Hints
- Saving:
- I'll only mention this once: Save often.
- Quick Save before every conversation. It'd suck to screw one up only to have to reload from a slot you saved an hour or more ago.
- A quick save goes in a new slot just the same as using the Save Menu (i.e. it's not a single slot that gets overridden). Therefore there's no reason to do a "hard" save.
- You may want to clear out your save game folder on occasion, as the more saves you have, the longer it takes for the load menu to come up. For example, after Chapter I, I typically have 100 save files. I'm not going back, so I might as well delete them at the start of Chapter II.
- Save your final save game. You can import it into The Witcher 2, and your choices will affect many of the side-quests, and some other subtle options. Keep old final saves in sepearte folders with descriptive names, and possibly a readme.txt describing your choices in that playthrough.
- Combat:
- Use your Signs and Potions often. They make combat easier, especially on the higher difficulty levels.
- Pausing before drinking in the middle of a battle will help you to take less damage.
- an upgraded Aard has a good chance of stunning enemies. When they're stunned, left-click on them to finish them off in one shot.
- In Fistfighting, left-click when the cursor turns into a plus sign.
- Leveling:
- Enemies level up at the same rate as you do, so the game is consistently challenging. This also means you need to keep your gear and skills upgraded.
- Enemeis respawn, so you can grind out a few levels every now and again if you like.
- Loot:
- Money (Orens) is scarce in this game, so loot everything and sell it to vendors.
- Different vendors buy and sell different things, so be sure look around for different types of vendors to sell stuff to.
- There are a limited number of weapons you can carry at once. One will even fill your Trophy slot, so be sure to keep that empty when engaging a Beast.
- Actually, it's really not worth carrying weapons around to vendor them, as you'll have an insane amount of money after a couple of Chapters.
- Items on the ground will disappear after leaving the area. This is both bad if you really wanted to keep something, and good if you want to get rid of something without having to lug it to a vendor.
- Some things you find early on will be useful and unobtainable in later Chapters. Use storage to keep your inventory clean, and use my Stuff to Keep list to keep track of it all.
- Gameplay:
- Read the manual.
- Due to the complexity of combat, I recommend against taking long breaks from the game. It can take a while to get used to switching stances and swords.
- Thanks to an annonomous user on nexusmods: If you don't like Toxicity in the game, which causes those red dots all over the screen, use the save editor to change Toxicity to -9999. Every time you use a potion, it'll still add a few points, but that's probably enough that it'll never go positive. Meditating may reset this to zero, so you may have to edit your current save game.
- Many NPCs will ask you to come back in a day. All you really need to do is leave their building and reenter. Or if they're outside, go in a nearby building and go back outside to them.
- You can just run away from fights. Enemies won't chase you very far.
- Meditating to cause the passage of time doesn't affect anything other than the time of day. You won't loose out on anything, and the date doesn't make any difference.
- System:
- If you install the Rise of the White Wolf mod, and some other mod you have isn't working, take all of its files from the RotWW and put them in a single folder, then take the other mod's files and overwrite the ones in the RotWW folder.
- Read the books before you play the game. The game takes place 5 years after the books, and they give some great background for the games. There are many times where you'll recognize characters and history, where you'd be lost otherwise.
- Time in the game continues to run when ALT-TABbed. Beware doing so when in a "dangerous" area.
last modified 21 June 2020