TW2 Playthrough: Uncle!

Hours In: 5
Character Level: 4
My Score: 75 (Paused)
Metacritic Score: 92 (no change)
Player Score: 90 (no change)

Boy do I suck at The Witcher 2. In fact, for the sake of my dignity - not to mention my sanity - I'm shelving the game for the time being. How bad is it? I had to turn the Difficulty down to Easy and repeatedly check online spoilers just to make it through the Prologue. I've heard the game actually gets easier from here, but I found the sequence immediately after the Prologue to be even more frustrating.

Mercy, please.

TW2 Playthrough: This is not a CRPG

Hours In: 4
Character Level: 2
My Score: 75 (-10)
Metacritic Score: 92 (-2)
Player Score: 90 (no change)

Good news. Installing the new beta NVIDIA driver has solved the worst of my technical difficulties, freeing me up to, you know, actually play the game. I still have the lip-flapping issue in conversations and some mouse lag on certain UI screens, but performance is fine when I'm actually running around in the game world.

Now that I'm playing the game as it was intended to be played, I can offer my initial impressions. In my search for answers to my performance issues, I've come across a lot of other opinions about the game, and I think the critique I would offer fits with a lot of the complaints. It's early and I could easily change my opinion later, but here is what may be my final take on The Witcher 2:

While the game is everything one could have hoped for artistically, it's decidedly not an old-school CRPG. When CD Projekt RED said the game was "designed with console in mind," they weren't kidding. Anyone who was horrified by the direction of Dragon Age 2 ought to be downright mortified by TW2.

Despite being vaguely aware of the "console" quote, I was taken off guard by this myself. In my joke post comparing DA2 and TW2, I had TW2 whispering to PC players that it wouldn't "be thinking of other people when I'm with you." In fact, TW2 is not only thinking of other people, but screaming their names out. And those names are "Xbox" and "PS3."

TW2 Playthrough: Technical difficulties

Hours In: 1 
Character Level: 1
My Score: 85 (no change)
Metacritic Score: 94
Player Score: 90 (-1)

What a battle! And no, I'm not talking about the opening sequence of The Witcher 2 (though that's pretty good too). I'm talking about my efforts to get the game running properly on my low-end system.

Initially the biggest issue was mouse lag, which simply made selecting anything annoying. I followed the advice of an anonymous reader out there and disabled Vertical Sync. That seems to have helped (thanks for that, Anonymous).

Now the only obvious glitch is that character lip-flapping is out of sync with dialogue. Plus there are some awkward pauses in conversation that don't seem to be intentional. Overall, not a big deal.

The real problem is combat. Specifically, I don't get the sense that I have much control over what happens in battle. I just mash buttons as Geralt spins out of control while getting stabbed from all directions. I'm not sure how much of this is due to lag based on technical issues with my system (and/or problems with NVIDIA cards that have been reported), how much is my own lack of skill, and how much is due to the funkiness of combat system itself. Whatever the case, I'm going to have to figure something out if I'm going to continue.

And I really would like to continue. I joked about the opening battle, but seriously, it's impressive. There's a level of authenticity to it - from the simple ways the soldiers interact to the towering siege weapons - that's unprecedented in RPGs. It makes Dragon Age 2's Battle of Ostagar look like a minor skirmish.

TW2 Playthrough: Baseline expectations

Hours In: 0
Character Level: N/A
My Score: 85 (Baseline)
Metacritic Score: N/A
Player Score: 91

Today is the day when we begin to find out if the hype is justified. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is out, and as I did with Dragon Age 2, I thought I'd record my impressions as I play through the presumptive RPG of the Year.

But before I click Launch game for the first time, let's once again record my expectations at the start so we can see how they change over time. I'm not the type of person to read a lot of preview articles, so some of my impressions could be flat-out wrong. That was certainly the case with DA2, and I knew a lot more about that game than I do about TW2 (thanks to the demo and the Bioware forums). In other words, don't take these impressions as factual statements. Finding out where I'm wrong is half the fun of this exercise.

As before, I'll be recording the Metacritic score with each post. There are only three reviews listed right now (90, 95, and 100), so this time I've started early enough to track any trends in the score over time. This time around, I'm also tracking the User Score from Metacritic to see if players have a different opinion than critics.

All right. Here are the things I expect to be the positives and negatives of TW2.