New screens and videos of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

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Geralt gets down and dirty with wenches and witchy-things

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings has some big-ass monster-stomping boots to fill. The original Witcher was everything previous RPGs weren't: dark, filthy, and realistic. The choices it forced you to make were morally ambiguous and the ramifications were far-reaching. The Witcher 2's devs are claiming that everything will be deeper and more complex this time around in their new developer diary video. Note: You might want to watch in full-screen to be able to read the dinky subtitles...

It's great to see that the combat will be spruced up - it was the one area of the game that felt too simple (click once to attack, click again at the right time to create a combo). The game looks gorgeous and definitely appears to up the graphical ambiance considerably. The real challenge, though, will be topping the difficult moral choices from the first game. They say these dilemmas will be a LOT deeper, but that's not an easy task without making things too obscure. We could easily see the plot becoming convoluted if they try to go all out on the complexity of interwoven story threads.

We have to break it to you, CD-Projekt, but that intro title card saying no pre-rendered images isn't impressing anybody. That cutscene doesn't look remotely pre-rendered. It's silly to make such a claim when the video can speak for itself. It looks great, but calling out its in-game graphics as competitive with CGI just makes us look for the flaws (hello, low-res leaves everywhere). Anyway, nice monster design - we love the weird giant-snail crustacean thingy.

You can also check out some screenshere.

The game looks this finished, and we have to wait until Q1 2011? Gah!

Apr 2, 2010

Matthew Keast
Matthew Keast
My new approach to play all games on Hard mode straight off the bat has proven satisfying. Sure there is some frustration, but I've decided it's the lesser of two evils when weighed against the boredom of easiness that Normal difficulty has become in the era of casual gaming.