[dragonbird]

I'm puzzled about the references to the Kayran. Yes, plenty of people probably went outside the game to find out how to kill it, and there's no harm in that, but the game did give you all of the information you needed. You get told about the kayran trap and about the mongoose potion, and you get Sile yelling at you to use Yrden. OK, so you may die a few (dozen) times working out exactly how to use Yrden and how to handle the QTE, but the information was there.

I also hope they don't dumb-down, but have confidence in CDPR. You are SUPPOSED to die a few times in boss fights in your first playthrough, otherwise how can you feel any achievement when you finally beat it? You are SUPPOSED to have to explore everywhere, and talk to everyone, otherwise why bother having a world to explore in the first place? I expect to get my money's worth out of a game, and that means I don't want to be able to finish it in 20 hours by blindly following instructions given to me by my computer.

The troll's head isn't exactly inconspicuous. I would expect that at least half the players would have seen it before even getting that far in the quest.

[saintmagician]

I think some people like trail and error, or searching for stuff on their own. Some people don't.

When I feel like doing stuff like that, I play a puzzle game. Or a game with puzzle elements. That's not the reason I play games like TW2.

Of course, I don't mind the current state of things, I just have the game running on one window and the wiki up on another monitor. Obviously this is not a solution that'll work for everyone.

The problem with dumbed down clues is this... Yes the journal article gives a VERY obvious clue about what you should use to kill nekker nests. However, the journal article gives a lot of other little bits of information about little things in the witcher world, which are not clues used for quests. In other words, people end up assuming the journal is 'flavor' only until something like this happens.



The thing is, most of the poeple playing this game aren't new gamers who stare at everything with wonder and think about whether or not it's a clue to something and role play "in character". No, most of us are seasoned gamers who have already been conditioned to a lot of the common game mechanics. One of them for RPGs is, puzzles are clearly delimited and marked out as puzzles. Other times, clear guidance should be provided for quests.

[Zanderat]

bowman said:

snip...... ›››

My issue with a console version, too. LOL! I remember the Oblivion forums where the Konsole Kids thought OB was too hard....... Can't wait for more of these types of posts when the Xbox version comes along.

Please CDPR, stick to your guns! No dumbing down of the TW series.

[Zanderat]

saintmagician said:

One of them for RPGs is, puzzles are clearly delimited and marked out as puzzles. Other times, clear guidance should be provided for quests. ›››

Just no. TW2 got it right. Hints without being obvious. I prefer that "puzzles" be a part of the game world without sticking out like a ore thumb and killing immersion.

[saintmagician]

I thought the puzzles were fairly obviously eliminated. You'd enter a room and there were runes, or torches, etc. Can't think of a puzzle that wasn't clearly separated.

However, that was a statement about the general state of RPGs.

[dragonbird]

If a quest instruction is explicit - go see this person, or go to this place, then the map should (and usually does) tell you where it is. But if the quest is to "seach for this item/place/nest of nekkers" then I think it's pretty much expected that you should have to find it yourself, and do some good old-fashioned RPG exploring.

[Zanderat]

saintmagician said:

I thought the puzzles were fairly obviously eliminated. You'd enter a room and there were runes, or torches, etc. Can't think of a puzzle that wasn't clearly separated.

However, that was a statement about the general state of RPGs. ›››

Agreed. I just think that thanks to the likes of Fable and DA2, the Xbox crowd is gonna flood the forums with similar complaints.

[dragonbird]

Zanderat said:

Agreed. I just think that thanks to the likes of Fable and DA2, the Xbox crowd is gonna flood the forums with similar complaints. ›››

Have you been in the Steam forum in the last couple of days? Your fears may be justified. I just hope CDPR doesn't give in to the pressure.

[slimgrin]

They should just flood the Xbox version with tutorial markers, pop-up tips, etc, so there is absolutely no ambiguity or guess work as to what the player needs to do next.

[Zanderat]

dragonbird said:

Have you been in the Steam forum in the last couple of days? Your fears may be justified. I just hope CDPR doesn't give in to the pressure. ›››

I generally try to avoid that place.................

[Laivasse]

bowman said:

See, these are the kind of posts that get me anxious about TW3 getting dumbed down... *snip* ›››

I'm sure the OP appreciates your extremely condescending post but maybe you should take your own advice and READ the thread. His problem (with the Troll at least) was not that he needed to read a book to find out details about trolls, but that the Troll Trouble quest in the journal ends on a very vague hint when you are searching for the she-troll. When I did that quest, I spoke to every single NPC in Flotsam and literally only found out about the she-troll when I visited the house of the very last one. I didn't resent having to do that because I like being asked to investigate stuff, but I can understand why some people might find it frustrating, especially considering the contrast between Troll Trouble and other quests where the game holds your hand and tells you exactly where to go, whether you want it to or not.

TW2 is a great game but it has inconsistencies in its approach. Why, for example, make potion-drinking more difficult/tactical/realistic when Geralt still somehow has the unrealistic/cheap ability to sharpen his sword with a whetstone mid-fight? When you argue against it getting 'dumbed down', you're talking as if it is not already dumbed down - well let's say 'easy to grasp' - in so many other respects already. Trying to keep certain random elements of the game as awkward as possible just makes it confusing and frustrating, not challenging. Case in point: that Nekker quest. Without being told how many Nekker nests there are, an 'easy to grasp' quest counter pops up telling me that I have destroyed 0/4. Yet despite knowing (without being told) how many nests there are, Geralt has no idea where they are. That makes no sense, it's immersion breaking and unintuitive because I'm not sure whether I should go searching for the nests myself or whether I'm expected to ask the Alderman for the nest locations and get a pointer to show up, or what.

Furthermore there is absolutely no reason for monster info to reside in both the character sheet (where you can find the Nekker/grapeshot tip) and also in the Journal in a trimmed down useless version that says nothing about grapeshot. The 'Monsters' section in the journal is utterly redundant except for the fact that it has cute pictures.

So TW2's approach to helping the player could have done with some refinement, and refinement would not necessarily mean 'dumbing down'. There's no need to accuse new players of being console neanderthals just because they stumble over the unevenness of the system. TW2 is already dumbed down (if we are going to use that term), it just isn't dumbed down in a smooth and logical way.

[dragonbird]

I agree with a lot of your points, and they make sense. There are flaws, and refinement doesn't necessarily mean "dumbing down".

But back to Troll Trouble - after your first visit to the troll, your dialogue and the journal both say to talk to your friends/acquaintances in the area, not every NPC. That probably means a maximum of about six people. These dialogues tell you that it's going to be in clear view, and that you need to look in the houses in Lobinden. How many houses are there? Less than 10. It's already been made easy by narrowing it down to Lobinden.

Yes, some people will have problems with this, and yes, they should be comfortable with coming into forums and asking without getting condescending replies. But when it switches from "I'm stuck, how do I do this" to "I can't do this therefore the game sucks" I think there are grounds for concern that CDPR may actually listen to the feedback. And human nature dictates that it will also affect the tone of the responses given.

Two days ago there were multiple posts in Steam from someone who didn't understand basic gameplay, openly stated that he didn't like to read manuals, and posted every problem as a game bug. Maybe it's affected my views.

[Laivasse]

dragonbird said:

But back to Troll Trouble - after your first visit to the troll, your dialogue and the journal both say to talk to your friends/acquaintances in the area, not every NPC. That probably means a maximum of about six people. These dialogues tell you that it's going to be in clear view, and that you need to look in the houses in Lobinden. How many houses are there? Less than 10. It's already been made easy by narrowing it down to Lobinden.

That's true, you don't need to talk to every NPC. I was in the process of doing so anyway for completism's sake, after I spoke to Zoltan as directed, and it just so happened that the very last person I spoke to in town, in the very last house I checked for the quest, was the troll trophy guy. As it turns out, I missed the cue about Lobinden; I played with Polish audio and that's one part where the English dubtitles flash by very quickly. You lose the option to ask Zoltan a second time, though, and Lobinden isn't mentioned in the journal. So I was checking all the houses in Flotsam. If you haven't chanced upon the objective by that point you don't know how conspicuous it's supposed to be, or whether it's possible to make the mistake of passing it by without triggering the next quest phase, so I was inclined to double back and check houses I'd already been to, thereby dragging it out further.

Again, I'm not necessarily saying that quest should be simplified. If anything I'd like to see more like it, with most of the quest pointers and objective counters dropped in favour of hints given by NPCs, or natural sounding journal notes. It's just that Troll Trouble was so clearly developed with a more laissez faire attitude to minimap & journal help than the vast majority of the rest of the game's quests, so, as we agree, it's not right to jump on someone's back over it.

My larger point is basically that future The Witchers should either be thoroughly accessible (arrows and help on a consistent basis) or more hands off and naturalistic across the board (less intrusive UI, all info from NPCs instead of godly glowing arrows). I'd much prefer the latter, but if it's a mix of the two then people are liable to have confused expectations while playing and end up tripping over none too complex quests. Considering that OP was harking back to TW1, I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

[slimgrin]

I can't tell you how many lame quests in RPG's I've played that are too obvious. I say keep TW2 like it is; some quests get a pointer, others you have to figure out for yourself. Lobinden isn't huge, finding the right house isn't that hard. Finding the Nekker nests isn't that hard. I don't want a pointer for every quest, or the same design structure for every quest either. Then it becomes formula. CDPR is one of the few to mix things up and make it un-intuitive.

[saintmagician]

Quote

But back to Troll Trouble - after your first visit to the troll, your dialogue and the journal both say to talk to your friends/acquaintances in the area, not every NPC.

The trouble I had with that quest, was always not in this part, but in the part straight afterwards - to find the troll head.

Quote

I'm puzzled about the references to the Kayran. Yes, plenty of people probably went outside the game to find out how to kill it, and there's no harm in that, but the game did give you all of the information you needed. You get told about the kayran trap and about the mongoose potion, and you get Sile yelling at you to use Yrden.

I'll explain why I had problems with this.

I used the Kayran trap in my second playthrough, on hard, after I'd understood all the game mechanics, etc. It wasn't obvious how to use the trap. You can't just lay the trap down with the 'r' key like other traps, which I tried doing and took quite a few hits for. You had to walk up to the spots already marked, and a prompt comes up to either click or press a key (I don't remember). That prompt only comes up when the marker is centered on your screen (like the way the "open" prompt only comes up when you are close to a door). i.e. I noticed it appearing very briefly, and almost died a few times trying to position my camera right to get it to appear again. I only did this for completionist sake though, I'd already read that the Kayran trap wasn't worth it. But point being, was not obvious how to use it.

Yrden was almost just as bad. With no tutorial in the game, my first playthrough... by chapter 1 the only sign I'd really used was Quen. Aard a little, Igni was easy to understand. But I simply hadn't understood or worked out how to use Yrden and Axii. By second playthrough, "Use Yrden to trap tentacles" would have been very obvious