The Witcher 2 - GDC Tidbits
 

Here's a collection of Witcher 2 tidbits from GDC, many relating to joint CEO Marcin Iwinski's presentation.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun reports "CD Projekt will never use DRM again", along with some specific territory numbers:
VG247 says the 360 Dark Edition has sold out in the UK and also that "releasing free DLC for The Witcher on 260 may be a bit tricky".
CVG talks with "lead level artist Marek Ziemak on what he was expecting from their new Red engine".
Lastly, Eurogamer has a preview of the Enhanced Edition. On the new content:
More information.

This was one of the reason I was willing to buy witcher 2 day 1 (i.e, pay full gog price). They produce a decent game but also support it after the fact with decent dlc/mechanic fixes and reasonable free dlc. I.e, if they make reasonable profit they are willing to allocate a certain amount of funding for additional content.

Compare this to EA or even Bethesda (which is not nearly as bad as EA but still a bit overdone in the DLC department). It isn't just that EA sells DLC but the quality is rock bottom and the concept of a 'day 1' dlc is horribly insulting. Tack on top of this the requirement of origin which is not quite as bad as MS client; it still is quite annoying (I know not everyone likes steam; but to be honest I've not had any real annoyances with it - while in my limited usage of EA's origin it has already annoyed me twice).
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Anyways Larian and CD Projek are two companies I think have (so far) treated their customers very well (while DKS did have DRM; the company was polite to remove it after the 1st year - which is quite ok with me; contrast this to UBI soft amazingly annoying DRM).
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Anyways thank you CD Projek for your support and attitude.

I don't think you should throw Bethesda in with EA. I'm a Witcher fan but I can make a strong argument that Bethesda provides truckloads more content to start with and CD Projekt's fixes come a year later when they want to make more money by releasing a new version.

The UK figure isn't all that low. Its population is 60+ million while Germany plus the other countries are probably 100 million. It's more that the Polish figure is nice and high :)

I happily support CDPR, it's companies like them that restore faith in PC gaming to PC gamers. Sure the major DLC (EE) was a year later but the support was ongoing non-stop, prompt patches and support count for a lot in my book.

Already high respect, increase.

I realy like CDPR and bought wicher I and 2 on day #1, in the case of the witcher 2 i made a point buying through GOG for them to have more revenue, so i'm a concerned and big fan of them.

With that said, i have to also point out that its part of their marketing to try and apeal to the PC FAN (like me) to actualy buy their games, apealing to our heart and stop piracy, revealing a little bit an hidden agenda of them.

Proof of that is that they always marketed TW2 as a PC exclusive before launch, and launched the game with clear indications that it was made with consoles in mind, and a little bit after launch (when the dire hard PC fans already bought it lured by the idea of "PC exclusive"), they finaly anounced it would go to consoles aswell when they already knew that even before PC launch. (check the UI, no 1920x1200 resolution support on launch, windows sound settings, etc, etc)


Don't get me wrong, i realy like CDPR and i'm a big fan of their games and company as a whole as very talented people, but i can also see that it was somewhat of a ruse what they did with TW2 PC "exclusive" release marketing.

It is also an awesome gesture of them to release so much quality updates and free DLC, it reveals they are not money-grabbers like EA (oh my god i'm still trying to get over the whole ME3 agenda…).

I repeat, i LIKE CDR, but i'm not blindly stating they are the extreme super good-boys they are trying to apear. Its a refreshing and realy cool company though.

While they didn't officially announce the xbox version pre pc launch it was widely know and hardly a secret.

I think they are a good company but Im not blind to the fact that they need to make money. I like that they wait awhile before releasing new content. I hate when Im half way through a game or just finished and new content comes out.

I'm not sure where anyone would get the idea that TW2 would always be a PC exclusive. CD Projekt stated from the beginning that they were considering a console port after finishing the PC release.

CD Projekt, Larian, Piranha Bytes and Obsidian… The last bastion of triple A level RPG developers…

I'll continue to support CD Projekt. They take interest in being ethical businesspeople. Sadly, the support of a long AAA development/publishing/marketing cycle is beyond the independent studio's -or small publisher's- budget to do alone, so not everything goes as they'd have done it from the start if they'd been self-funded. It's cool that they add these things later in their releases, and do very nice updates to their games as a free service to their customers well after the initial release date.

Maybe they're the last bastion of rpg devs you like but you can't throw Larian and PB in the "triple A" bag; critical reception, sales and production values of the games they make have yet to reach that standard.

If those are the things you're using to judge them then you might as well take Obsidian off that list as well.