The Witcher Megathread - Games

Fair enough, I'm gonna do a Dark run after my current one and I'm getting to the point where I only take a few hits. I never use traps, bombs or throwing knives which probably isn't a good thing but swordsmanship alone is good for now.

I got a question regarding the extra mission on Iroveth's path. Since I never played his path before, and I just left Vergen to go to Loc Muine in the story, I'm not sure if I missed it or if it now automatically happened during the story. Did I miss it, or can someone give me the basic gist of it to see if I already went through the quest or am about to?

When I played it was triggered once you get to Loc Muinne's main square. Specifically where the barber lady usually stands.

Also when fighting multiple opponents you can often use Yrden and sometimes Axii to trap/charm enemies and thus temporarily reduce the amount of opponents swinging at you. Axii s hard to use properly, but successfully hexing a strong opponent (like a knight, Endrega warrior, Greater Rotfiend...) can make a group fight that much easier. Stuff that boosts sign intensity helps with those spells, as well as the duration of Quen. Since vitality generation potions may not be that useful on Dark difficulty, Petri's Philter (sign intensity++, no penalties) may be worth trying.

axii is useful when fighting sorcerers and more hex sorcerer, watch chaos

Is there a way to [sp]save upper Aedirn when siding with Roche? I hate seeing Zoltan's drinking buddies being hanged.[/sp]

Maybe try [sp]killing Henselt?[/sp] I don't think it's possible though, same with [sp]Iorveth's path and Vergen always winning[/sp].

If you kill [sp]Henselt[/sp] it'll just be [sp]Radovid[/sp] doing the hanging.

[QUOTE=Marden;35783174]Maybe try [sp]killing Henselt?[/sp] I don't think it's possible though, same with [sp]Iorveth's path and Vergen always winning[/sp].[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=Spool;35783742]If you kill [sp]Henselt[/sp] it'll just be [sp]Radovid[/sp] doing the hanging.[/QUOTE] Aw, I expected as much. Thanks anyway.

So I just picked up Witcher 2 Sunday, but I'm having trouble running it. It says I can run it at about medium to high settings, but whenever I play, I get a bunch of stutter in character and camera movement. Like playing with lag, but offline. Does anyone know what might be contributing to this? I totally nuked my textures, which seems to only have helped a bit, but I know I can run intensive games like BF3 no problem, so I'm wondering what the problem is, and what settings might be causing this.

I turned off depth of field (both in gameplay and cutscenes) and saw a huge FPS boost. You could also try turning off SSAO (I didn't really like how it looked in-game anyway) and turning down shadow quality and number of shadowed lights.

Maybe also turn off ubersampling if its on.

Turn off bloom as well. I notice quite a difference in fps when it's off, and it gets in the way of all the pretty.

Set shadow quality to Low; the setting doesn't make ANY visual difference at all. Set LOD Distance to Near; most environments are tight, the visibility is usually low so you'll only really noticing a few distant twigs against the backdrop disappearing by lowering this. Disable DOF; they're a huge performance drain and just blur distant scenery that you may want to look at. Disable Motion Blur; it's not that noticeable and it drops your FPS during fights - when you need FPS the most. Disable UberSampling if it's on; it's some brutal form of antialiasing that involves rendering at higher resolutions then downscaling, or something. I don't think there's any GPU out yet that can handle it. You can leave DOF Cutscenes on because FPS doesn't matter much during cutscenes anyhow. I tend to leave Bloom and DOF-gameplay on as an experiment however since I had the elbow space performance-wise, and I really like the way it enriches the highly stylized environments. Take the Flotsam forest for instance; it doesn't look "realistic" but rather like an extremely detailed, colorful and rich painting out of some high fantasy setting, and Dof + Bloom enhances that look even if they end up reducing visibility.

The fps drop caused by ubersampling is insane, once I turned it off the game went from around 20-30 fps to buttery smooth for me.

What IS ubersampling?

[QUOTE=Killuah;35793254]What IS ubersampling?[/QUOTE] From what I've heard it makes faces look a bit more detailed and something to do with shadows, don't remember.

An odd thing happened a few minutes ago; there was this guy who gave the Harpy Feathers quest, and when I came back after giving him the feathers, he was dressed as a chicken. After I finished talking to him, the game crashed, assumedly due to the silliness of the guy's costume.

[QUOTE=Jericho_Rus;35793425]From what I've heard it makes faces look a bit more detailed and something to do with shadows, don't remember.[/QUOTE] it adds HEAVY AA to every frame totally destroying jagged edges and any that's still there you won't notice when playing the game, here's some of my screenshots with it on. [QUOTE][IMG]http://filesmelt.com/dl/witcher2_2012-04-22_21-00-25-40.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://filesmelt.com/dl/witcher2_2012-04-22_21-00-37-61.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://filesmelt.com/dl/witcher2_2012-04-22_21-22-19-27.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://filesmelt.com/dl/witcher2_2012-04-22_21-23-29-30.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://filesmelt.com/dl/witcher2_2012-04-22_21-25-09-10.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://filesmelt.com/dl/witcher2_2012-04-22_21-25-45-16.png[/IMG][/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Im Crimson;35791483]Set shadow quality to Low; the setting doesn't make ANY visual difference at all. Set LOD Distance to Near; most environments are tight, the visibility is usually low so you'll only really noticing a few distant twigs against the backdrop disappearing by lowering this. Disable DOF; they're a huge performance drain and just blur distant scenery that you may want to look at. Disable Motion Blur; it's not that noticeable and it drops your FPS during fights - when you need FPS the most. Disable UberSampling if it's on; it's some brutal form of antialiasing that involves rendering at higher resolutions then downscaling, or something. I don't think there's any GPU out yet that can handle it. You can leave DOF Cutscenes on because FPS doesn't matter much during cutscenes anyhow. I tend to leave Bloom and DOF-gameplay on as an experiment however since I had the elbow space performance-wise, and I really like the way it enriches the highly stylized environments. Take the Flotsam forest for instance; it doesn't look "realistic" but rather like an extremely detailed, colorful and rich painting out of some high fantasy setting, and Dof + Bloom enhances that look even if they end up reducing visibility.[/QUOTE] I could be wrong but I'm prety sure by lag he means his fps is fine, but he's getting bad memory buffers :s

[QUOTE=Killuah;35793254]What IS ubersampling?[/QUOTE] [quote]high quality rendering mode under which whole scenes are rendered multiple times to provide the best possible textures, object details and anti-aliasing[/quote] Straight from the readme.

Just found this beautiful piece of art: [IMG]http://thewitcher.com/public/files/wallpaper_x360/download/wallpaper_1_1920x1200_en.png[/IMG]

Unless I'm mistaken, Ubersampling (also known as SuperSampling AA) basically renders the game at much higher resolution, then scales it down, makes it all look awesome but rapes the FPS (unless I'm mistaken again, this is also what publishers mostly use for official screenshots AKA bullshots, only to a much higher degree). [QUOTE=Marden;35797328]Just found this beautiful piece of art: [IMG]http://thewitcher.com/public/files/wallpaper_x360/download/wallpaper_1_1920x1200_en.png[/IMG][/QUOTE] That's some nasty PMS.

I just finished the Enhanced Edition on xbox, I really enjoyed it but there were certain sections of the game where I literally didn't have a clue where to go.

Playing the enhanced edition, didn't finish the normal version because I wasn't happy with my choices so here I go again. I beat the Kayran stage where you had to dodge the tenticles the first time, then I forgot what to do when the bridge falls on it so I died and had to do it over again. Which lead to like 15 reloads on the tenticles, did the enhanced edition make them 1 hit kill? And fuck Letho, jesus christ. I can dodge him no problem but he'll just whip out his force push [I]while i'm slashing him up.[/I]

The first fight with Letho. I remember struggling with it, playing on my friend's pc. Tried it again on Xbox, nailed it on the first try. Spamming Quen helps, and Letho can get stuck in Yrden too. I remember him spamming the "Force push" all the time on PC, while on the Xbox he did it once.

[QUOTE=Vallux;35806287]"Force push"[/QUOTE] Can't we just say "Aard"? :v: Speaking of which, in Dark mode I'm barely using it at all; it just seems to creatures barely shuffle and can't even stun the weakest ones. In the first Witcher (and TW2 on Normal) it was probably my most used sign.

I only really use quen, when fighting normally and axii with groups with yrden on tougher douches like Letho, force pushing just seems like a waste at low level. Speaking of which I completely forgot about yrden while fighting letho, brb.

I ended up using Igni much more, since it has the same flinch effect on many enemies as Aard and deals superior damage.

[QUOTE=Spool;35806495]I ended up using Igni much more, since it has the same flinch effect on many enemies as Aard and deals superior damage.[/QUOTE] I was actually pondering just that yesterday. It seems Aard only becomes useful once you've gotten your Sign Intensity up enough to stun things so you can score a free finisher move.