CDPR seems to have been fairly happy with the reception they received for the Witcher 2, as this time around the combat system has not been as severely overhauled as it had been for the middle game within the trilogy. Of course you can’t just repeat what you did prior and say, ‘yep that’s good enough’, and instead additional features or tweaks were added. Returning are Fast and Strong attacks, with the fast attack being much quicker than the strong attack, allowing you to strike out and then evade it does not do as much damage as a raw strong attack. A strong attack takes longer to perform/hit but will do more damage. The slower attack speed leaves Geralt open to being attacked, as you cannot evade while attacking. It is a balancing game between choosing which is best for the situation, or if you prefer just using fast attacks most the time if you happen to be a twitch player. Parry has been altered slightly as to whenever you successfully parry an attack, it leaves the enemy stunned briefly, allowing you to perform one to several counter-attacks upon them. Previously we preferred in the Witcher 2 to just dodge out of the way of enemy attacks, in this game certain enemies we would actually use parry as it would be easier to get a hit in that way (enemy with a shield for example). Evading an attack is now possible via two different methods. The first is the standard roll, roll away from an attack, giving you larger distance between you and the attack. This does stop any stamina regeneration from happening, meaning if you are trying to roll away then use a Sign with low stamina, you’ll be waiting a while. The second, more effective way of evading an attack is dodge. Dodge lets you side-step an attack depending on the direction you point, back, left-side, and right-side with the bonus that it does not pause stamina regeneration while performing this attack. The only downside is that you do not create as a large of a gap from an enemy compared to that of roll. Unless there was an enemy that was using an area effect attack, we would typically just dodge to the left or the right, attacking their now unguarded side, with the occasional use of roll to really put distances between us and the attacker(s).
What’s a witcher without having Signs? No that’s not traffic signs, Signs are what Witchers use to enable them to wield a specific subset of magic. Aside from Signs, Witchers cannot use any other sort of magic that say a sorceress (or other magic wielder) can use. The classic five Signs return with a few seeing alterations which we will briefly touch upon. Aard is the first Sign, similar to that of the air element as it allows you to knock back enemies, as well as break wear walls or barrels to reveal hidden entries or items. Igni or the fire Sign, allows you to set enemies on fire. Putting enough skill points into it will allow you to increase your chance to burn a target. A burning target will continue to take fire damage until the duration expires or you hit the enemy. Great for taking down multiple enemies as burning targets panic and usually don’t attack. Yrden is one of the two Signs that has seen the most changes to it. Rather than stun an enemy once they walk over it, it will slow any enemy that walks into its large circle. This is great for slowing down enemies in order to evade their attacks, especially against spectres who move and attack quite fast and can ‘teleport’ away from you, usually behind you and then attack you. Quen is once again our staple Sign, giving you a protective shield that will absorb up to a certain amount of damage before ‘dissolving’. Without this sign, upgrading it and allowing it to reflect some damage back to the enemy we would have died countless times on our play through. That or would have become experts at dodging and parrying. Axii is the other sign that has been altered, also known as the ‘charm’ Sign. Putting points into it at the first level allows you to use it in certain conversations, allow you to by-pass having to fight someone, or bribe another. Think ‘Jedi Mind Trick’. This does not work all the time as there are a few instances where someone with the person who Axii’ed sees you put this on their friend, calls you out on using magic, and a fight ensues anyway. In combat Axii will at first stun/immobilize an enemy until the timer expires (or you attack them) with later levels allowing you to ‘mind’ control one or more to fight for you temporarily. For those curious, we tended to use Igni (with skills points put into it to make it do more damage), Yrden to slow down enemies, Quen as protection, and Axii so we could manipulate conversations when we could, or deal with one specific necrophage to make it easier to dispatch them.
Vigor has been replaced with a Stamina bar again. It seems CDPR would rather we have the single usage bar for using Signs compared to the ‘slots’ of Vigor we saw in the Witcher 2. We are thankful that Stamina (Vigor in Witcher 2) is no longer tied to how much damage you do. No matter how much Stamina you have you will always do the same amount of damage to a certain enemy based on the weapon damage, their armor, and additional factors (such as oils). You must have a full bar of Stamina in order to use a sign, alternative signs (which are available in the second tier of the Alchemy tree) will sometimes use less that its normal counterpart or slowly drain Stamina depending on its outlined purpose.
We are very thankful they made changes to when you can consume a potion compared to the Witcher 2, where you could only use them before a fight. While it does make sense to plan ahead for certain fights, other times you don’t know that you’ll face something and are stuck with the wrong potion(s) active. Returning to the Witcher 1, where you can use however many potions you want as long as you do not fill up the toxicity bar made the Witcher 3 experience more fluid. This allowed CDPR to have fights go on longer, or chain multiple combat events knowing the player can change what potions they are using to better suit their situation. Using a potion that negates poison when you are fighting enemies in a poisoned filled cave that you could not possibly of known had poisonous gas halfway through exploring it to only be thrown into combat. The use of potions whenever you want is balanced out by having a limited amount you can carry (example level of Swallow is a maximum of 3 potions) at once and shortened timers for said potions. Potions have less toxicity then they did before, meaning you could use five or six at once, having them last minutes, or you can craft decoctions which last much longer but have a larger impact on toxicity.
Our first play through involved playing the game on the hardest difficulty, called Death March. The amount of damage most enemies inflict on Death March makes Dark Mode for the Witcher 2 to be easier in a lot of instances. Enemies tend to be able to kill you in a few hits, with bosses being even more powerful. It required us to constantly craft the best gear for our level, which tended to be the Griffon school set, as well as create and use all the oils, potions, decoctions, and bombs available, upgrading them when we found better recipes for them. Dodge and Quen were our two best friends that were used so much that we probably used them more in the game then actually performing an attack. We were lucky that Quen would absorb one hit, as it usually would give us that extra time to dodge away. Not as lucky when it came to multiple enemies, or enemies that attacked several times at once. Parry is another skill Geralt has that we used from time to time but probably not as often as we should have. Killing a large monster, for example a Griffon in Act One, was very harrying, yet when we did defeat it we felt a sense of accomplishment thanks to the challenging nature versus having just beat it easily on lower difficulties. One last thing we’ll mention about combat, is Quick Time Events (or QTEs). They do not exist in the game, at first we were waiting for the prompts to come up, they never did. We are enjoyed that CDPR learned from their mistake of jumping on the QTE bandwagon of 2011 and did away with this horrible horrible in game feature.
