Spacebar to loot all items, you can’t hit the space bar to accept a crafting prompt for example and have to instead hit the enter key, but not the one on the numpad.

Another oddity is that you can see all of your patterns that you can craft in the inventory system, but can’t actually do anything with them there. Instead there is a completely different UI that is accessed by holding down the control key and shown two screenshots above… then you have to click the center symbol to go into another menu with no hotkey available. From there you have to go into yet another menu for Alchemy which finally allows you to brew a potion or make a bomb. There is no reason why this functionality could not have been accessed off of the inventory screen since that is already loaded with a bunch of other information.

All of this just drives home how important user interface and user experience design is in a video game. We have evolved to the point of having a pretty standard template, and when a game doesn’t follow that logic it feels bad to play it. This is ultimately the biggest challenge about dipping too deeply into the back catalog of games that came out in the 2000-2012 era of games, because we were still sorta figuring out how these games should work on the PC without a controller. For all I know this might all go away and end up as a very smooth experience with a controller equipped, but that is not my default method of play and not something I naturally gravitate towards.

I am super thankful that by the time Witcher 3 rolled around all of these user experience problems had been ironed out. Yet again it is a scenario where I am hoping that eventually, much like they have started to do for Elder Scrolls Games… that someone will come through and do a mod that effectively recreates the first two games in the Witcher 3 engine. Erxv1 recreated the entire Witcher 1 Prologue for the Witcher 3 engine and it is available over on Nexus Mods. Unfortunately I am certain this took a massive amount of work, and came together largely because all of the needed assets were readily available in Witcher 3. It would take a lot more effort to recreate entire games, but god I would love to see it.