RPG Codex - 2008 In Review

You're right, we should expect games to work out of the box.

But it's not like The Witcher *started* this trend, is it now? Fallout, VtM:B, NWN2, PS:T much?

The load times originally were very annoying, but not show stoppers. Glad that they patched it, but I would have played and liked the game even with that flaw.

Here's the real and official Witcher review at the Codex .
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=165

Prime Junta said:

But it's not like The Witcher *started* this trend, is it now? Fallout, VtM:B, NWN2, PS:T much?

Click to expand...

The Witcher didn't start the trend of unfinished releases, but it did start the trend of somehow getting people to not just forgive them for the unfinished release but to actually thank them for fixing it.

Obviously, EE is more than just a fix and CDP Red could've left it at it so I'm not as negative about it as DU is. But at the end of the day, it's just hype for fixing a game, which no matter how you twist or turn it is just wrong.

It's marketing. It's there to get more people to buy it. I don't see anything horribly "wrong" about it. It was a good game, and deserves to sell as much as it possibly can. If the EE hype worked to sell more copies, I for one don't object. I bought one myself.

What's more, I don't really see how much "hype" there was of it. They polished it up and re-released it. There wasn't an insane amount of interest in it here; there was a brief flurry of traffic as some new people picked it up, and that was it. From where I'm at, they didn't promise anything that they didn't deliver on: they promised a new translation, more varied character models, the option to choose your language, with or without subtitles, on the fly, and slightly tweaked performance here and there, and that's what they delivered.

Besides, they fixed those load times in a patch looong before the EE was even announced.

So you'll forgive me if this stinks of classic Codex elitism -- if it's 3D and real-time and sells a million copies it must, by definition, be a load of crap published by a greedy publisher with a PR agent who lies through his teeth, and we're so much smarter and more enlightened and generally superior creatures for not falling for that, rolling instead around in our ca 1999 cRPG paradigm instead, between making sophisticated jokes about Jews and homosexuals. Yes, I peeked. I even giggled a bit at those sophisticated jokes. But it gets old real fast.

Prime Junta said:

It's marketing. It's there to get more people to buy it. I don't see anything horribly "wrong" about it. It was a good game, and deserves to sell as much as it possibly can. If the EE hype worked to sell more copies, I for one don't object. I bought one myself.

Click to expand...

So did I. But for a site like the Codex, warriors against any kind of hype, it'd be fairly hypocritical to constantly bash Bethesda for hype and then let an overly convoluted PR campaign for TW:EE slide on the premise that they like TW more. Hype is still hype, and while TW:EE didn't get much of the "you're lying" hype, it did get quite a bit of "this seems a bit much" hype in the form of interviews, trailers etc.

It's just a big-ass patch. The show surrounding it was a bit much.

If it worked to sell more copies than it cost to market it, where's the problem?

The difference is that Bethesda lies; AFAIKT CDProjekt Red didn't.

The Witcher worked fine out of the box, and in fact much better than many other games upon release. Fallout 3 crashed more than Windows ME, on the other hand, but that's really beside the point.

They patched The Witcher BEFORE the enhanced edition, and loading times were much improved. The problem was not the game itself, but rather the NWN engine it was based on. Everyone should be lamenting the HORRIBLE loading times in NWN2 - and yet it's considered acceptable and a fully working product.

I don't care about hype - and if we're going to target the concept, I think we'll have far more deserving receivers of our lament.

The basic fact is that the enhanced edition was a significant improvement, and it was only possible due to the success of the basic edition. You think it's free to get voice actors back in the studio and redo tons of dialogue, or to get programmers to improve their code and implement sorting routines and a far better inventory management system, or to seriously optimise content so that loading times are minimized. That kind of thing costs a ton of money, and there aren't too many precedents for giving this stuff away without compensation. What they COULD have done, was re-release it with the same hype and NOT give it away free to customers who'd already purchased it. THAT is par for the course. Gold editions, anyone?

I'm not saying they deserve a medal or even praise, but there's simply nothing reasonable to bitch about, when getting this kind of upgrade for free. Maybe in a perfect world, everything worked flawlessly out of the box, with minimal technical issues, but in this real world of ours that's just not going to happen. Even the most technically proficient masters of polish manage to release buggy and crash-prone games, and it's not just because they're lazy. There's such a thing as an economic reality, and this is a business.

JDR13 said:

The first part of that statement is ok. The part in parentheses means something is seriously wrong with you.

Click to expand...

I guess I just don't like wielding swords in games. I like playing mage types, and I have been able to do that in all the Elder Scroll games, but Witcher and the Gothics pretty much forced me to use a sword (or axe or whatever). Also, in Gothic 1 I couldn't get over the controls. I don't remember if I ever tried Gothic 2, I think I did, but still could never feel comfortable playing it.

txa1265 said:

I thought that he was discussing how rather than actually playing games in 2008 he spent the year accumulating his vomit, feces and urine in a big bucket while thinking about the crappy state of games by seeking out only negative things about supposed RPG's released during the year , especially things that lament how they don't measure up to th e'good old days', then meticulously detailed the process of taking the game boxes, putting them on his desk, and dumping the contents of the bucket on them.

Click to expand...

It's always wonderful to see the pretense of politeness at RPGWatch dissolve into attempts at scathing wit whenever the Codex comes up. Congratulations, you're now playing on the same field as the Codex!

Brother None said:

Decline of the Codex!

And seriously guys, DU has every right to hate the Witcher even if it's a bit obsessive, he argues pretty clearly why he dislikes it. And the Enhanced Edition really shouldn't have got the attention it did (either in hype form or from the angry diatribes of DU on the Codex), being just a patch/expansion and hardly worth more notice than a port.

Click to expand...

Of course he's got a right to hate it. That doesn't make him any more reasonable to me, though.

I really don't recall this extravagant attention you're talking about. They redid a ton of stuff, and then they released a much better version - both as a stand-alone product and free to those who'd already purchased it. We're not talking about Blizzard, EA, or Bethesda here, and they don't have money pouring out of every orifice. These polish guys loved this baby of theirs - and they wanted to get a better version out there, for themselves and for the fans.

You're being unreasonable.

Hell, the end conclusion is "2008 was a really bad year for RPGs". That's a fair point, and it's the same view we're taking over on GameBanshee for our end-of-the-year round-up (which is getting to be a bit late but eh).

Click to expand...

The end point is hardly the object of this disagreement.

"I don't have this problem" should never equate "I don't get people complaining about this issue". It's a technical issue on the PC. The fact that you don't have it means exactly nothing to other people's experiences. "It runs fine for me" is not a good answer to "this game is buggy as hell"

Click to expand...

Think about what you're saying, and you'll release how reversable that point is. Someone claims this, another claims that. We have nothing but our experience and our "gaming" instincts to go by. It's my opinion that The Witcher was reasonably stable and functional for a title of its depth, and though loading times were pretty bad - they were mostly fixed in a prior patch. It certainly wasn't bad enough to warrant a free makeover of the entire product, and anyone expecting such a thing would have to be as unreasonable as the person responsible for the review in question.

Brother None said:

The Witcher didn't start the trend of unfinished releases, but it did start the trend of somehow getting people to not just forgive them for the unfinished release but to actually thank them for fixing it.

Obviously, EE is more than just a fix and CDP Red could've left it at it so I'm not as negative about it as DU is. But at the end of the day, it's just hype for fixing a game, which no matter how you twist or turn it is just wrong.

Click to expand...

It's surprising that a person with your obvious experience with gaming would call The Witcher an unfinished product. It wasn't the most polished product, surely, but it was definitely finished and fully playable.

You obviously haven't played an unfinished product like, say, Gothic 3. If they redid Gothic 3 like The Witcher, I wouldn't be there defending them - because THAT was an unfinished game. But I've seen far worse get cut more slack than The Witcher.

I need hardly mention Fallout 2 upon release, or even fully patched. I'd argue that Fallout 2 - being hailed as perhaps the best game of all time on a certain site I won't mention, was in FAR worse condition than The Witcher. How quickly we forget.

To say that CD Projekt hyped the release of the Enhanced Edition is quite a hyperbole. And to say that it was a patch to fix an unfinished game is quite a hyperbole too.

The patches prior to the Enhanced Edition made the loading times almost none existing and technically there were in reality no bugs at all. The Enhanced Edition was about making up for some design mistakes, which they did for free. They could just as well not have made an Enhanced Edition, because the game was already more than playable. They did it because of their devotion to making great RPGs. I view the Enhanced Edition far more as a Game of the Year Edition than a patch to fix a broken game.
And no I'm not a huge fan of CDProjekt (RED) but they seem a lot more sympathetic than publishers/developers in general and The Witcher is the best RPG to be released in several years.

I must have missed all that hype concerning the Enhanced Edition. I haven't even bought it. But neither did I play the initial release of The Witcher. I played it after the release of patch 1.2.

Asbjoern said:

To say that CD Projekt hyped the release of the Enhanced Edition is quite a hyperbole. And to say that it was a patch to fix an unfinished game is quite a hyperbole too.

The patches prior to the Enhanced Edition made the loading times almost none existing and technically there were in reality no bugs at all. The Enhanced Edition was about making up for some design mistakes, which they did for free. They could just as well not have made an Enhanced Edition, because the game was already more than playable. They did it because of their devotion to making great RPGs. I view the Enhanced Edition far more as a Game of the Year Edition than a patch to fix a broken game.

Click to expand...

Pretty much, this. To be sure, I'm not certain if the EE patch improved loading times--by patch 1.2, I think it was, I no longer experienced loading time problems (compare that to the horror that is NWN2, for example). But even out of the box, it's hardly unplayable unless you stretch the definition of "unplayable." The content is, more or less, finished. Unpolished, sure, but hardly in shambles the way KotOR2 is. I don't recall game-stopping bugs.

DArtagnan said:

You're being unreasonable.

Click to expand...

Really, how so? I'm not stomping my feet or calling CDP evil. I've pointed out they could've left off at just patching it so the Enhanced Edition is a nice touch.

However, I've also been around long enough to realise that it's not what we should encourage. Patches are nice. Fixing a translation your publisher messed up is nice. But it's not praise-worthy, it should be the base level we consumers demand of publishers. Because if we don't, they'll keep shovelling crap at us as they are. I know patches will always be around, but I prefer not to accept them as the status quo that easily.

TW is nowhere near the worst of the lot, but by hiding a fix as a repackaging and presenting it as a gift, they're being disingenuous and setting a bad precedent. If they had presented it otherwise, as a GotY edition or as an apology, I would've been all for it, but I'm not looking forward to a time when publishers get praise for finishing their unfinished releases.

Debates about the choice of the word "unfinished" notwithstanding.

DArtagnan said:

You obviously haven't played an unfinished product like, say, Gothic 3.

Click to expand...

Yes I have. Are we really going for this whole "GTA IV is so shitty on PC that you can't complain about other games"-logic? The fact that games like GTA IV or Gothic 3 fucked up worse doesn't mean games like Fallout 3 and even the Witcher did not fuck up at all.

DArtagnan said:

I need hardly mention Fallout 2 upon release, or even fully patched. I'd argue that Fallout 2 - being hailed as perhaps the best game of all time on a certain site I won't mention, was in FAR worse condition than The Witcher. How quickly we forget.

Click to expand...

I don't know of any sites that hail Fallout 2 as the best game of all time. Please elaborate.

DArtagnan said:

Interesting.

The Enhanced Edition had several significant improvements, but I think the key part this person is missing is that it's free.

Click to expand...

Not neccessarily. It is also sold, boxed, in shops.

At least here.

Apart from the downloadable version.

Brother None said:

Really, how so? I'm not stomping my feet or calling CDP evil. I've pointed out they could've left off at just patching it so the Enhanced Edition is a nice touch.

Click to expand...

You're siding with the person who's saying that it's a negative that they released the enhanced edition like they did.

That's unreasonable, and I've detailed why above. If you don't understand what I mean by now, you likely never will.

However, if you're just saying that they don't deserve praise, then I guess I misunderstood your words. I don't personally agree, but it's not unreasonable to simply not be grateful.

However, I've also been around long enough to realise that it's not what we should encourage. Patches are nice. Fixing a translation your publisher messed up is nice. But it's not praise-worthy, it should be the base level we consumers demand of publishers. Because if we don't, they'll keep shovelling crap at us as they are.

Click to expand...

It's not praise-worthy to do something nice?

I have to disagree.

I think we should encourage people to be nice, and investing significantly to improve your product and giving the result away for free - I agree - is definitely nice. The translation was never broken - as in needing to be fixed. It was just flawed like 99% of the eastern european to english translations that I've seen, and I think I've seen pretty much everything there is to see in this industry. Even AFTER the new and improved dialogue, it's still flawed and it always will be.

They'll keep shovelling crap at us? Are you aware that The Witcher was widely considered one of the best CRPGs ever, BEFORE the enhanced edition? Wasn't it GOTY at several places as well?

You're letting your jaded and emotionally charged opinion of the industry as a whole cloud your ability to see clearly.

TW is nowhere near the worst of the lot, but by hiding a fix as a repackaging and presenting it as a gift, they're being disingenuous and setting a bad precedent. If they had presented it otherwise, as a GotY edition or as an apology, I would've been all for it, but I'm not looking forward to a time when publishers get praise for finishing their unfinished releases.

Click to expand...

Let's see if I understand your logic.

You say it's nice that they're fixing the translation, but then you're saying they're actually hiding it as a gift and being dishonest. How can they do something nice, and then have to apologize for their mistake, before you can accept it? Then it wasn't nice but a requisite for simply being tolerated.

Are you truly of the opinion that quality translation from polish to english is a trivial matter? Are you suggesting that a complex and rich story written in an eastern european language, is expected to be flawlessly translated to english with the resources available?

How about cutting them some slack. The dialogue was in no way preventing the game from being fully playable. If we ignore reality and exaggerate the technical problems as you insist, then the dialogue surely wasn't the main issue?

Yet they made the effort to re-record a huge part of the dialogue, and they gave it away free to people who owned the game. That's not exactly a trivial gift and I see nothing dishonest about calling it that. It's what it IS.

Yes I have. Are we really going for this whole "GTA IV is so shitty on PC that you can't complain about other games"-logic? The fact that games like GTA IV or Gothic 3 fucked up worse doesn't mean games like Fallout 3 and even the Witcher did not fuck up at all.

Click to expand...

You can complain all you like, it's not the issue here.

I'm trying to demonstrate what unfinished means in this business, and Gothic 3 would seem a very fitting example. The Witcher was never unfinished, that's just your claim - based on what I can only assume is limited experience with this industry.

I don't know of any sites that hail Fallout 2 as the best game of all time. Please elaborate.

Click to expand...

I said "perhaps the best" - because it's not officially proclaimed as the best game of all time. But based on many, many posts on sites like the Codex and NMA - it's very clear that Fallout 2 is respected as one of the very best games ever released by a lot of people. To pretend like you're not aware of this is a tactic with a purpose I fail to perceive.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Not neccessarily. It is also sold, boxed, in shops.

At least here.

Apart from the downloadable version.

Click to expand...

The Witcher isn't free, and I think we know that.

I'm talking about the improvements.

Brother None said:

The Witcher didn't start the trend of unfinished releases, but it did start the trend of somehow getting people to not just forgive them for the unfinished release but to actually thank them for fixing it.

Click to expand...

Prime Junta said:

It's marketing. It's there to get more people to buy it.

Click to expand...

Somehow, this reminds me very much of how Microsoft acts.

DArtagnan said:

The Witcher isn't free, and I think we know that.

I'm talking about the improvements.

Click to expand...

I was talking about the improvements, too. The EE is actually sold in a boxed form here, too.

http://www.amazon.de/The-Witcher-En..._1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1232487978&sr=8-1