Worse is when you've completed two quests for someone (e.g. Vaska), and you fail one - even though you completed it - because you didn't talk to her in the right order.

Tired of people thinking their differing opinion on something means the something is "overrated." That implies the majority doesn't know what they're talking about and I just don't think that's the case here at all.

I think it's the inability to step outside opinion for a moment, or to reason through why certain things may be getting overlooked. For example, I find racing games very boring. I just don't like cars. Despite that, I can tell the difference between a good and bad racing game, and when I've said what I think the best racing games are to my two racing-obsessed friends, they've agreed with me and for the same reasons. Same goes for FPS, another genre that never really clicked with me. I'd say it's about realising what the game's aims were and if it meets them, regardless of if those aims are something you're interested in personally. Then you can say "Well it's not for me, but it's still really good".

In the case of The Witcher, there are lots of little flaws and some odd moments (e.g. sometimes dialogue does flow oddly and disjointedly) and certain people seem to let those things get to them while quite possibly ignoring much worse examples of those things in similar games such as Dragon Age. What it does so very well, and it's something that was clearly its aim, is embed you in a situation that has a very novelistic feel. It feels far more intimate and far more physical than other games of its kind. Bioware RPGs seem to have you moving between small areas and experiencing reams of text, that's how they build their worlds. But it detracts because you can just flit around between distant locations at will and people are still standing there, doing exactly what they always do. Elder Scrolls games have more dynamic NPCs but they're so glitchy and poorly made, it actually backfires as you see hovering guards with their torches out in broad daylight, or a villager walking into a wall 24/7 and muttering repeatedly about mudcrabs.

Speaking of Oni, that game was pure gem. Hope GoG will distribute it later.

I don't mind the rhythmic clicking that much, it pales in comparison to stuff like DMC or Bayonetta, but that's like saying the shooting in GTA pales in comparison to Call of Duty. What I mind is how glitchy it seems to be, sometimes clicking does nothing at all. Sometimes you can take your sword out way in advance, other times you're surrounded by bloodthirsty bastards and Geralt decides the absolute last thing he needs to do right now is arm himself. It can also be annoying how he seems to take forever to put his sword away sometimes - I accidentally attacked the town militia because his sword was still out about 20-30 seconds after a fight against barghests.

If you want to play a serious pc shooter then try far cry not Call of Duty joke today. The first Call of Duty was an ok shooter but nothing is near far cry that is offered here.

Tab puts the sword away.
A gets out your sword in the right slot (standard your steel sword)
E gets out your sword in the left slot (probably your silver sword)
R gets out your weapon in the third large slot (never used that)
They do not always work, but i have the impression they do if there is even a faint chance of a monster running around in the current area.

Main issues for me were that you seem unable to enter new areas with drawn sword and Geralt's extremely bad habbit of putting it away after every attempt to loot a barrel or chest and some corpses. :(

Okay here is me havinga completely opposite opinion

While I think Gothic 2 is not a bad game I don't like it as much as The Witcher

I personally thing Gothic 2 can be very frustrating, because somehow in this game it happens to me that I die and my savegame is 10-15 minutes away from where I was when I died...

In Gothic 2 I also miss the dark atmosphere The Witcher has...

I miss the realism as well, while Gothic 2 feels much more like a fantasy world to me in The Witcher I feel like This is really how a city could look like, this could be our world if those creatures out of the legends were real...

Also even tho Gothic is an european game, The Witcher gives me a much more european feel, maybe it's the realism of architecture and level design that plays the biggest role in that...

Also there are rarely any women in Gothic... :P there is a brothel in G2... but I wished they would give the whores more personally like The Witcher did so well

Tho I gotta admit there are a few things that I like in Gothic/ Gothic II more:

- Crafting
- Selling your crafted stuff
- In Extremo making music in Part 1 :P

How can someone complain that The Witcher only has 2 weapons?

He's a witcher, the 2 weapons are his tools of trade.

One thing I really like is how intimate to the character the story is. It's not a sweeping epic where a party has to get the McGuffin that isn't The One Ring This Time to/from The Place That Isn't Mordor This Time with hordes of whatever to fight through.

This time it's one guy working his way through an investigation in and about a pretty small area. So he can do it all, because it's all relevant to what he needs done that moves the story forward; like Columbo always being the one to figure out the crime, or, well, pretty much any number of detectives in any number of movies/books, which is basically what this is, just set in a fantasy world.

I've had no problems at all with the combat; it reminds me very much of Batman: Arkham Asylum in that very little finger work gives you a lot of cool moves, and I've played entirely too many turn based battles to really care that you use a single button to do all the work for you.

The only real complaint I have in a general complaint of too many games: the traveling. It's a small area, true, but I want to just be able to open my map and transport to the person I want to talk to; I can just pretend he walked the whole way there, but I don't need to do the footwork all the time. L.A. Noire fixed this problem perfectly, and is a good example to follow.

I think people like the choices, the story and the setting but for me that wasn't enough. I didn't enjoy the combat, I didn't enjoy the character development and I didn't feel attached to any of the characters in the game. I share the same views as you OP about The Witcher but I think it's an average game. Compared to games like Arx Fatalis, Divine Divinity, Divinity II and Dragon Age: Origins, The Witcher doesn't offer anything to beat them. Sure it has choices with consequences that change the story but that's not what I'm looking for. Doesn't Red Dead Redemption have choices with consequences that pop up later in the game? That's not even an RPG.

I want a game where you can imagine a character and make him. I have no problems playing a preset character but I at least want to be able to customize him a bit but with The Witcher, you have only a tiny selection of weapons and a rare collection of armor to do that with and no matter what, Geralt is always the monster slayer and nothing else. I think there were only two choices in the game that changed Geralt slightly and that was the romance path you could take with either Triss or Shanni and also who you chose to side with; be it the Order, Elves or the option to remain neutral. That's not enough role-play for me.

Though I can see why the game may appeal to other people. It just didn't for me. If it had combat that I liked and more customization, I would probably have enjoyed it more but for me, it's an average RPG that I will soon forget.

Honestly I think Gothic 2 is the game that's overrated. Gothic 1 was really excellent, and at the time I thought it was even better than Morrowind. But Gothic 2 just didn't have the same charm to me. I'm not saying it was a bad game, but Gothic 1 was just a lot more interesting to me, especially in the environments and different factions.

Everybody has opinions and hardly never they are the same as others. We could argue which is better, gothic 2 or witcher.. or perhaps oblivion, planescape torment, dragon age.. I like all those games. Isn't it great that we have atleast some good games?
I'm playing witcher now, again.. I started couple of times in past and had to format aka never finished. But this time I will.
In my books witcher is awesome. =)
And I like the combat. Nothing wrong with that.

I played Gothic 2 that I got free with TW2....better than TW1? I don't think so. No.

Some people like to play a sandbox RPG where you create your own character in a game..and those people may not like this one. Personally, I like both types of role playing games.

TW1 grew on me...I put it down a few times during those long drawn out parts of Act 2. But once I got through that part, the rest was really fun. I enjoyed it just as much as DA:O.