gamers these days... they want the game to hold their hands all day long...lol

Oh how times have changed...

Are you serious? The Karyan is far easier than the rest of the game up until that point (unless you're playing on easy), you just need to think for a second instead of spam clicking. Its a fairly basic boss as far as games go, is this your first time playing a video game or something?

Believe it or not, some people actually like their games to challenge them a bit (see Demons' Souls for example).

This reminds me of the amount of people who died to the Ogre in that DA 2 demo, and flooded Bioware's boards asking how to kill it. Me wondering, wtf could people possibly be having problems with, and even killing it without using my character at all, and just the NPC tank and Sister Mage. :p

On the one hand, it's great that there are so many people playing video games today. Twenty years ago, you were a total social outcast if you even dared to mention you played one. At the same time, the much broader audience has also resulted in such a wide range in player ability that I assume it's literally impossible for a game developer today to make a game that's going to be able to cater to that breadth, especially since the concept of playing your genre strengths/interests seem to have been thrown out the window as people play everything and expect everything to cater to them.

Playing this fight on easy, there's absolutely no need for twitch reflexes as I outlined in my earlier post. I did the fight on easy just to see what in blazes people could be having issues with. No QTE at all. Max distance. Move always, never stop. Drop Yrden after a tentacle has slammed down and been lifted back up. Run back and forth in the general area of that sign. Eventually tentacle (with orange glowy bulb) will land on it and get stuck. Hack away at it (it does nothing to you during this hacking). Max range again and never stop moving as you run back and forth. Do this until three tentacles have been defeated.

Now you ride a tentacle and only have to press your left mouse button rapidly. No other button presses. That's it. Once thrown, go run up that bridge that's been torn down on the left side of the screen and watch as you automatically kill it.

No gimmicks. No crazy console kiddie button mashing. No crazy reflexes.

Please don't give up (just yet).

SPOILER alert!

SPOILER alert!

SPOILER alert!



1/ Start the battle on the left hand side of your screen
2/ Never stop moving around
3/ As soon as a tentacle with an orange bulb (and only those!) hits the ground near you, set a trap with your Yrden sign
4/ Wait for the tentacle to prepare hitting you again (you'll notice it stirring a bit)
5/ Move (roll) aside, so that the tentacle hits your trap
6/ Butcher the glowing bulb of the tentacle to minced meat
7/ Continue with the other tentacle on the left side of your screen

8/ Once the left side is cleared, proceed the same with the tentacles on the right side
9/ Avoid getting hit by the 2 middle side tentacles
10/ Avoid getting hit by the green slime that the beast pukes out

11/ Once three tentacles are trapped, the fourth tentacle will come towards you in a sweeping move
12/ Hop on it with a QTE (right click, I believe), and stay on top of it with another QTE (keep clicking left button, till a flashing bar fills up)

Once the flashing bar is filled up, Geralt should automatically jump down from the tentacle. Some people reported the need to hit SPACE bar to do so, but I didn't need to do it.

The tentacle should crash against the bridge, which should collapse, which gives you a way to reach the head of the beast, to slay it definitively.

END.

I assure you it will appear as very easy to you once you get the hang of it.

I hope you'll give it another try ^.^

In most games I've played (most of which weren't released in the past 2-3 years) you're meant to figure out the bosses' attacks/weakness, not allow the game to do it for you. Even WITHOUT the cutscene and books, the fight was still extremely easy to figure out (mainly thanks to Sile's bitching).

I "planned ahead" a bit and had the potion though I'll admit I missed the part about the growths. Still, it only took me an attempt to learn when to roll, a second one to notice you couldn't trap the 2 center tentacles (and noticed the orange growths), and a 3rd to execute the fight correctly. I could understand making things a bit more obvious if this was purely an action game but last I checked The Witcher was an RPG series.

I just can't imagine how anyone could sit there for hours, not having any clue at all of what to do.

Just watch this.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA5UJXZwyWs Kayran Boss Fight
If you need a visual guide...

After the prologue, more whining for a relatively easy fight...

Use your witcher like a beacon after placing an yrden, to make sure the correct tentacle falls. They are marked with little orange flags. After the 3rd tentacle, if you need to get some life back, a piece of the bridge is near the extreme right. You can stay idle there and avoid all rocks.

The rest is even easier...

I might agree it's not the most exiting part of the game, but saying the design of the fight is AWFUL is a bit stretched. And with the bug that makes the cutscene unskippable, bear in mind the game just got released. Remember F:NV anyone?

Gamers havent changed. But games have. For better, or worse, players have become used to dumbed down games that spoonfeed the content to the players, in order to reach a wider market, and to avoid anything that might actually challenge them, for fear of driving away a potential player.

I was playing some of my older shooters recently, games that are considered classics, and I found it remarkable how many times I was reloading and thought nothing of it, because that was the kind of challenge that generation of games was built around. I realized, if these classic games were released today, they would be reviled for being "too hard", and people would resent that fact that they were actually designed to fail repeatedly, before they learned how to succeed.

So I dont blame people who have come up in this generation of games for being slightly taken aback by the Witcher 2, which has more of an old school philosophy about challenge and reward. They are just a product of what theyve been weaned on. I for one love the game because of the challenge, and would hope that people who want an "easy" game, recognize that theres an "easy" mode precisely to accommodate to that game experience. A lot of them just seem to resent the labeling of that mode, because on most other games, easy mode is called "normal".

Well said mate, I sure hope developers take note and bring out more games like this.

Yeah, that doesn't mean those games were actually any "interesting" to the people that play them today. Most people resent reloading to figure out the weaknesses of such and such monster, I am among them. Give me skills, books, or clues, and reasonable time to figure it out on my own, fine, but reloading to die in 2 hits yet again while trying another of my options (is it vulnerable poison ? scratch. to fire ? scratch. to ice ? scratch. etc.) is old skool maybe, but also outdated. At least, I believe I have been rather straightforward about it till now ^.^

People rationalize patterns differently. Take the 2 middle tentacles, for example. I skipped Triss' clue (which I admit was my mistake). This lead me to think that I couldn't trap the tentacles because :

1/ my Yrden wasn't powerful enough ?
2/ there is a chance for the tentacle to resist my trap ?
3/ I could only trap tentacles standing at the right spots (which made sense to me at the time, because of the yellow flashing signs on the ground) ?

Finally, I figured it out, on my own, after watching the creature again. It took me probably longer than you, because we have different experiences of games. So do other players, who, for all that we know, could have much more experience with cRPGs than yours and mine combined.

Therefore, I just ask for some tolerance towards them. One day or another, you might be trapped in a game, looking for advice, and with some help, the challenge might just appear as trivial as it does to us today.

That still doesn't make the design of this particular battle any better to me. If so many players find it frustrating, there IS a valid reason about it : it is about bad design, not about the difficulty.


Sorry, but no.

I could stomach the "reload feast" 10 years back. No longer please. I relish clever and intelligent design.

I don't ask for games to be easier. I don't support DA2 "awesome button" shortcuts. Bring on the "Wraith" or "Monastery" fights. But there has to be a better way than to resort to the game over screen to teach the player how to "win at a game".

Pretending that the Kayran battle is anything but a frustrating, because unnecessarily obscure and ultimately trivial, scripted event is ludicrous.

In its current state, I fail to see how it makes the game any better, or to quote you, less "dumbed down".

Killing the tentacles for me was the easy part and it took me a couple deaths from flying rocks to notice the obvious ramp the fallen bridge makes, seeing it I couldn't help but utter 'Duh.'

QTEs aren't difficult, they are annoying and stupid. Pressing a button over and over again as fast as you can isn't game play, it's just excessive tedium added into games because God of War is popular.

I agree they could have done a much better job with the tutorial and learning curve in the game, as well as providing more intuitive feedback about how to proceed in certain high profile encounters. Furthermore, QTEs just murder kittens in general. I dont know any gamer in maybe 30 years of gaming that likes these things. They might tolerate them, but nobody says, "man, I gotta have more button mashing QTEs in my game...those things are great."

But as far as the (allow me to paraphrase), "Wah, I dont want to die in general" sentiment, I have no sympathy. There is no issue. Put it on easy mode. Thats what its there for, for people who dont want to reload often, and want to succeed without failing.


While I dont find the combat outside of the boss encounters in the game especially hard,I personally love the fact that the game will punish me with a reload if I get lazy and let enemies flank me on even default difficulty. If you dont want to suffer failure in the game, to make success all the sweeter, and all the more earned, there are any number of other rpgs out there that allow you to sleepwalk through them on almost any difficulty setting. For me, I love having this game that remains perfectly playable and interesting, while still keeping me on my toes.

[Edit} But yes, to be perfectly clear, I agree the boss encounters in the game have some serious scaling issues).

Visually the QTE was well done and not too taxing - I don't mind them if the alternative is just a noninteractive cutscene. They should not be punishing though - failure should always be a repeat of the last QTE you messed up, NOT the whole fight.

If you fail a QTE, the animation should just loop around to the start of the last button prompt. Many games have done this before and it's much better than the instant fail system here. Heavy rain got it perfectly right.

Also, I spent a lot of the fight trying to climb the fallen masonry on the right hand side - not the left. It's not clear enough that that's where you are meant to go. Very, very poor signposting.

Don't you patronise me you stupid little boy, you may be used to consolised button mashing but some of us aren't. People have outlined the issues with this fight and the concerns raised are valid. If you have nothing constructive to add I suggest you go elsewhere, no one is impressed.

It's not bad design just because you can't beat it. Stop being so dramatic, good grief.