…Okay. Apparently you’re supposed to roll around a lot, a feature that wasn’t even in Witcher 1. How do you roll? Well, you can double-tap a directional key on the keypad or…

You can plug in a wired Xbox 360 controller and press one button.

Also, locking on to enemies is important. This is also easier with the 360 controller than with the keyboard.

I seriously feel I got snookered on this game. And the sad thing is, it wasn’t even on my damn radar until I saw some trailers touting its “living world” tech (and you know how I be about the living world tech).

Now I’m stuck with what is apparently an Xbox 360 game masquerading as a PC game (and yes, CD Projekt just announced a 360 version). I don’t mind playing PC games with a wired 360 controller (and yes, I own one) when it’s clear that the game was designed for that. I recently played all the way through Red Faction: Guerrilla using a 360 controller because I knew that game had been designed for consoles first. (Red Faction: Guerrilla is an excellent game, by the way.)

But this was supposed to be a PC game. And it was supposed to be a Witcher game. Now everything I knew about combat and magic from Witcher 1 is gone so none of my skills map, plus if you’re using mouse and keyboard your control scheme is non-optimal.

Plus, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, blocking drains your mana bar. Seriously. This makes blocking completely useless, which is why you have to roll around on the ground like you’re Samus Aran in ball form.

And of course, you are told fuck-all of this when you actually start the game.

This goes beyond bad design. This feels disingenuous, like they’re figuring out the problems with the game on us more lenient PC testers so they can fix them for the 360 version (and I will bet $100 right now that the 360 version has a complete tutorial when it ships.)

After all the goodwill CD Projekt gathered after Witcher 1 – releasing the improved version for free to everyone who bought the original, adding a whole bunch of features (again for free) and having a pretty awesome base game to begin with – for them to piss all that down the toilet in favor of the 360 leaves a very, very sour taste in my mouth. Trust me when I say that Witcher 3 will not be a must-buy for me.