Difficulty in The Witcher 3

I’ve just about had enough of the Hard difficulty in The Witcher 3. It’s fine for normal encounters, but when it comes to bosses it’s over that fine line between challenging and frustrating. And it’s not because the encounters are actually too difficult, it’s because of two things: 1) The controls are not responsive enough, and 2) It takes too long to re-load from your previous save.

The controls. Arg, the controls. I guess it’s “animation lock” that’s the problem. You know, where they make it a priority to make sure the character animations smoothly transition from one pose to the next, instead of prioritizing your button presses and the actions you actually want to do. So if your guy is in the middle of doing something-say, swinging his sword-you have to wait for him to complete that action before he’ll start the next thing-say, dodging-and during that interminable wait, you get nailed and die because on Hard difficulty the bosses hit pretty damn hard and fast. To me, that says the developers are more concerned with the gameplay experience of the people who might be watching you play instead of the people actually playing the game. Yuck. I hate it. Frickin’ respond when I press the buttons!

So inevitably you die because the game doesn’t respond to your button presses fast enough. You click to re-load your last save. You wait. And wait. And wait. The waiting really makes me want to rage-quit this game, because I’m already mad that the game killed me even though I knew exactly what to do and pressed the buttons in plenty of time to avoid dying. And in the case of the !@#$!@ Werewolf in that one side quest, it’s killed me repeatedly at least a dozen times already and I’m just sick of it.

So yeah, I might drop back to Normal or even Easy. But it keeps telling me I won’t get an achievement if I switch, so maybe I’ll slog it out a little longer…