We take a look at the Enhanced Edition of The Witcher 2, and also interview CD Projekt RED about a bunch of PC-related things.
Last week, I had the opportunity to check out The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition at Namco Bandai. While primarily focused on the upcoming Xbox 360 port of the game, two members of the CD Projekt RED team flew out to support their product: Agnieszka Szostak, marketing specialist, and Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, senior quest designer.
During the initial presentation, Agnieszka and Mateusz highlighted the features that Xbox 360 users could expect to enjoy in the Enhanced Edition of the game. A new game introduction created by BAFTA Award winner and Academy Award nominee Tomasz Baginski set the scene, while additional animations and cinematics will also be available. There’s an extra four hours of gameplay to be found, which introduce three major characters, and they hinted that they have yet to announce the full list of content that will be included in the game.
By far the greatest news, from a PC perspective, is that when the Xbox 360 version launches on the 17th of April, The Witcher 2 owners will be able to download the additional content free of charge in a game update. From what I saw and played of the Xbox 360 version, CD Projekt Red has done a phenomenal job of maintaining a lot of the visual prowess of the PC version on the Xbox 360 and, considering this is their first Xbox 360 title, this is no small feat.
I had the chance to sit down with Mateusz (and Agnieszka chimed in at the end) to discuss all things Witcher 2.
Atomic: If you’ve got returning PC players who’ve played the whole way through The Witcher 2, why would they want to come back and play the Enhanced Edition?
Mateusz: Obviously, because we’ve got all this new content, right? Not only two new quests, which I mentioned earlier, we also have completely remade the epilogue of the game, which is a big thing, in my opinion, because, as I said before, we have added those movies which sum up the choices you make throughout the game.
Atomic: So it’s a gameplay section as well as videos?
Mateusz: It’s a gameplay section. It changes the location.
Atomic: It changes the ending.
Mateusz: Yeah, which shows the implications of the things that you did in act three.
Atomic: Alright. In Australia, we’re still very backwards with our classification system and, as I noticed when I checked the report for The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition, you guys have submitted a modified version. What’s your experience been like working with our backwards classification system?
Mateusz: It’s a tough question. We had to censor something, as you probably know.
Atomic: A sex scene.
Mateusz: Two of them, actually. But it was not about the sex, per se, but the sex as a reward.
Atomic: They have a problem with that?
Mateusz: Yeah. I dunno. Did you play the full game?
Atomic: Not the full game, no. I haven’t
Mateusz: Well, I won’t spoil it for you, but there were two quests in which it was a reward, so now in the Australian version when the player is offered this, Gerald will always say, ‘No, thank you.’
Atomic: He turns the sex down!
Mateusz: Yeah. Unfortunately.
Atomic: So, in the original version, you have a choice to say yes or no.
Mateusz: In the European version, you do.
Atomic: The better version, let’s be honest.
Mateusz: It wasn’t our intent.
Atomic: I was just talking to Agnieszka earlier, who was talking about ways to get around that.
Mateusz: There are some mods.
Atomic: She mentioned buying it on GoG.com. That’s the great thing about working on PC, isn’t it?
Mateusz: Yes.
Atomic: The PlayStation 3 version: are you guys looking at doing that?
Mateusz: Well, we would certainly like to do that, but obviously the Xbox version is a very big thing for us. All the people are on the Xbox version so we don’t even have time to start working on the PS3, but no decision has been made yet.
Atomic: Why did you pick the Xbox version to go with first?
Mateusz: It’s familiar to the PC.
Atomic: From a design point of view?
Mateusz: Yeah. It’s mostly the technical things: memory management and stuff, architecture of the console itself.
Atomic: So, easier to develop for from a developer point of view. Fantastic. I read a while ago about the piracy statistics of The Witcher 2, and it was completely disproportionate to the copies that you sold. Not long after launch, you guys removed the DRM from the game.
Mateusz: Yes.
Atomic: Do you guys regret that decision?
Mateusz: No, we don’t.
Atomic: Why do you still take this approach when you’ve got so many people like Ubisoft that have ‘online all the time’ DRM?
Mateusz: DRM affected the performance in the game. It was in the game at launch, but we removed it when we noticed that it affected the game. So we decided that the DRM is not important for us at all. And the game is the most important thing. So we removed it. And on the other hand, we believe that DRM is not the way to make sales because there are two things. First of all, those people who are pirating the game, wouldn’t buy it in the first place, in my opinion. Or they are pirating it to check how the game plays because we haven’t released demos, and they go and buy the game anyway; if they like it, of course. And the second thing is that I think that if the people want to crack the game, the security systems, they will do it anyway.
Maybe in the short term but it will pay off in the future, look at Valve. Building up a loving and dedicated fanbase is good for business. Or at least I hope it is, I know I for one will buying their games with far less doubt than other devs because I know even if their games have issues they will listen to their fans and work to fix the problems for free.
Games from other studios have to be fantastic before I will buy because I know that it's not likely they will improve it. And they will probably nickel and dime me for content, restrictive DRM that will limit how and when I can play and other crap. That all lowers the value of their games to me, and makes me want to support them.
That and their games are all fantastic so far! The only thing they could improve is comprehensive mod support.
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