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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings ann.
- Thread starter eloj
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These shots aren't impressing me as much as previous ones. They're not nearly as seemless.
northrop
grumman
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^Those shots are the size of a knuckle. Hard to say anything concrete from that. As far as graphics go, I'll wait for the game to come out before I say yay or nay on the subject.
Playing Witcher 1 ATM. As far as graphics they are fine, detailed and beautiful, really capture the Gothic look of old Europe, at least to a westerner born and raised on the west coast of California.
Where the game could improve is motion quality. The character animations are not the smoothest. Also, the game is really not free roaming.The maps are designed well but you are very restricted on where you can travel. Not much exploring outside of predetermined paths. Your main character can not even jump. For instance if you are on a dock or a pier you can't hop off the pier into the water or on to the beach. No hoping fences that line the pathways, stick to the road.
These are issues I would like to see addressed in Witcher 2. A badass Witcher that can't jump? They can do better than that.
Where the game could improve is motion quality. The character animations are not the smoothest. Also, the game is really not free roaming.The maps are designed well but you are very restricted on where you can travel. Not much exploring outside of predetermined paths. Your main character can not even jump. For instance if you are on a dock or a pier you can't hop off the pier into the water or on to the beach. No hoping fences that line the pathways, stick to the road.
These are issues I would like to see addressed in Witcher 2. A badass Witcher that can't jump? They can do better than that.
You can zoom in to full screen. In the bottom right corner of the first picture there's a magnifying glass that you click on to take you to a proper gallery, then in the bottom right of the picture in the gallery is a "full size" button that takes it to 1920x1080.
Here: link
Hopefully its just compression artifacts and the real game will look sharper and more seemless (when I say seemless I mean things like having a high detail rock next to a low detail ground with a bad transition, making things look unbalanced).
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northrop
grumman
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Don't see the magnifying glass. Must be adblock or something.
I managed to work it out somehow, and judging from the full size screens, it doesn't look half bad. Again, I'll wait until the game is out, but if it looks the way it does in those screens, I won't complain. I've played many, many games before W2 that looked way uglier, and it didn't stop me from enjoying them. After all, not every game has to look like those teaser screens from BF3
Says no deep linking, care to post a lower level link?
Anyway, I dunno, these newer screens dont look as awesome as the older ones. I've been playing the witcher EE recently and these screens dont look amazingly better (better, yeah, but nothing I'm gonna drool over or anything).
WabeWalker
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Interesting. Because the second Gamespot screenshot looks ordinary to me. I wonder if Gamespot took that screenshot themselves?
The screenshots I've seen so far have been beautiful, but I'm skeptical that they weren't severely touched up - other people have said the same thing, that the screenshots look photo-shopped.
I need to see this game running on my own PC. If it looks as good on my own system as it does in the screenshots, and if it runs well, and if it feels more like an actual RPG this time, and if CD Projekt has made the combat much more engaging, then this could be good. Lot of ifs there, though.
D
Deleted member 174368
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Can we stop freaking out over the screenshots, it's not like there isn't dozens of videos on the internet of the game running where it looks as good as the promo shots.
edit: wabewalker trolling again, surprises all around
edit: wabewalker trolling again, surprises all around
WabeWalker
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Excuse me, but having an opinion is hardly trolling.
You, like so many others at this forum, seem to have drunk the kool aid, and are head over heels in love with this game (which you haven't even played yet). Why? The original title was a buggy mess on release day - and if it had been an Ubisoft game or an EA game, then everyone, right now, would be posting about that.
But no, this is The Witcher!
I've even seen people at this forum resort to revisionist history tactics by claiming that The Witcher, on release day, ran perfectly well. Um, no it didn't.
Here, a review from the day:
"So far I have discussed the game’s strong points but unfortunately there are some weak points as well. Well, one big one to be exact. The loading times will drive you nuts. A big rig with lots of memory and a muscle-packed video card will not save you from the frequent and long loading screens that the game will dish up for you. And with frequent, I mean frequent. Enter a house, leave a house, move to a different area, the load screen will haunt you in worse ways than the monsters in the game. Be prepared to spend probably a tenth -if not more- of your time in The Witcher staring at ‘loading…’. Of course this may be good news to gamers that are interested in honing their embroidery skills, but to me it meant I ended up weary of exploring the game world. I ended up frantically trying to avoid entering a different place for fear of the 3 minutes of interruption that would follow. Not a very good motivator, most definitely a ‘mood breaker’ and bad enough to affect the score a bit."
He's wrong about the load screen percentage though. A tenth? Nope. I was forced to get out my stopwatch on this one, and it was bad. Very bad. More like fifteen minutes for every hour if you had to enter a lot of homes.
D
Deleted member 174368
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Wow, you've posted that I dunno how many times already. Your posts aren't even funny anymore like they used to be, now they're predictable and boring.
People are looking forward to The Witcher 2 because... the first game was an amazing RPG. Holy shit people liked a game you didn't, yeah, it happens some times, don't worry, it might happen in real life too. It doesn't mean you're supposed to vehemently argue with them that they, in fact, did not like the game, that it's impossible they could have liked such a buggy game, that those 1.5 million sales were clearly a fabrication from the developer.
but OMG the loading times let me post about that a few more times maybe someone will understand me~~
People are looking forward to The Witcher 2 because... the first game was an amazing RPG. Holy shit people liked a game you didn't, yeah, it happens some times, don't worry, it might happen in real life too. It doesn't mean you're supposed to vehemently argue with them that they, in fact, did not like the game, that it's impossible they could have liked such a buggy game, that those 1.5 million sales were clearly a fabrication from the developer.
but OMG the loading times let me post about that a few more times maybe someone will understand me~~
Ozymandias
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You keep harping on this (4 years after the game was released), so I guess someone has to explicitly tell you why we have more faith in CD Projekt than in Ubisoft, EA, or Activision. Yes, the loading times were completely broken on release, but CD Projekt went and addressed it. Then, they kept improving on The Witcher for free. Some may call it fixing the game, but that is severely underrating all of the things added by the Enhanced Edition. Most other developers would have started making a sequel or pumping out DLC after patching the major issues, but CD Projekt polished The Witcher until it was the best it could be.
As a PC gamer, (so far) CD Projekt has done good by me. This gives me (and others) hope and higher expectations for the sequel. In contrast, Ubisoft, EA, and Activision leave console limitations and/or stupid DRM schemes in their games and rarely bother to fix those. So we have lower expectations for their games.
Ryom
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I doubt Bioware is going to go back and address the reuse of levels in Dragon Age 2. They also have yet to patch some major issues... Remember how they said Auto-Attack was going to be in the console version? One month after release and a 50 page forum thread about it later, it remains unpatched and still MIA. Because the one thing Bioware is NOT know for is patching bugs quickly, or for that matter, sometimes ever. Broken quests are a practically a trademark of Bioware's. The bug that causes a player to permanently lose health points is still there. I believe the bugs caused by your companions, Isabella and Sebastian, are still unpatched.
A brand new developer putting out a brand new game, using an engine they didn't develop themselves (a Bioware engine, incidentally) is going to have bugs. They fixed them, then took the money they had from the success of their game and poured it back into improving the game for their loyal customers with a free overhaul. Do you know what Bioware's definition of loyalty is? Long time customers paying full price for the game and all DLC. I got a discount for Call of Pripyat for having bought Shadow of Chernobyl. That's showing appreciation for customer loyalty. Not forcing your long time customer's to pre-order at full price to get the full game. I was able to pre-order Portal 2 at a 20% discount, and Valve gave Portal 1 out for free with the purchase so people could experience the entire storyline before the second was released.
I have the distinct feeling we won't be seeing any more collected bundled editions of Bioware games. You'll have to buy the DLC piecemeal directly from EA, and it will never be on sale. Bioware doesn't show their long-term customers that they appreciate them the way "lesser" developers do.
Some interesting quotes from Bioware's forum:
All that said, The Witcher 2 has yet to be released. It looks good, but I'll reserve judgment until the game is in my hands. Many people on the Bioware forums are expressing how good TW2 is going to be compared to DA2, and I think that is unfair. You can't compare a released game to an unreleased one.
A brand new developer putting out a brand new game, using an engine they didn't develop themselves (a Bioware engine, incidentally) is going to have bugs. They fixed them, then took the money they had from the success of their game and poured it back into improving the game for their loyal customers with a free overhaul. Do you know what Bioware's definition of loyalty is? Long time customers paying full price for the game and all DLC. I got a discount for Call of Pripyat for having bought Shadow of Chernobyl. That's showing appreciation for customer loyalty. Not forcing your long time customer's to pre-order at full price to get the full game. I was able to pre-order Portal 2 at a 20% discount, and Valve gave Portal 1 out for free with the purchase so people could experience the entire storyline before the second was released.
I have the distinct feeling we won't be seeing any more collected bundled editions of Bioware games. You'll have to buy the DLC piecemeal directly from EA, and it will never be on sale. Bioware doesn't show their long-term customers that they appreciate them the way "lesser" developers do.
Some interesting quotes from Bioware's forum:
All that said, The Witcher 2 has yet to be released. It looks good, but I'll reserve judgment until the game is in my hands. Many people on the Bioware forums are expressing how good TW2 is going to be compared to DA2, and I think that is unfair. You can't compare a released game to an unreleased one.
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WabeWalker
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Oh please.
CD Projekt has released how many RPGs? I believe that they've produced one title - and they happened to release it to market unfinished.
Your post is highly critical of Bioware - but this isn't the place for it. CD Projekt is not even in the same league as Bioware. Just don't even go there.
Score:
Bioware = Baldur's Gate, Shadows of Amn, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1 & 2, Dragon Age 1 & 2, and a little known game called Knights of the Old Republic.
CD Projekt = The Witcher.
If you want to sing the praises of CD Projekt then don't try to do it by having a bash at Bioware, which is exactly what you just did. That's absurd.
I'm not really familar with photoshopping images, but why do they looked photoshopped exactly? To me they mostly just look like really good textures. At most they look like they were taken at a high res then downscaled to a lower res to make them look sharper.
The images that have come out the past couple of days look, to me, extremely compressed. They're blurry and nothing looks sharp like in the earlier images. Even the text on the UI is blurry, I'd be surprised if it looks that blurry in reality.
WabeWalker
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A discount for having bought a game from a developer?
Hmm, interesting.
Are you aware that Bioware is GIVING AWAY free copies of Mass Eefect 2 for people who buy Dragon Age 2? Not a discount. They're giving copies away. For free.
But again, it's EA isn't it - so we have a new set of rules here. When the makers of STALKER discount a game, then it's customer loyalty. When EA actually gives a game away - one that's barely a year old - then it's no longer customer loyalty, but EA trying to trick people into buying DLC, or enticing them into buying DA 2.
Excuse me, but a free game is a free game, and if you're going to praise the publisher of STALKER then you should man up and do likewise with Bioware, instead of having a bash at them.
Clearly, what we have here are two sets of rules.
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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Digital Premium $35.96
WabeWalker
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D2D is doing this almost every two weeks now. It just doesn't make much sense anymore to be buying anything from Steam on day one. The difference is never less than ten dollars, and sometimes it's even more. That adds up very quickly.
I can vouch for D2D as well. It's an excellent service. Myself, I'll buy my copy of The Witcher 2 later on, as it so happens Fable 3 will be released the same day.
D
Deleted member 174368
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$10 off a future title if you buy from Amazon, so technically $40 for the boxed premium version.
Ryom
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Giving away a game that their most loyal customers already have. I've had ME2 for ages, and I'd wager most of their core players do as well. That promotion is aimed at bringing NEW players in, not rewarding customer loyalty. Go read the sticky threads regarding that giveaway on the Bioware forums, it's much the same sentiment.
I'll rake any developer over the coals when they do something to deserve it. The DA2 team and EA deserves the negative attention they've been getting. I've been critical of Valve and CD Projekt, if you want I can link you to posts I've made on each of those developer's forums criticizing their decisions when they've misstepped. They'll get praise when they deserve it and derision when they don't. I'd appreciate it if you don't presume to judge me. Your overly hostile response to a general post is worrying.
So you man up. What you've done is attacked me for having an opinion of the matter that you don't like. A personal attack, telling me to man up, when my post was not directed at you. If you care to search, you'll find plenty of my posts on this very forum defending Bioware. If you were wondering why you are having such a hard time convincing others of your view, it's likely because you IMMEDIATELY alienate anyone that has a dissenting opinion.
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WabeWalker
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Post 417 of yours is virtually campaigning against Bioware.
And I can assure you that there will be tens of thousands of people who don't own Mass Effect 2. It's simply not fair to single out the publisher of Stalker, and praise them for having provided you with a discount for having bought a game from them, while concurrently dismissing Bioware for having gone one step further and actually gifted people with a recently published triple-a title.
Also, this being the Internet, I'm shocked that you would take such offense at the phrase 'man up'. Really, that's a personal attack? Not really it isn't. More likely, you're just angry that I'm not in agreement with you.
Ryom
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Really, I'm glad you're enjoying the game. But you did single me out for expressing an opinion you didn't like, and telling someone to man up is highly disrespectful. You took a harsh tone in a reply to a post that wasn't directed at you. What did you expect?
Who cares if I'm campaigning against Bioware (more specifically, the DA2 team. So far the ME team is in my good graces mostly) in a thread about their direct competitor about a game that is directly competing with their release? This thread is going to invite discussion between the two and given the checkered release of DA2, about its failings.
Would you like me to quote your post in the DA2 thread where you told people who weren't all roses and kittens about the game to butt out? We are expressing our opinions somewhere else and now we shouldn't do that here either? So don't criticize DA2 in any thread, at all on this forum? Who here is the one being unreasonable?
Who cares if I'm campaigning against Bioware (more specifically, the DA2 team. So far the ME team is in my good graces mostly) in a thread about their direct competitor about a game that is directly competing with their release? This thread is going to invite discussion between the two and given the checkered release of DA2, about its failings.
Would you like me to quote your post in the DA2 thread where you told people who weren't all roses and kittens about the game to butt out? We are expressing our opinions somewhere else and now we shouldn't do that here either? So don't criticize DA2 in any thread, at all on this forum? Who here is the one being unreasonable?
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WabeWalker
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I never said that.
Be reasonable. If a thread has grown to be fifty pages long, as was the case at the time with the Dragon Age 2 thread, and a person has been continuously posting in that thread, and yet says he hasn't even played the game, then it's fair to call that person a troll.
There comes a time when you have to either a) shut up, or b) actually sit down and play the damned game. If the thread is fifty pages long, and you're still posting, then it's time to shut up.
And what I said in that thread was, if I were to do likewise in the eventual Witcher 2 thread - and just continuously post, and post, and post... antagonistically... and then admit that I hadn't even played The Witcher 2 - people would say, huh, what, we're on page fifty of this thread, you've been posting from page one... and you haven't even played the game!
My god, you people would go batshit crazy. So how come I can't do likewise when a guy does the same thing in the Dragon Age 2 thread?
(And by the way, I wouldn't do that - continuously posting about a released game I hadn't played or even disliked. Bad Company 2 is the biggest POS I've played in years. Do you see me continuously posting in those threads? No you do not. I couldn't care less about that game. Why would I want to waste me time writing about it. If you hate a game that much, then move on. And I'll repeat that just like everyone here, I'm hoping The Witcher 2 will be great. The RPG genre is by far my favorite. I don't hope for poor RPGs.)
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D
Deleted member 174368
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Except you did do that, and you kept arguing against people that had legitimate complaints about the game, even brushing off objectively bad game design like repetitive areas and spawning baddies. Games aren't either PERFECT or WORST GAME EVER with nothing in between.
Your problems with The Witcher seem to just be a personal grudge over the loading times (which was fixed) and... nothing else. If you addressed some actual gameplay problems, like the slow start, clunky combat, messy inventory, then we'd have a proper discussion. You won't find any argument from anyone about those issues because they exist, and CDProjekt isn't going to repeat them in TW2.
Your problems with The Witcher seem to just be a personal grudge over the loading times (which was fixed) and... nothing else. If you addressed some actual gameplay problems, like the slow start, clunky combat, messy inventory, then we'd have a proper discussion. You won't find any argument from anyone about those issues because they exist, and CDProjekt isn't going to repeat them in TW2.
WabeWalker
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I have adressed all of these issues - multiple times.
Not only that, but I addressed these issues week one. I had been following The Witcher long before its release, and was hugely disappointed by it. Where the hell was everyone when this game was released anyhow? Not at the official forum, I can say that much, because I posted there avidly and it was hardly visited.
I wonder how many people here at this forum can honestly say they bought this game day one? Not very many, I'll bet.
Andrew_Carr
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You know what Wabe, I didn't purchase The Witcher on day 1 and I'm glad I didn't. It came with DRM so I held off until it was removed. And by then a lot of the bugs had been fixed. So I got a good game for $20 without any issues.
I'm sorry you fell for the lack of hype, got burned by a day 1 purchase, and refuse to let go of it.
I'm sorry you fell for the lack of hype, got burned by a day 1 purchase, and refuse to let go of it.
I think some caution is always prudent but I think the odds of this game hitting the streets in anywhere near the shambles condition part 1 did when it first streeted are quite low for what I would think would be obvious reasons.
I'm simply not that worried about it.
I'm simply not that worried about it.
Michaelius
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I'd say it has much bigger chance of being playable day 1.
1. Hardware is much faster now so the requirments won't be that shocking.
2. It's their second game not first one
3. It uses build from ground engine they made themselves instead of rewriting parts of Aurora engine several times during development process.
Right. And:
4.) They faced a lot of hell for the debacle of the part 1 launch and it took time but Witcher EE was the end result. A lot of other developers, if not most, would have simply thrown 1-2 half assed, grudge job patches out there at best and told people to go pound sand after that while moving on to the next thing.
They know they've got a lot riding on this game's launch being successful.
Yeah, there are a lot of games that have a lot of issues on release (if not all). At least the devs stood up and fixed the loading time issue soon after release and then continued to support the game with the EE. I dont understand why Wabe has his nickers in a twist over The Witcher, time and time again in other threads he's takent he attitude of "if I dont have any problems then clearly the game is fine and anyone having problems is a liar or a pirate!!!" yet here is one game he did have problems with and now boohoo poor Wabe had problems which were fixed in a patch, now he's going to stick up for the poor down trodden EA and crap all over The Witcher 2 discussions (even though he bitches about thread crapping for other games). Get over it Wabe, people are sick of your bitching about The Witcher and sticking up for random game XXX.
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He had a bad experience on their forums. I understand that but it shouldn't merit this mini crusade I feel like I'm seeing in this thread. Seems a bit overblown.
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Michaelius
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He is just butthurt because people used TW2 as counter example how to make better sequel compared to DA2
To be fair, a pile of shit is a counterexample compared to DA2.He is just butthurt because people used TW2 as counter example how to make better sequel compared to DA2
Ouch. Pretty harsh.
Sometimes it is fun to feed. Wabe's harmless, passionate about what he believes even if his views are bordering on the odd.
I actually believe he's blocked me ever since one of the numerous piracy threads where he associated anyone who disagreed with him as being a pirate