Now I'm playing TW2 for second time and still trying to find reason why to visit pubs in game? I think, that there is none. First of all there is no need of alcohol or grease essence for elixirs and oils preparation. So also inn-keeper and waitress in pub has no purpose. Why need the to buy fish or plum? Other thing is that I have found only one full scale pub in TW2 in Flotsam (I don't reach Vergen in Iorweth path yes, so I don't know if there is any).

I'm missing option to (for example in Flotsam) to sit in pub, have drink and meal, chat with friends. Triss lean on the window and Jaskier sleep on the the desk almost all the time - except that one scene at the beginning of the chapter.

Unfortunately not much point, no. I do miss that from TW1. I guess the shopkeeps are just there for atmosphere. The illusion works pretty well if you don't actually try to use it as a pub though :p

Yeah, what happened to the drinking games and flirting with waitresses? And didn't Geralt once said in TW1 that innkeepers know a lot of things?

I wonder why we can buy food when it has no purpose. And they might as well bring back the booze.

Yeah, there is a lot missing there that could have been cool :(

Still, the pubs in flotsam and vergen have a lot of atmosphere I think, you can talk to your friends, arm wrestle, dice poker, fist-fight, so there's still a lot to do.

Off topic, but I love Skalen Burgen's dialougue when you beat him twice at dice poker :)

I miss booze from TW2. Both as an atmospheric element and as an alchemy ingredient.

I also wish you could sit down on a damn bench or lay in bed. And that your friends kept some sort of a schedule, instead of drinking their brains out non-stop. Never figured Triss for a lush, but she keeps up with Zoltan and Dandy just fine...

i wish the food you can buy wasn't rotten junk.

I got the same feeling about pubs, and that feeling was persistent through the whole game.

Unlike TW1, those places lacks some interest as we dont get all previous options like buying alcohol, herbs, mostly alchemy ingredients, and sometimes for sidequests (buy white wine for the party with Shani and Carmen was fun ^^).

Infortunately, the feeling I got is there was a lot of efforts brought for graphics, ambience and story, but when trying to scratch out the shine of the first (impressive) look, there is barely something consistent to find out there...

In other hand, I think it's because of the apparent "perfection" of the whole game, we expect to find all this perfection in all aspects.
Maybe are we more demanding, maybe that's because of some previous immersive components we don't find out in TW2 ?

The fact, indeed, is that a humongous lot of work has been done to build a new engine, and some choices has been made accordingly to reduce development time.

I hope a future "enhanced edition" that will add some stuff to make this game truly near perfection... ;)