Still going to play it though, I'm more interested in the combat for the second, since I like the other elements of the game a fair bit. Also...the trailer for Witcher 3 is fuckin' gold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr-DKyAVU34
Its bascially a action adventure style of combat think of something like devil may cry, or tomp raider with swords but completly utterly shit. Its difficulty comes from beeing half broken, not because its a decent challenge like dark souls You have ZERO control over your character in w2, the controlls are so wonky and slow it is freaking rediculous that they thought: Yep this is going to work. -You are locked in animations, long anoying animations -Dodge has a delay means you have to dodge some attacks bevor they start... -Enemies hit you at random you can be outside of the reach of someone and he still bleed stacks you. The models dont represent what really happens -The hitboxes are completly fucked up too -blocking randomly doesnt work for no reason -some enemies can block even with no animation -if an enemy recovers from a hit, like standing up hes invincible The combat system only "works" because almost any encounter is stubidly easy even on the hardest difficulty. Expet some bossfights that show you how fucked up the whole thing actually is. Yeah I started to play it because I wanted to buy w3 when it gets released. Dont play it because of the combat, first you think it has depth but after you managed the basics you can run through any normal encounter by just spamming mouse1 and 2. The graphics are awesome like really really atmospheric and good, I also liked the setting with its more or less believable cloth and armor. Makes it more grounded than those wacky 3 meter shoulder designs of other games. The problem is that their are huge cock block moments in form of retadedly scripted boss fights in the game that can completly ruin you game experience because you need to win those to actually enjoy atmosphere and story. First bossfight forces you to memorize and die till you got the sequence of moves nailed down to win it. You can still die if you do it perfect because the fucked up hitbox of that encounter can instakill you for no reason. Second boss is just a joke, you can win it by skilling the right stuff (which means you have to know that fight iin advance) and abuse a broken skill OR you make shit tons of throwing weapons bevor the fight happens and stunlock him in the recovery animation with those. What you dont do is actually using the combat system to overcome the bosses.
You have more control over the fight, I don't care waht you say. In W1 you'd get locked into the moves in each sequence whereas in W2 you channel together single strikes. About your list, the first point makes it so that your hits actually have some weight to them. You're not a mosquito, dammit. As for the rest, I haven't played enough to notice or care. W1 story is good imo, but the game itself has a problem where act one is fun, acts 2 and 3 are grindy to get through (if you try to 100% it), act 4 is okay until halfway through, and the rest is awesome too. That was my impression, at least. And the reason it was so hard for me to get a proper hard difficulty savegame for W2.
No point discussing anything with that attitude but let me say this, you didnt play much. I said that the game is piss easy and makes you feel like you can control the flow of the fight till you face one of the difficulty spikes in the game that show you how much it actually sucks. In w1 you had complete control over the fight, I didnt like the system but you could always win fights by planning ahead. W2 on the other hand removes any planing by having multibe animations for each attack with different length. Means you hit a button and it can take between half and 2 seconds bevor you can actually do anything else. Theirs no way you can forsee which attack the game chooses. You will realize how broken that is when you face a boss that can take half your hp with one swing (and yes I did skill every HP increasing skill) of his sword while you only chip away one pixel with your hardest attack. Beeing locked into an attack animation because the game has choosen the longest one equals game over in that situation.
Say what you want about thier games, CD projekt is a good studio compared to the other assholes out there selling games.
Mayama ,are you.. bitching about realism? Like seriously, about the fact that the game doesnt have invinciblity frames? For one, it always pissed me off hoow every game with a dodge mechanic just makes you superman for a second. I for one am ok with how in this game you cant just roll into a giant tentacle and be okay. And the game is not THAT unresponsive. I played it when it came out and on a shitty pc where it lagged. And i call bs on kraken. How hard is "lay a trap on the ground and nail the tentacle"? the only gay part of the fight is that there is a QTE after getting the last one, and if are caugh off guard, you have to redo the whole thing. Besides, you are full of it regarding w1 as well, besides the rare "lol stun you dead" it was way easier than 2, mostly because of how broken the aard and group style were, with 3 or more enemies you were doing more damage than single styles on appropriate enemies.
The problem is that you have to dodge bevor the enemy makes an attack because the delay between hitting the button and actually dodging is way to long. Enemies get invincibility frames you dont. The thing that pissed me off about the tentacle was that you still get hit by it even if you stand like 2 meters away from it hitting the ground.
If I could step on the ground hard enough to throw things into the air I'd sure as hell damage more things than just the things I stepped on. Again, I haven't played the Kraken fight, but I probably will one day.
Funny thing is that when you first go scout the place of future bossfight, you get ambushed by like 20 undead watery dudes. Easily harder than the bossfight itself. Have no immediate plan and you are deader than disco faster than you can say "saturday nigh he~