The Witcher 2 - Previews @ RPS, Destructoid

Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Destructoid both have new Witcher 2 previews based on press builds. Let's start with RPS, who are generally very positive but they do have some concerns:

What isn’t clear from this preview build, is just how flexible core quests are going to be in terms of what you can choose to do. So far I haven’t seen much deviation from the linear path, despite chapter one’s general openness. While I made radically different choices during one key scene, the outcome was always essentially the same. I am hoping that later chapters will be far more forked and give us genuine choice and consequence. But I guess we’ll see.

There are some other issues in this preview build that I think people will find significant. The first of these is the save function. Generally the game auto-saves at important points, but there’s potential in the more open areas for you to cover a lot of ground between auto-saves, and therefore lose a lot of game time if you die. This is covered by there being a quicksave function, which is only available outside of combat or specific set-piece scenarios. Weirdly, however, there is no manual save. Seems like a bit of an oversight.

On to Destructoid, who recount their experiences, ending with some positive comments:

I looked back on my experience with Dragon Age II afterwards, and BioWare's fantasy RPG now feels like it's in almost every way a mere toddler in the shadow of The Witcher 2. That's not to say DA II sucked, but a single village in The Witcher 2 already has more personality than all of Kirkwall. Moreover, the politics now run deep without treating you like a child for once. Characters feel human and treat you like an adult, the player is expected to deal with temporal jumps in narrative to keep up with the story, choices actually carry weight, and oh my god the breast textures!