Game difficulty level

During the creation of the walkthrough, the game was played on hard difficulty to provide a reasonable amount of challenge. The game's difficulty only affects opponents' health and damage, though, so this should have no bearing on the walkthrough itself. Should you find yourself looking for an even additional challenge, check the game options for the "Difficult QTEs" option to add a smaller timeframe for quick time events. Note that choosing hard or making the QTEs more challenging is not exactly recommended for your first playthrough, unless you're the type of person who appreciates the extra challenge right out of the gate. Insane difficulty essentially "gives" you only one life (it disables loading upon dying), though remember that you may reload if the situation looks bad (and you still haven't died).


Game version

There have been a handful of patches (1.0a, 1.1, 1.2, and just prior to the publication of this walkthrough, 1.3) applied to The Witcher 2. The walkthrough was written using the 1.2 version of the game.


Walkthrough organization

The game's prologue is separated into four parts, which are divided up in such a way that it follows your dialogue choices with Roche in the La Valette dungeons. Once he asks you to recite the whole siege as it happened, you'll be given several dialogue options where each one tells a different episode. Part 1 in the prologue covers the first dialogue option, and so on. As far as acts go, all the main and side quests have their own respective pages enrolled in the navigation bar to the right.