Rage Quitting Witcher 2

Witcher 2 is one of my favourite RPGs. However, I'm losing patience with it and on my 2 last playthroughs I almost rage quit as well. Here's the issue (and I'm playing on the Dark difficulty):

I'm re-enacting the Vergen battle in chapter 2 as Selkirk. Whenever I load the latest save game, this is how it goes:

1. Watch the unskipable battle between Selkirk and some knight.
2. Watch the cut scene of Geralt becoming Selkirk
3. Defeat the first 3 enemy soldiers. After defeating them you can't save.
4. Defeat the 4 other soldiers. Still can't save.
5. Watch the cutscene of Geralt talking to Selkirk, which can't be skipped. Only the individual lines can be skipped as in regular dialog.
6. Still no save.
7. Geralt starts to lose health for some reason rapidly and has to defeat a powerful opponent.
8. More cut scenes.
9. Finally an auto save happens, but when I load it Geralt is still rapidly losing health and has to face even a more difficult opponent. After loading, Geralt is directly in front of the opponent and if I don't move quickly the game is over.

10. Click load, which freezes the screen while the game accesses the thousand saved games, because Witcher is unique in this regard. Wait for the loading to finish and start over. Can't click quick load since I would start with 10% health, losing it quickly and right before the enemy with no Quen activated.

One of the worst designed levels of any game I've played recently, pretty much, because of these technical reasons. When you first enter the area it's equally annoying, with 3 or so different load screens, an unskippable conversation between a group of soldiers, after which you're thrown in to a ring surrounded by fire and with no warning, in a body of a regular soldier, facing 4 or 5 opponents. If you fail, which you will likely to do, you need go through the painfully long loading screens, the first of which is Geralt just facing the fog for a second.

EDIT: So it seems the difficult can't be changed during the re enactment thing either. I don't remember Geralt losing health rapidly during non Dark playthroughs, but I might be wrong.

Ha. I really disliked what I played of W2. It's a long winded choose your own adventure book about characters that kind of suck. Looks great though. The first town felt smaller than nwn 1 areas and I quit after being forced to linearly follow some person with a bubble shield. I really don't get the appeal, but I know I'm in the minority.

I think the whole sequence is spectacular, but the two parts where you fight as a wraith dude were not well though out - on the dark difficulty, I´ve only played through it with quite a lot of points invested into swordswanship so it was easy (because some of the skills transfer to the wraith dudes), but I imagine it must really suck when played with most points invested into the other trees, it´s clearly unfair.

Anyway, it seems like the biggest issue you have is Geralt loosing health, which I think may be caused by having equipped one of the weapons added specifically to the dark mode. I haven´t made any of these, but IIRC these weapons were supposed to cause loss of health when wielded without the full related armor set equipped.

Also, the way the save games were handled in the game sure sucks. Personally I was just "manually" deleting them from the save folder periodically to prevent slowdowns, but, and I´m not sure about this, I think that Enhanced Edition added a way to delete them in-game via "del" key.

Wow, that sounds incredibly annoying and I can't blame you for shelving the game. I've played Witcher 2 a bit but haven't gotten to the area you describe.

I absolutely hate unskippable cut scenes. The cinematics at the beginning of the game were all skippable for me, seems very odd that the devs would choose to add some unskippable scenes in Chapter 2.

DeepO:

It's true, I wear only part of the Oathbreaker armour, but I did not notice being poisoned before. When Geralt is losing health, this sort of shadowy aura surrounds him. The ridiculous character screen is of no use in determining what's going on.

CountChocula:

Some small cut scenes can't be skipped but they are rare. There's these cut scenes that take place in the regular dialog view, however. You can skip them only by rapidly clicking the mouse to skip each individual line. The game likes to auto save *before* these dialogs instead of the actual difficult fights.