Beating the Heat with Good ol' Geralt

Where I live we are currently in day 5 or 6 of an "excessive heat" event--it has been over 100 degrees every day this week and it's just too miserably hot to do much of anything outside.  I'm extremely fortunate to live in a home with central air and air conditioning and it's the perfect environment to escape from the heat and the best excuse to spend lots of time gaming.  I'm currently 2/3 of the way through my re-play of The Witcher saga having just finished Assassin of Kings and moved on to the third game.

(The "enhanced edition" cinematic of the assassination of Demavend is still awesome...even more than 10 years later!)

I've always thought that The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings never got the praise that it deserved.  I have always enjoyed the way they presented the story at the beginning of the game, namely having Geralt relive his memories of what happened as part of his interrogation by Vernon Roche.  It's a clever way to present a tutorial and introduce the major story beats.  From there, it only gets better--the environments (the ancient, dangerous forests of Flotsam; the cursed battlefield near Vergen; and the ancient Vran city of Loc Muinne) are awesome, the music (particularly in Vergen) is some of my favorite, and the way they divided the story based on player choices--there's just a lot to love about it.

It's great, but there are also small things that drive me crazy.  One of the most annoying parts is the save system--rather than having a few slots for quicksaves and autosaves the game keeps ALL of your saves.  It's ridiculous and creates a huge number of files.  My personal method of combatting this ridiculous system was to delete 10 saved games every time I logged on.  I could scroll through social media while casually deleting files (just be careful you don't get too clicky and delete the wrong thing).

You would think after playing through a game many, many times that I would have all the story beats down pat, but I still managed to mess up a minor quest chain.  Toward the end of the game in Loc Muinne I noticed that my armor wasn't quite what I remembered and realized that I had missed out on the quest that grants you the best armor in the game.  I had somehow missed the shipwreck in Vergen...sheesh.  Maybe I'm getting scatterbrained in my old age!

I've just started the third game and it's always fun to see how much the technology had improved between games.  Usually I turn off the more resource demanding, somewhat extraneous features--usually NVIDIA's Hairworks--but I just can't deny Geralt and the characters of The Witcher 3 their beautiful, flowing locks (*we'll see if this lasts...If I have a bunch of crashes it'll probably get turned off).  Watching the wind blow through the trees and seeing the way the sun shines through a thickly forested area is a huge improvement over the first game.  It's too pretty to turn down!

Interestingly I decided that I didn't want to punish myself through the series this time--I usually like to challenge myself and crank the difficulty all the way up.  I'd rather enjoy the experience and since I've already done it, I'm playing on the "blood and broken bones" setting--so a notch above normal, enough to make it somewhat challenging, but not torturous.  It's nice.

Whether you're trying to make it through a heat wave or just looking for a classic to play, give The Witcher 2 a play.  Maybe turn the difficulty down and just enjoy it!