The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings ann.

A huge update to Witcher 2 is inbound from one of the games own designers. Combat has seen a complete rebalance from stats to brand new moves. It aims to tighten up a myriad of animations and add new ones. All for a game that’s over two years old. Respect.



The prominent modder, Andrzej Kwiatkowski, is currently working for CD Projekt as a gameplay designer. This mod was created during his spare time, whilst his day job was working on the Witcher 3. The update is due out within the next two weeks. I’m rather glad I put off playing Witcher 2 until now.

Here’s the patch notes, prepare yourself:

GENERAL CHANGES

Up to 80% increase in responsivness per Geralt's animations.

Up to 50% increase in repsonsivness per NPCs animations.

Added strafing while being locked on an enemy and walking.

Geralt can block while moving ( NEW ANIMATIONS ). Static Guard Stance is no longer required to parry enemy attacks.

Geralt automatically parries enemy sword attacks and deflects incoming arrows.

Geralt and his attackers are no longer bouncing off parry. It allows to continue attack sequence.

Monster attacks still cannot be parried with a sword.

While using Guard Stance Geralt channels an active Quen shield.

Above listed changes to defence mechanics decreased importance of rolling in combat.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Decreased the number of skill to ensure quality over quantity.

Geralt now starts with core witcher skills already learned. No need to go through Training tree before unlocking other branches.

Removed many passives from skill tree to replace them with more active abilities. Remaining passives are changed to make them more attractive.

All skills now have one level ( previously 2 ).

Aard and Igni Signs have been changed from projectile to cone area of effect.

Riposte doesn't require Guard Stance to activate, only attacking in a timed window.

Changed riposte animations ( NEW ANIMATIONS, DUH ) to prevent Geralt from sliding on enemies.

Experience points are given only for progressing through quests, not for killing enemies. This encourages role-playing without worrying about missing experience.

Geralt no longer buys witcher specific recipies from random merchants. He recalls lost memories as a part of character development.

BALANCE

Each enemy is balanced according to his constitution, combat skill, combat style, weapon and armor type. Following this pattern allowed to created consistent rules that every character follows. A barechested bandit won't survive more hits than a knight in platemail just because the bandit was encountered later in game.

Decreased the disproportion in stats between starting equipment and late game equipment.

Moved the weight of character power from equipment to character development. Learned skills should have as big impact on Geralt's badass factor as items.

Geralt's armors are split into 4 categories: leather jackets, heavy leather jackets, combat jackets and heavy combat jackets. Heavier armors impose small damage penalty on Geralt. Players need to choose between max damage and protection.

Items imported from The Witcher savegames are of the same quality as in the first game. An exceptional armor and weapon remains valuable. This makes the game easier, but it is an intentional reward.

Set elixirs and oils duration to 1 hour.

Added potion overdose and heavy overdose debuffs on toxicity thresholds 55 and 65.

Removed Fatigue penalty that decreased sword damage and damage reduction on block when Vigor was spent on Signs or Parry. It discouraged some players from using Signs becaused it decreased Geralt's sword DPS.

NPCs deal full damage to other NPCs.

Removed 50% Hit Points condition for throwing enemy off height with Aard.

Decreased Riposte damage multiplier to 1.0, but added 30% enemy parry chance debuff.

Riposte no longer costs Vigor.

Silver throwing daggers are considered as silver weapons for damage calculations against monsters.

Inceneration, Bleeding and Poisoning effects are allowed to be active at the same time.

Made quest experience rewards more consistent. There are no longer any situations where player is rewarded with 50 experience points for one quests and 2000 for another.

Made moral choices in quests equally rewarding in terms of experience and items. Players should be encouraged more to role-play instead of weighing quest rewards.

Geralt gains knowledge about monsters faster.

Changed rewards for gaining knowledge about monsters to monster specific oils for swords.

Set minimal damage dealt by Geralt to zero ( was 5 ).

Removed bonus damage for backstabs.

Finally soaked boots in tutorial weigh more than dry boots!!

ECONOMY

Decreased the number of armors and weapons present in game. Amount of equipment is adjusted to provide smoother item progression without making huge amount of items useless stat-wise.

Weapons and armors that are present in the game were picked according to these rules: visual differentiation, witcher low level magic setting. Some items available in game assets but not used in original game were reintroduced.

Moved more quality items from quest rewards to shops and distributed them among Chapters. Player should be encouraged to regulary spend money in shops.

Decreased buying cost of swords and armors. Player should be able to buy items more often, not hoard money.

Decreased amount of loot dropped from enemies.

Removed some of the junk items from container definitions.

Made vendors specialize in certain type of merchandize.

Witcher specific recipies cannot be bought but also cannot be sold to merchants.

VISUALS

Added Focused Combat Stance. Geralt enters focused state during challenging encounters.

While in Focused Stance Geralt performs piruettes ( NEW ANIMATION ) instead of rolling and uses Guard Stance idle animation.

Enemies explode when killed by mage spells. Does not apply to witcher Signs - they are not that powerful.

Made finisher animations which use Signs unlocked by upgrading Aard and Igni in character development.

Removed cutscene swords. Geralt will use his currently equipped sword in all cutscenes.

Equipped enemies with swords according to their social status, wealth and current situation in the game. For example, soldiers patrolling areas near ghost fog in Act 2 are equipped with silver swords like the story suggests.

Decreased camera shake effect used on each step of huge creatures like trolls and golems.

Removed green cloud effect from enemy poisoning FX.

FIXES

Tweaked anim events in all combat animations to improve timings and responsivness.

Fixed sword oils not providing bonus damge against monsters.

Fixed Circle of Power: Endurance giving Circle of Power: Vitality bonus.

Fixed a bug where Geralt was always doing 2 more steps after roll before stopping.

OTHER

Changed item rarity names to reflect witcher's low level magic setting. Items are no longer MAGICAL and EPIC.

Decreased attacked enemy importance for targetting to make switching enemies easier.

Many, many other changes that were required to make features listed above work.
 
Is this going to be auto-deployed as an official patch via the game's launcher, or is it optional and we need to DL it separately?
 
Yeah their website is barely functional right now. I'll wait until later tonight :)
 
It's weird that it's an unofficially supported officially created patch/mod. I look forward to playing TW2 with it.
 
Tried to play with the combat mod last night. The 'automatic' blocking when not attacking is pretty buggy. You have to be neutral for what seems like a full 1-2 seconds before you enter the blocking stance. Basically just enough time to get nailed when your fighting more then one opponent.

He also changed it so that when you hit the block button you do not block - you cast Quen. That also seems buggy....half the time I would cast my active spell instead of Quen.

I thought I saw in the patch notes that he enabled lock-on strafing. I guess not, but it sure would help the feel of combat. Coming off of Dark Souls to this is pretty painful.
 
He also changed it so that when you hit the block button you do not block - you cast Quen. That also seems buggy....half the time I would cast my active spell instead of Quen.

Holy shit this is annoying! I am glad I am not the only one who noticed. I simply cannot use this mod because of this.
 
ugh, not sure what to think. I tried playing the tutorial to reacquaint myself with the controls, but could not get past the riposte section. Right now I do not know if this is going to be usable. They also nuked monster xp, guess there will not be any more grinding....

EDIT: so there are some doubts that this will work with the steam version. the mod says is requires 3.4. The patcher folder shows a 2.0.
I tried combat in the arena, no automatic parry at all. consensus appears to be that has disappeared. this was after playing up to the stone golems, so everything in the combat trees was unlocked
 
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ugh, not sure what to think. I tried playing the tutorial to reacquaint myself with the controls, but could not get past the riposte section. Right now I do not know if this is going to be usable. They also nuked monster xp, guess there will not be any more grinding....

EDIT: so there are some doubts that this will work with the steam version. the mod says is requires 3.4. The patcher folder shows a 2.0.
I tried combat in the arena, no automatic parry at all. consensus appears to be that has disappeared. this was after playing up to the stone golems, so everything in the combat trees was unlocked

Riposte is totally broken with this. IMHO, this feels like it got released too early and should have been tested more. I uninstalled it.
 
It blows my mind that these guys are still putting out massive patches like this for a game that's over two years old now. CD Projekt RED has to be the single best thing to happen to modern PC gaming.

I quite look forward to replaying this game for a third time with this new patch.

These guys put every other greedy publisher/developer to utter shame when it comes to supporting their games. CD Projekt is pretty much the only developer I am prepared to pre-order from at full price despite having a massive backlog.....everyone else I am more than happy to wait until their games drop to $10 a couple of months after release if I feel a compelling need to eventually play them.
 
I went ahead and picked up a copy from gog, on sale for $5.99, to test with the patch. I have the steam version but I don't mind paying to support the company, they are that great.
 
I went ahead and picked up a copy from gog, on sale for $5.99, to test with the patch. I have the steam version but I don't mind paying to support the company, they are that great.

Your $5.99 definitely lets them know how great you think they are. I kid, I kid!
 
These guys put every other greedy publisher/developer to utter shame when it comes to supporting their games. CD Projekt is pretty much the only developer I am prepared to pre-order from at full price despite having a massive backlog.....everyone else I am more than happy to wait until their games drop to $10 a couple of months after release if I feel a compelling need to eventually play them.

Same. There are plenty of titles that have come out over the past year that I really want to play, but I'm still waiting for the right price. I just have way to many games.

The Witcher 3 though... they will have my money the day and date there is a preorder on Steam and I won't think twice about it.
 
so the verdict on this new patch/mod seems to be a thumbs down...guess it needs more work
 
I have been playing it with the gog files. they do appear to be different from the steam version. I am seeing things I don't remember, like crows. You can get the gog files with your steam key. I don't believe the steam version is current.

The blocking works fine with the gog version, automatically, especially with arrows. riposte I am not sure about, in testing I don't know if I am riposting or just normal attacking. the symbol does not appear. attack + dodge works very well so it is easy to kite large groups of enemies.

also: The focus is more on a playthrough rather than grinding. You still collect loot that way otherwise it seems like you level according to stages rather than through xp.
 
So wait...there are different versions of the game? I don't have it installed anymore, but mine's the boxed version. It's the last boxed PC game I bought and probably ever will buy for that matter :)
I don't think mine required Steam (definitely not GOG), but I might be wrong.
 
So wait...there are different versions of the game? I don't have it installed anymore, but mine's the boxed version. It's the last boxed PC game I bought and probably ever will buy for that matter :)
I don't think mine required Steam (definitely not GOG), but I might be wrong.

Latest version of the game is 3.4.
 
Latest version of the game is 3.4.

I just meant based upon what Jiminator is talking about. He seems to think the Steam and GOG versions of the game are full-on different, least that that's how I'm reading it.
I haven't messed with it lately, but my boxed version had an auto-updater built into the launcher, so I'm pretty sure it didn't require Steam or GOG.
Since I'm on a SSD, I don't want to re-install the game if this optional patch is broken.
 
I just meant based upon what Jiminator is talking about. He seems to think the Steam and GOG versions of the game are full-on different, least that that's how I'm reading it.

He's mistaken.

Also: the optional patch can be easily uninstalled from the Control Panel. And the original game restored without having to re-install.
 
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So wait...there are different versions of the game? I don't have it installed anymore, but mine's the boxed version. It's the last boxed PC game I bought and probably ever will buy for that matter :)
I don't think mine required Steam (definitely not GOG), but I might be wrong.

No copy requires GOG unless you bought it through GOG. They just enabled you to redeem a GOG copy using the key that comes with your game. So you can take the retail key you got and redeem a copy on your GOG account as well as a backup or whatever you want to do with it.

The game isn't steamworks so the only copies which require Steam are those purchased through Steam.

The initial versions of the game were different in terms of DRM but this was later patched out. Now the only DRM on the game is if the distributor requires it (such as Steam).
 
The install is a mod, from the witcher start menu it can be turned off by running the mod tool.
The steam version does not include the latest patches. When I checked my install the files were from 2011.
You can see the patches here: http://en.thewitcher.com/support/w2/
It shows 3.3 as the latest from feb this year. 3.4 must be newer.
 
The install is a mod, from the witcher start menu it can be turned off by running the mod tool.
The steam version does not include the latest patches. When I checked my install the files were from 2011.
You can see the patches here: http://en.thewitcher.com/support/w2/
It shows 3.3 as the latest from feb this year. 3.4 must be newer.

3.4 is a hot fix that is installed automatically through the launcher.
 
Anyone playing with the Full combat rebalance mod 2? How do I tell for sure it is active? The descreption says it allows strafing when target locked but it does not work. How do I strafe in combat?
 
FYI, CD Projekt Red released the SteamOS version of The Witcher 2 today, and to celebrate, has placed both Witcher 1 and 2 on sale for 80% off.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition (Windows, Mac, SteamOS/Ubuntu) $3.99
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Director's Cut (Windows and Mac only) $1.99

http://store.steampowered.com/app/20920/
The deal expires on Saturday, May 24.
 
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So, I just picked this up. I tried the first Witcher and it just felt really clunky. So far, I'm really liking the second one. I've got to the point in Act 1 where I started finding clues about the Kayran monster thing.

Anyways, my question is this. Should I be investigating every nook and cranny of areas I enter before moving on, or should I just keep completing quests and stuff. It kinda feels like Skyrim where if you just keep running around doing quests eventually you'll get everything done. I'm just worried in Witcher 2 I won't be able to go back to an area.
 
You will never be able to do "everything" in one play through, in fact a major choice you make can end up taking you one of two paths to a completely new area vs the other choice.

The world isn't really "open world" a la TES games, it's explorable and youw ill find hidden things, side quests, etc but you will eventually move on.

Just explore all you can and do the quest/side quests.
 
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