9 Terrible Openings That Almost Killed Great Video Games

9. The Witcher 2

Unlike its sequel, The Witcher 2 was an unforgivingly difficult game. Featuring combat that required a precise understanding of enemy types and a battle system where traps, potions and magic all needed to be used on the fly between regular sword swings, the title aimed to punish players until they eventually mastered its mechanics.

Which would be fine, but the game itself did an incredibly poor job of communicating how to do anything other than running straight towards your untimely death in the first few hours.

Without any real tutorial or explanation of how to actually use the array of offensive and defensive capabilities at your disposal, the opening of The Witcher 2 became a frustrating game of trial and error just to get past the first couple of missions.

Later in the title's Enhanced Edition, some of these issues were fixed (and they finally introduced an actual tutorial rather than throwing you straight to the wolves), but by then it was too little, too late.