The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Magazine Preview Tidbits

The February issue of PC Gamer has a four-page preview of The Witcher 2. It is largely taken up by screenshots, but does discuss a few things in some depth:

Voice acting and graphics are praised as at a high level, romance should be more interesting than The Witcher’s card game.
The magazine discusses a murder investigation quest in the dwarven city of Vergan, which is a racial melting pot.
Dandelion the Poet follows Geralt on a quest to find a Succubus. Here you can opt to have him tackle the summoning and “subduing” of the Succubus, which opens up a poetry crafting minigame (put the lines in the right order so the poem flows)
Alchemy is no longer tied to fireplaces, but can be done anywhere.
A lot of attention is paid to combat and magic:

Attacking Geralt was a band of melee combatants, an archer, and a ranged-damage spellcaster. Fighting numerous enemies in this game is tough, and requires plenty of blocking and rolling away when they attack simultaneously. Jan [the CD Projekt employee playing the game – GB] would cast an area-of-effect lightning spell, dart in for an attack, then flank the group to lay some damage onto the enemy caster, switch targets to keep the melee at bay, dart back to hit a single combatant with a heavily-damaging fireball, and so forth. Focusing exclusively on a single enemy means you leave yourself wide open to attack by others, so a kind of kiting approach is required to keep multiple foes at bay.

But you still need to assess who’s dealing the most damage, and take him down in short order. In this case, it was the spellcaster. On a couple of occasions, Jan actually managed to line the caster up in front of the enemy archer so he took damage. But in general, it seemed to be a case of drawing the greater melee away from the ranger attacker to leave him exposed, before darting around to deliver a flurry of blows. The final enemy left standing was a shieldbearer, and he was the toughest of the bunch. As a natural defender, you have to wait for him to strike, and deliver the riposte when his guard is down.

I also saw a few of Geralt’s spells in action. Of particular interest was his fire-trap spell, which involves placing a ward on the floor. Enemies who step on it get flamed. Levelling up the ability, however, enables you to chain-link further wards, at which points lines of fire are drawn to connect the wards together. Placing three wards equidistant from each other creates a great triangular trap-area in which any foe who crosses the line takes fire damages. It looks like a great way to start a fight, and I can envisage indulging in almost BioShock 2 levels of devious trap-placement, arranged to weaken foes before drawing them into an encounter with naked steel.