The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Retrospective

It’s only been two years since the release of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, but Eurogamer still saw fit to write (type, I suppose?) a retrospective article for CD Projekt RED’s fantasy action-RPG. Here’s an excerpt:

Those that made it past the opening hours were presented with several concurrent and pleasingly complex narrative threads that were too roughly tied together. It was easy to miss the connection between the seemingly minor events of one chapter and major events of another. The bold move to allow you to prioritise Geralt’s personal quest for total recall in favour of his wholehearted involvement in tracking the titular assassins further muddied the narrative waters. CD Projekt had conceived of an intriguing wider fiction to ensure that the world didn’t revolve solely around Geralt but The Witcher 2’s three-act structure felt somewhat disjointed and The White Wolf’s travels were occasionally disorientating.

Some of these issues were addressed with the release of patch 2.0. Coming four months after the original launch the patch added, amongst other things, a tutorial. Players of the The Witcher 2: Bit Better Edition benefited from improved combat and a refined control system. In typical CD Projekt style, the update also included additional content in the form of an even harder difficulty level and a separate combat arena, all for free.

However, the narrative presentation remained untouched and without careful study of the in-game journal and paying particular attention to the machinations of the game’s major and minor players there was the potential to become fuzzy about what exactly was going on, like watching an episode of Game of Thrones while slightly drunk and very tired.

This led to The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition, which is the version that Xbox 360 players experienced as well as those PC players whose first play-through occurred after April 2012. With the major mechanical wrinkles already ironed out, the Enhanced Edition concentrated on adding a whole raft of narrative improvements, as well as several hours of new content to the slim-pickings of the third act.

The end of each chapter gained a neat summation of its key events and an overview of where Geralt’s journey was taking him next, as recounted by the foppish Dandelion the bard. Upon completing the game there was a round-up of the key choices you’d made throughout, which is handy when there’s a 16 different states that the world can end up in, along with a final cinematic setting-up the events of The Witcher 3. Everything made more sense and so you could stop grappling with the manner in which things were being delivered and instead concentrate on how things and people related to one another and why that man was hacking off that other man’s head.