The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Previews

The lucky few who were able to go hands-on with The Witcher 2 are continuing to share their impressions. Joystiq focuses on choice & consequence, or cause & effect as they call it.

Dandelion was eventually captured by the succubus, and back as Geralt, I burst into the cave to save him — and to kill the demoness. I chose violence and a quick end to the beast (I am a Witcher, after all), but again the CD Projekt representative reminded me that there would have been more to discover — and to play — had I taken a different approach to the quest. He revealed that it was actually Ele’yas (the man who started me on this sidequest) who had killed the succubus’ lovers, and that if the player discovers this then “the story gets really complicated.” My questline had ended, but I’d only covered about half of its total gameplay because of the choices I’d made.

This kind of decision-based gameplay is what endeared The Witcher to so many players, and the sequel looks to charm those same gamers and more when it’s released for PC in May. If the response is positive enough, we might even see The Witcher 2 brought to consoles one day.

AusGamers goes in-depth on mechanics.

Beyond combat, your spells also have purpose in the game’s environment. We used Force Push, for example, to barge our way through a suspicious-looking wall of bricks (suspicious in that they looked like they wanted to be Force Pushed), while unlit torches practically begged us to use our fire spell. Hopefully the puzzles and interactive spell options throughout aren’t as pronounced as the ones we saw; it would be much better to have players experimenting with the game-world and their abilities, so we’ll just have to wait and see how that one turns out.

There are some hidden goodies though. Scattered throughout the world are (places of power,) Gop explained. Basically in these areas you activate your Medallion (basically your base magic), and you’ll be rewarded with a specific buff with a time-limit. These could be anything from extra health or armour to greater speed, strength and more. What’s even cooler is that they’re actually pretty hard to find. Though Gop knew where they all were in the demo, so they may very well be specific to areas and not random (which would be better).