The Witcher 2 Catch-All

A lot of people in here are playing already, because collectioner's edition got unlocked 24h earlier. I'm off to pick up my preorder and then wait till midnight

ebarstad wrote:

Just watched all four recent videos again. CDProjekt does some of the best animations out there. I still think the opening (before the game starts) and ending sequences of the original game are two of the best I've ever seen.

Those movies were outsourced and produced by studio of Tomasz Baginski, Oscar nominee (for short animation "Cathedral"). Search on YouTube for his projects.

You should get some EU funds for all the positive publicity you provide for Poland, UCRC

Seriously, what a month. My daughter was born, there was ice hockey world championship in my city, meanwhile Obama killed Osama, then The Witcher 2 comes and May still has two weeks left. There's something incredible lurking around the corner, I'm sure of it. Maybe Games for Windows Live stops sucking...

wanderingtaoist: Woah now, I take offense at your unrelenting optimism. You know that ain't ever happening.

Congrats on your daughter, though.

1st patch:

Several major balance fixes (economy and fight)
On screen fixes (items descriptions, journal etc.)
Audio mix fixes
Several audio areas, music, cutscene fixes and added better sounds
Many UI fixes (functional, smoother and more user friendly ex. inventory items selection)
Many fixes to quests, quests markers
Visual fixes to fade outs, blackscreens in scenes, cutscenes
Many community fixes - work, npc’s life
Big opponents fights balance and fixes
Many cutscenes fixes - animations, items, lipsync
Gamepad fixes - playing gamepad is now much better
Camera fixes - collisions with objects, collisions with npc’s, combat camera improvements
Some hair physics fixes
Minor QTE fixes
Several locations fixes - objects collisions, envoirements improvements, lights, effects
Crafting, shops, alchemy improvements
Added new autosaves in important places (ex. before fight with Letho, Arachas, Draug)
Some random crashes fixes
Dice poker improvements - logic bugs fixes

Less than 14 hours.

Negative publicity, for turn:
CDP Red spent 12 hours fixing activation patch/servers issues. Good news is, only CE buyers (who were eligible for unlocking day before everyone else) suffered, and we, common folk should be untroubled.

edit: And, on more private note, they also somehow f*cked up with regular version preorders and sent them two days later they were supposed to, which means I'll get my copy tomorrow (I hope) instead of today/yesterday. Annoying, because I was planning to get couple of hours in after midnight when it unlocks.

For a long single-player game such as TW2, I find the rush to get playing at zero-hour kind of funny as the game will likely take weeks or months to complete. That said, opening up the GOG downloader will be one of the first things I do tomorrow and then saturate my line downloading all the bonuses.

Scratched wrote:

For a long single-player game such as TW2, I find the rush to get playing at zero-hour kind of funny as the game will likely take weeks or months to complete.

I dare you to tell me that in two, maybe three days.

I have jury duty tomorrow, knowing this game is out and I can't play it is going to make it even more miserable

Nuean wrote:

I have jury duty tomorrow, knowing this game is out and I can't play it is going to make it even more miserable

Just tell them that you regularly shoot people in the face with arrows. Nobody will want you on their jury. Unless it's somebody that's accused of shooting people in the face with arrows.

The Witcher 2 AND LA Noire.

Man, tomorrow is going to be a blur.

Scratched wrote:

For a long single-player game such as TW2, I find the rush to get playing at zero-hour kind of funny as the game will likely take weeks or months to complete. That said, opening up the GOG downloader will be one of the first things I do tomorrow and then saturate my line downloading all the bonuses.

I expect the intro and begining to be fantastic.

It takes quite a while to prepare 9.6GB of data for install. The bonus stuff looks awesome.

Perhaps we pre-emptively need a spoiler thread.

Just started it, ~1,5h in. Some of cut-scences look unbelievable, interface and GUI is one of the best I've seen, I'm getting used to combat but it's certainly better than first game.

Start it on normal! Combat can be really hard once you face more than couple enemies. Difficulty can be changed at any point in options, though.

edit:
It's all especially amazing to me because while I'm playing I still have sights of early W1 development, humble beginnings of something which at the time felt more like NWN mod than standalone product, in my head:

Some years laters and those guys look like new Bioware of cRPG PC gaming.

Well, my copy is dispatched. Normally would get it tomorrow, but it's election day, so a public holiday. Dammit.

Oh, and I hope my GPU works with only 384 megs of memory.

UCRC wrote:

edit:
It's all especially amazing to me because while I'm playing I still have sights of early W1 development, humble beginnings of something which at the time felt more like NWN mod than standalone product, in my head:

There was a version of TW1 that started by Metropolis I think (the developers who were doing the console port of TW1), in the 3DFX days. It's been a long time simmering in the pot before it saw the light of day.

From playing to the first save point, if I had to criticise TW2 on a few points it would be facial animation, and coming from TW1 Geralt's voice actor acts a bit flat (little emotion) and hoarse without the physicality of his character suggesting it (he's essentially a super-human). That's really just the first five minutes though, so it's scratching the surface.

Scratched wrote:

From playing to the first save point, if I had to criticise TW2 on a few points it would be facial animation, and coming from TW1 Geralt's voice actor acts a bit flat (little emotion) and hoarse without the physicality of his character suggesting it (he's essentially a super-human). That's really just the first five minutes though, so it's scratching the surface.

I've seen English actor and it's much worse than Polish counterpart, I think. Can you switch to Polish like you could in W1?

BTW: paper figurines are fun. My preorder got Geralt and Triss, best way to pass lengthy installation ever.

UCRC wrote:

I've seen English actor and it's much worse than Polish counterpart, I think. Can you switch to Polish like you could in W1?

Polish isn't included in the GOG distribution (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish), although it's meant to be available later.

UCRC wrote:

BTW: paper figurines are fun. My preorder got Geralt and Triss, best way to pass lengthy installation ever.

.jpg files don't have the same character as physical paper, and I don't have a printer hooked up right now, although I've got 7 characters worth.

Got up at 3am to play it soon as it unlocked (I love my new work from home job!) So far I think the game is excellent. Combat feels slower and less forgiving than I remember, it took me a couple of tries to get through the first encounters. You have to be quite tactical with your signs and items (I am playing on hard) Also imported my saves from W1 no problem. Graphics are fantastic, but performance seems just okay, the game feels sluggish at times but I can't tell if it's my PC or the game is just supposed to be that way.

Only complaint is that the install took FOREVER. Almost 1 hour.

Not at home today, so I couldn't try it on my desktop. I did, however, install it on my laptop and fire it up to see if it would work, and it turns out, it does! At the native resolution of 1366x768, it runs at 15-25 fps throught the first part.

So for anyone who is wondering if it'll run on an m11x r2, it will run barely on low settings at the native resolution.

I think I'm going to have to go home after work today so that I can play this game as it was meant to be played. The opening sequence left a really good impression on me.

Just rub it in that I am going to have to wait til I get home and download it on Steam, why don't you all ?

davet010 wrote:

Just rub it in that I am going to have to wait til I get home and download it on Steam, why don't you all ?

See my post above to make you feel better.

You know that phrase "misery loves company" ?

At the end of the day, it's still misery

I'm just hoping that most people haven't bought it on Steam, so I might actually get reasonable download speeds.

For those running nvidia 3d, there's a new beta driver - http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread....

davet010 wrote:

You know that phrase "misery loves company" ?

At the end of the day, it's still misery

Yeah, true. But tomorrow when you're playing I will still be miserable and consumed with jealousy.

Scratched wrote:

For those running nvidia 3d, there's a new beta driver - http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread....

Thanks!

I got to first act (=some more open world and wandering around) and I've got to say, Polish voiceacting and background dialogues are really great. It's all highly stylized and very hard to translate, I'd guess, which makes me (almost) sorry that English speakers won't be able to enjoy it as much.

UCRC wrote:
Scratched wrote:

For those running nvidia 3d, there's a new beta driver - http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread....

Thanks!

For clarification, that's the stereoscopic 3D stuff, rather than any performance fix.

Waiting for 2 trigger conditions before I buy:
1) I finish Mirror's Edge and Crysis 2 or
2) There's a sale on GOG or Steam that drops this to $30 or below.
Whichever comes first.

2b) My resolve slips.

I played a little bit of the prologue before I went to work this morning. No invert y-axis option for mouse or gamepad (although I'm grateful for 360 pad support). Hopefully they fix that soon because the game, so far is impressive.

I've played maybe two hours and I love it so far it's a really pretty game even though I haven't maxed it out. I don't like that it's letter boxed though, and there was one part where I died over and over

Spoiler:

When the dragon shows up and you have to make your way through those wooden hallways I kept getting set on fire and it would always kill me. Took me like 15 tries.

Also, I think the English voice acting is great, and the writing too for that matter. I like it much more than Dragon Age's.