The Witcher catch-all

I hope they made a serious dent in the load times.

They claim a dramatic improvement in both saving and loading times. You can check out the rest of the patch notes here.

My download is at 30% now and taking it's sweet time...

4) Some bugfixes mentioned above will work only if a game is restarted from scratch, for some others a corresponding act needs to be restarted.

WTF

Beat it and loved it. Spoilers:

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I gave the grandmaster up to the Wild Hunt. I assume the GM was Alvin, but there's dialogue I missed by making my choice, can anyone fill me in?

That was one cool finale starting with Ali-Baba's spider. Big battles one after another. Only fault: All the cutscenes really stress how awkward the game is with integrating cutscenes. Why do I start 2 feet from the baddy and THEN take 4 seconds to draw my sword!? Arrghh...

The game really understands the heart of any story are characters, so it was great to see how so many of them found their way into all 5 acts.

I joined with the Order all throughout the game and chose Triss.
My ending was:
Siegfried is the new Grandmaster and the Order consolidated power.
Non-humans persecuted even more harshly.
Nothing about Triss (which was weird)?
Sorceresses thrown out of the court.

Anyone get anything different? And what happened to the other witchers? They disappeared from the story after the prologue.

Final cutscene was cool. Nice way to lead up to a sequel while showing off some sword fighting. Crazy, another Witcher! Maybe we should've talked this through before cutting his arm off?
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My ending comments...

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I also went order + triss. But I defeated the King of the Haunt instead of giving up GM. Instead I just walked up to him and stabbed him to death.
Not sure if your ending showed it, but Geralt finds the necklace on the GM corpse. The same that he gave to Alvin but aged. Which is a pretty good clue that GM = Alvin that travelled through time. But the ending cutscene confused the hell out of me. They zoom into the face of the other witcher, but I couldn't figure out who that was supposed to be. So the whole point of dramatic zoom in was lost on me.

Did anybody figure out who that's supposed to be?
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Strekos wrote:

I hope they made a serious dent in the load times.

My load times were cut by almost half, but other people are reporting very little difference, so...

Patch Fixes wrote:

Patch 1.2 Major Fixes
======================================================

Gameplay and text bugs fixed:
- Fixes for Alina not being at her home when she should (Act 4).
- Wife's Tears Potion fixes.
- Fixes for usable doors on the swamps (Act 5).
- Fixes for Alchemist in manufacture giving quest items to Geralt (Act 3).
- Fixes for some items to be found in Fields (Act 4).
- Fixes for a disappearing enemy in quest Haunted House (Act2).
- Fixed problems with Alvin's spawn (Act 1).
- Few minor text fixes for all languages.

Code bugs fixed:
- Loading times are much faster!
- Saving is much faster!
- Another portion of stability improvements.
- Fix for rare "red rectangle" effect on loading bar.
- Quest tracking fixes.
- Some cursor fixes connected with finishers in tight places.
- Quest now won't update when Geralt is dead causing multiple problems.
- Autosave mechanism fixes (numeration).
- Savegame files fixes – some irrelevant information was sometimes generated inside.
- The game won't make an autosave if Geralt has an effect preventing him from talking (like knockdown, stun, push) - the result would be no talking at all for the rest of the game.
- Now you can't attack neutral NPCs if you input the second (etc.) sword sequence in them, while first attacking a hostile.
- Dandelion's music won't be 'echoed' while changing location twice.
- The game can handle broken savegames now – it returns to main menu.
- Motion blur effect won't stay active despite Blizzard potion wearing off – drinking, then changing location, then cutscene.
- Final fixes for weapons disappearing from enemies' hands.
- Grass and small stones being multiplied – fixed.
- Fixes for receiving damage from Striga while being far away.

Art bugs fixed:
- Few level decoration fixes.
- Fixes for barghest attack animation.

Anyway, for me the loading times were cut by about a third, but my PC was loading the game pretty quickly to begin with (about on par with Neverwinter Nights 2 or Oblivion, nothing to complain about). Saving times on the other hand, amazingly, take only about a fourth of the pre-patch time, only a few seconds for me now.

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"Giving up" the GM was just a dialogue choice. I still stabbed him. With his last words as, "that sword's for monsters..."

I also found the medallion on the GM but it still feels like Alvin = GM is more of a 75/25 thing rather than 100% sure. Either because the developers wanted to screw around with us, or took so long to write the story, there were some inconsistencies left early on.

The yellow-eyed assassin is just a sequel tie-on, I think. It's just suggesting that there's other witchers out there, some with different morals.
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IMAGE(http://www.thewitcher.com/resources/upload/card/card_high.jpg)

Did he just slap the liquor out of that guy's hand? Also, booby, but it is painted so I call safe for work.

This was emailed to me by CD Projekt Red as the Official Witcher Christmas card (complete with Little Orphan Annie Decoder Pin.)

I actually didn't notice the oogaba until after I posted it, but then I figured, hey, it's tasteful drunken debauchery, so what the hell.

We're Witcher fans. It's how we roll.

You know the devs must have a one track mind when they can't even design a Christmas card without a woman showing off her cleavage.

New background! That's awesome.

Load and save times have been improved quite a bit for me. Nice patch!

Looking forward to continuing Act 3 now that the patch is out... hopefully next week I'll be able to jump back in, in between sessions of Rock Band and College Hoops 2k8 that is.
---Todd

I haven't played around extensively yet but it appears to me that one of the things they did to reduce load times was to take the CD checks out that happened whenever you would enter one of the main areas. I appreciate this a lot since my drive takes a couple seconds to spin up and doesn't do it particularly quietly either.

My load/save times have greatly decreased, but it does take out the skill exploit.

Load / save times also amazing for me. With this, the mod for better dialogue, and original polish voice acting, I'm set to go. I'm really, really happy I waited until after Christmas to sink my teeth into this game.

Dysplastic wrote:

Load / save times also amazing for me. With this, the mod for better dialogue, and original polish voice acting, I'm set to go. I'm really, really happy I waited until after Christmas to sink my teeth into this game.

You, uh, wouldn't be able to provide me with info about where you managed to find those original polish voice files, would you?

:shifteyes:

I swear to God if Act II doesn't end soon I'm going to scream.

Still getting some random crashes on vista 64bit.

Dysplastic wrote:

Load / save times also amazing for me. With this, the mod for better dialogue, and original polish voice acting, I'm set to go. I'm really, really happy I waited until after Christmas to sink my teeth into this game.

Is this the mod you used?

polypusher wrote:

Is this the mod you used?

Yes. At least, everyone who is cool is doing it. The latest version of the mod would be in this thread, along with the first page having a few examples of what the differences are between the three scripts. There are a few issues with timing and overall comprehension on the original scriptduring the Prologue, afterwards though it's a great improvement over the "cut" version.

Very interested in this game, but I'd been holding out for a demo to see if the game ran well enough on my 7800GT/2G Ram system. Unfortunately, the demo crashes at start-up each time I try and launch it - going to have to fool with it a little bit more, but it's leaving an unfortunately bad taste in my mouth to start.

DrunkenSleipnir wrote:

Unfortunately, the demo crashes at start-up each time I try and launch it - going to have to fool with it a little bit more, but it's leaving an unfortunately bad taste in my mouth to start.

If you get it working, consider the invested tinkering time as an incentive to push through the entire demo. I nearly filed the game off to never-never land thanks to its prologue.

As you've undoubtedly read, the game is rough around the edges throughout, but it does work some creeping charm on you after things open up.

My computer is having some issues loading the Trade Quarter. Nothing major. However, I've had the Finders Keepers quest completed for about 11 hours of gameplay and the dude is NEVER there to turn it in. I'm beginning to think he'll never show. And I do have another possible spoiler question.

[color=white]Does the the Carmen werewolf quest ever start to resolve itself? It was one of the first quests I got in act 3 and I still can't ask the right person or view the right event to get the ball rolling on that one. Does it reach some point where it becomes obvious or am I just not in the right place or what? I know the 3 cures, but it won't let me find out who it is. Should I be patient or am I missing something? And did anyone else sleep with the clerk in town hall? The card is just ridiculous.[/color]

Grenn, you'll have an encounter with the subject of your spoiler question as you pursue the main questline.

OK, because I spent a half an hour running around at midnight a and talking to everyone to see if they might progress it.

Okay, in case you wonder how the retail English script/voiceover works against the uncut English script/Polish voiceover, I've created a video to illustrate the difference. The Witcher - Conversation Comparison, keep in mind you will want to watch this full-screened in order to read the subtitles.

If you need any help in getting the game to work with the uncut English script/Polish voiceover, send me a PM and I can point you in the right direction.

Got the demo working, and put a few hours into it. I'm pretty pleased with the gameplay thus far - my only real complaint is that during cut-scenes the game ignores my video settings and drops to 2FPS. Anyone have this problem in retail?

One more question: Would the international version be the one to get, or are the patches for the US version satisfactory for translation/uncensoring?