It would be nice to see Letho using a scabbard or perhaps a leather strap depicting his sword hanging around his neck.

It breaks immersion where the sword hanging on his back floating... just like Dragon Age.. Not to nitpick but i see TW2 is a game of details.

Now how could they miss it?

We never get to see Letho in detail so probably he has something to hold his sword like the thing on Roche's back and you just missed it.

you dont see any others NPC having a scabbard as well. The scabbards will put a heavy demand on your GPU that most PC won't be able to handle smoothly.

I think the dev, however, did a good job making the weapon attached to the NPCs. In Dragon Age, and other RPGs, included two world, even the new shooting game such as COD black ops, I see the weapons floating inches away from NPC's back.

you don't know what you're talking about.

to put simply, it was too much work to make scabbard for all of the sword weapons, since they varied a lot in size, carry position and thickness.

for some of the more common swords carried by guards, i think it's possible to do it like geralt with a scabbard attached to the hip rather than the back.

i know exatly what I talk about. Have you play WC1 with scabbard mod? check it for yourself

Well that's a mod, maybe it's not optimized very well. I don't see how a few extra polys on Letho is going to kill your computer.A scabbard is not a complex object.

CDPR removed scabbards altogether from TW1 because of the demand they put on GPU's

If you install the mod for TW1 with the scabbards you can see it does slow it down some...still I think they should have made it an option to have it or not

Letho has his sword behind him on his back. Adding a small holder or scabbard or even a leather strap will do.

It won't have any toll to GPU with the small scabbard or leather strap at all since the fine details like stitching thread of Geralt's jacket can also be seen.

It's more likely they have missed out Letho's sword holder as they have ran out of development time.

Game like Dragon Age where you see all characters where their weapons magically hanging on their backs clearly shows how lazy the developers are.

Letho uses a really long sword. A flamberge. It's not possible to draw it out from his back if it would use a scabbard.

The scabbard itself might not be, but the algorithm to ensure that the scabbard behaves as it is supposed to relative to the sword might. Particularly if it needs to be run for every single character in the game, and particularly if it must be run on the CPU without any advance knowledge about which characters are and are not actually visible in the current scene.

Some sort of algorithm is required, as it really does no good to just draw a scabbard in a fixed position. That would indeed be simple to do, but it would look and behave very poorly. And then people would just be complaining that "swords move right through scabbards like they're not even there sometimes and it really breaks immersion".

True, Letho has a very long sword.. Probably he need to sheath out his sword for combat perhaps adding the scabbard or leather strap would cost additional animations.

Do we actually see Iorwerth equipping his bow from his back? Otherwise if the whole game was coded that his bow on his back were just for decoration purposes

... 'cause real men sheath their swords between the rib cage and shoulder blade.


... on a serious side note about scabbards: I didn't like decision by CDP devs of making the scabbard belt a separate mesh from the scabbards themselves, and then attaching the belt to the trunk meshes. Belt and scabbards should be one mesh. It's getting in the way of my "ambiance" modding, since modding tools for Witcher are scarce.

Actually, yes. But that isn't a problem since it uses the same weapon/animation as the rest of Elven archers in the game.

i figure since it's such a long blade he just hooks it on his back.

Interesting. I'l have to go and check in TW1 and see what is what. At the end of that thing, I was carrying three swords.