I must confess I'm puzzled by this as well. Gerard is very well animated and moves with grace, it's a pleasure to behold. But if I just want to see how many experience points I need for the next level, the process actually takes quite a long time and can't even be done while in combat. Sure, I don't desperately need to, but you could, after all, just hit Spacebar for pause in the first game and then mouse over (holding down shift to "release" the mouse cursor) both your experience, health, toxicity and vitality bars.

Same with drinking potions: Sure, it looks cool the way he does it, probably just like it really would look. But if realism is the aim, is it realistic to expect players would want to watch that sequence every time?

Well, you can press C at any time and get the info about XP, your effects and resistances etc. but not about health, I think. Well, I am a bit put off by watching him just throw the potion bottles on the ground. I would not expect that from a European dev team, to be honest. Too much realism?


Yes. That. :)

.

XP: Theres a white bar over top your health bar that represents XP progress. If you want a more exact count, just press C, to go to your character screen. Yes, you can do this during combat. If playing on Normal difficulty, you can even level up during combat.(not on hard).

The looting and potions are just nods to realism in the Witcher games. They dont want you quaffing potions during combat...they are designed to be deliberate forethought, as they should be. And they dont want you looting in combat either, taking the time to stuff somebody's sword and armor into your pack while beset by monsters.

My mind is loling at the image of Geralt placing his potion bottles in a green sack. :p

That said, if they were actually going for realism, he wouldn't be throwing the bottles out anyways. I'm sure he'd keep them to re-use for his new potion mixes. I doubt bottles were easily and cheaply mass produced in that era.

I chalk up his throwing the bottles on the ground as fitting his devil-may-care-machismo is all.

Thanks for the heads up about the "C" button -- I genuinely wasn't aware, so I've been schooled and am grateful. :-)

But yes, the waiting is really a killer -- literally so, you'll find the same thing in combat. Geralt is so painfully well animated that I get killed a lot due to being stuck in "pain" animations which play out in exquisite detail while being on the receiving end of the enemies' equally elaborate "attack" animations.

(this topic has admittedly drifted very far from having trouble with looting corpses!)

I think there's an amazing gameplay experience buried inside all this, but I'll admit to being confused that such things as "don't keep the player waiting" were overlooked in playtesting. It's not that we're an instant gratification type of crowd, but immersion is threatened whenever you feel that the control (and thus the connection) between you and your character is hampered.