Posted June 27, 2011
Several people have complained that drinking potions is cumbersome and takes too much time, and I certainly agree with them. Question is, how could this be fixed? The wish for drinking potions anytime, like in the first Witcher, is unlikely to come true, for it would be a fundamental change to how the game works. Speeding up the drinking animation or making it skipable has also been mentioned, but that wouldn‘t make such a big difference.
My idea is a shortcut that allows you to drink again the same combination of potions you drank last time, with animations, but without any menus being displayed.
Let‘s say you want to explore some dungeon, and you decide to drink some potions for preparation. You enter meditation and select a combination of swallow and wolf from the drink potions menu, just like you normally would. Then you start exploring. After 10 minutes, when your potion‘s effects have ended, you just press the re-drinking shortcut key, which causes Geralt to sit down, drink another swallow and wolf, and get up again, without any menus being displayed and without any additional input required.
This way, you could save a lot of time and effort when you just want to refresh potions that have run out, and there wouldn‘t be any change to the way the game works - Geralt would still sit down to drink and everything, and, obviously, it would only work at places that would also allow „regular“ meditation. On Gamepads, the neglected „Back“ Button could be used for this (on keyboards, finding an appropriate key shouldn‘t be a problem).
A minor tweak I‘d suggest to speed up „normal“ potion drinking would be to have meditation end automatically afterwards - Geralt drinks, then gets up, without the meditation menu being displayed again.
My idea is a shortcut that allows you to drink again the same combination of potions you drank last time, with animations, but without any menus being displayed.
Let‘s say you want to explore some dungeon, and you decide to drink some potions for preparation. You enter meditation and select a combination of swallow and wolf from the drink potions menu, just like you normally would. Then you start exploring. After 10 minutes, when your potion‘s effects have ended, you just press the re-drinking shortcut key, which causes Geralt to sit down, drink another swallow and wolf, and get up again, without any menus being displayed and without any additional input required.
This way, you could save a lot of time and effort when you just want to refresh potions that have run out, and there wouldn‘t be any change to the way the game works - Geralt would still sit down to drink and everything, and, obviously, it would only work at places that would also allow „regular“ meditation. On Gamepads, the neglected „Back“ Button could be used for this (on keyboards, finding an appropriate key shouldn‘t be a problem).
A minor tweak I‘d suggest to speed up „normal“ potion drinking would be to have meditation end automatically afterwards - Geralt drinks, then gets up, without the meditation menu being displayed again.