The Witcher 3 and Projekt Red's DRM-Free Stand 115
An anonymous reader writes "This article goes into the making of upcoming fantasy title The Witcher 3. The studio, CD Projekt Red, reveals that, unusually, it'll be releasing the game as a DRM-free download. 'We believe that DRM does more harm to legit gamers than good for the gaming industry, that's why the game will also be completely DRM-free,' says the game's level designer, Miles Tost. The game will build on the strengths of The Witcher 2 while attempting to broaden its scope. 'We want to combine the strong pull of closed-world RPGs story-wise, with a world where you can go anywhere and do anything you want.'"
Linky? (Score:2)
Hello, anything more substantial than this nice summary one can read somewhere ?
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It's contained within the talk linked here. [vg247.com]
Hey, new witcher out? (Score:2)
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I wasted 10 hours of my time downloading this game and the iso image didn't even have the crack!!! steer clear of the torrents until skidrow has a release.
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It was from the article http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331646865514/the-witcher-3-next-gen-skyrim-arrives (not VG247)
Re:What kind? (Score:5, Insightful)
So far as I can tell, DRM-free means "no DRM".
FWIW, I actually find Steam really annoying. I usually use a couple of computers at once, and I sometimes have a slow-paced game on one and want to play something faster on another while, say, waiting for turns to process or something. I can do this with even the most draconian DRM schemes, but not with Steam. Yes, I'm aware of Offline Mode. Valve Support has told me that it is in fact prohibited to use Offline Mode to run another copy of Steam, even if I'm using it to play a different game.
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It's an acceptable tradeoff for me. Though I have loathed it since its inception, I have warmed up to Steam over the years, mostly because the huge discounts offered through sales have resulted in a vast library of games that the Steam client organizes pretty neatly for me. It also does away with any sort of installation hassle. I do not miss having to hunt one or more patches on a publisher's site to apply to my 1.0 version. I also don't miss physical media being subject to damage, having to search for a C
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It's only when compared to activation limits, mandatory connection for single player and other aberrations that is shines in a benign light.
If your only argument in favor of something is "It's better than other bad things.", you may have a problem on your hands. Well, you said you don't actively like Steam DRM, but continuing to use Steam only ensures that it'll never change.
Re:What kind? (Score:4, Informative)
. Well, you said you don't actively like Steam DRM, but continuing to use Steam only ensures that it'll never change.
He likes stuff like disc based securom drm even less.
If he refuses to use everything he doesn't like, he won't play very many games at all.
but continuing to use Steam only ensures that it'll never change
Steam has added family accounts, and now family library sharing features. These don't solve the problem yet, but they are baby steps forwards towards solving some the biggest complaints most people have about steam's drm.
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If he refuses to use everything he doesn't like, he won't play very many games at all.
Well, that's what I do. I still play Doom (with source ports) and other old games (many sold on GOG), and I have no problems.
Steam has added family accounts, and now family library sharing features. These don't solve the problem yet, but they are baby steps forwards towards solving some the biggest complaints most people have about steam's drm.
My complaint is that Valve itself supports DRM at all. If it were just a problem of the developers, it wouldn't be Valve's problem at all.
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Well, that's what I do. I still play Doom (with source ports) and other old games (many sold on GOG), and I have no problems.
Of course, people who have to play all the latest games might not like this. But it's not like DRM-free games don't exist; there are many.
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See GOG.com (where I purchased witcher 2, which I have yet to play). Same basic idea, lots of discounts, nice organization, etc.. Only no DRM! None at all!
The selection though is a little more limited, For me though I tend to enjoy old games just as much as new ones. The combination of GOG, humble indy bundles, and a couple other similar sources keeps me well stocked with DRM free games.
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The selection though is a little more limited,
A lot more limited, but they also have one of the best and largest old game libraries. I love gog for old games.
My 'beef' with GoG for indy games though was Linux support. I buy a cross platform indy game on steam and I get pc+mac+linux. On GoG I only got PC+Mac downloads.
Recently GoG has announced a committment to support linux, and I couldn't be happier to hear this!
Another quirk with GoG's model is that its a bit at odds with paid expansions. For old games, a
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Another quirk with GoG's model is that its a bit at odds with paid expansions. For old games, all the expansions that are are ever going to come out have come out, but what about expansions / paid DLC for current still in production indy games. -- And I believe I read its one of the main reasons AI War, for example, is not on GoG. I'm not sure what the solution here is.
How so? GOG already has a number of DLCs and both free and paid expansions (I've only bothered committing the new Shadowrun expansion to memory, though). Where's the issue between that and the No DRM policy?
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That's odd. I'm going to bring that up on the GOG forums, but I suspect there's some BS going on at some layer.
Did a quick check: There are several games on GOG with DLC.
Shadowrun (mentioned before)
Sword of the Stars: The Pit
Omerta: City of Gangsters
Strike Suit Zero
Blackguards
Democracy 3
Divinity: Dragon Commander
So I'm not sure where they got that...
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Did a quick check: There are several games on GOG with DLC.
Yeah, but too be fair, I think that's a fairly recent feature for GoG.
I know "AI: War" also uses (used?) a serial key to differentiate between the demo and full version, which was another sticking point with GoG. (Although they allow multiplayer keys for NWN etc... so there's that...)
By this point though, I don't think Arcen is ~that~ concerned. By far the majority of the revenue is from steam. They wrote that steam is 91% of the income, 3% was dire
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See GOG.com (where I purchased witcher 2, which I have yet to play). Same basic idea, lots of discounts, nice organization, etc.. Only no DRM! None at all!
Witcher 2 was a bad example.
Every version of The Witcher 2 sold on services that weren't sold through GOG had DRM when the game launched. This included retail copies, which had SecuRom.
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Did retail copies bought in Poland have SecuROM, or any DRM at all? Those are the only copies that were published by CD-Projekt. In North America Atari had publishing rights (later, Warner Bros. took over), Europe and Australia had Bandai Namco, and Japan had CyberFront. It was the other publishers, not CD-Projekt, who added DRM to retail copies. CD-Projekt responded by arranging it so that if you bought The Witcher 2 from anywhere then you could go here [gog.com] and get the game DRM-free from GOG at no additional c
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I bought the game from GoG, but loved to hear about that when it happened. CD-Projekt are true bros and one of the studios I really want to support.
I was about to say that I'd buy their games even if they weren't as good as they are, but you could actually do quite a bit worse than Witcher 2 and still have a game worth playing.
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GOG is nice but I personally wish they had a proper client. Sure, it's not like many of the games on GOG receive updates and hence need some of the features provided by Steam but I personally enjoy the organisation aspects of Steam.
Re:What kind? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no requirement for DRM on Steam. It's a distribution platform first and formaost, and there are DRM-free games on Steam. Steam also has DRM that publishers can use (and which really isn't that bad or intrusive). Steam also distributes games with all the worst DRM: horrible, horrible stuff.
Contrast this with Good Old Games, owned by the very same CD Projekt Red. There you get a promise of "no DRM of any kind ever". They distribute many games which originally had DRM in some cracked (but licensed) form, so stuff like "look up this word in the manual" is bypassed. They're just as good as Steam at patch management.
Steam is tolerable. It's good points outweigh its problems. But GOG is great. It's made of win and awesome. It's like the best pirate BBS from back in the day, where every game worked better thanks to the cracks, except it's all legal and licensed, and reasonably priced. Naturally, they're having a hard time attracting publishers, but the financial success of the Witcher titles might get some notice.
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There is no requirement for DRM on Steam. It's a distribution platform first and formaost, and there are DRM-free games on Steam. Steam also has DRM that publishers can use (and which really isn't that bad or intrusive). Steam also distributes games with all the worst DRM: horrible, horrible stuff.
Contrast this with Good Old Games, owned by the very same CD Projekt Red. There you get a promise of "no DRM of any kind ever". They distribute many games which originally had DRM in some cracked (but licensed) form, so stuff like "look up this word in the manual" is bypassed. They're just as good as Steam at patch management.
Steam is tolerable. It's good points outweigh its problems. But GOG is great. It's made of win and awesome. It's like the best pirate BBS from back in the day, where every game worked better thanks to the cracks, except it's all legal and licensed, and reasonably priced. Naturally, they're having a hard time attracting publishers, but the financial success of the Witcher titles might get some notice.
GoG: No linux :(
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I wonder how hard it would be for all the older games that run in DOSbox?
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Fairly easy - the hard part is getting the game out of the installer. You'd need to use something like innoextract or WINE. But fortunately GOG is busy working on adding Linux support right now, so sometime in the near future it should be as easy on Linux as it is in Windows.
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Doesn't many old DOS-era games from gog.com come with DOSBox? Shouldn't be too hard to move from one DOSBox installation to another?
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Yet. But from the request page [gog.com] and then this notice [gog.com], it is coming...
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They have recently announced their intention to support ubuntu/mint.
See http://www.gog.com/news/gogcom... [gog.com]
It shouldn't be that hard. Anyway, wine is also a viable solution for many older games, although I haven't tried it myself. For the adventurous types, many games from GoG can be played under linux. Here is a quick list:
http://www.gog.com/mix/linux_n... [gog.com]
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Most of their Mac games use DOSBox or WINE, so it probably wasn't too much effort for them to get Linux support working for most of them. Even before they announced Mac support, I ran quite a few of their games with WINE and DOSBox on OS X (their older games use DOSBox on Windows too), but it's a lot less hassle to get their configs (although they tend to be quite pessimistic about visual quality, and you can improve some of the older adventure games a lot by changing the scaling mode to hq3x in the DOSBox
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You're correct in that Steam doesn't mandate DRM for games sold on it. But it has two distinct problems:
1. Steam doesn't indicate on a game's store page if said game is DRM-free. You have to search for this information elsewhere and hope someone has the correct info. Sometime Steam will indicate if a game uses extra DRM apart from regular Steam-DRM, but I've never seen it advertise a game as DRM-free unless the developer/publisher has specifically put that info somewhere in the game's description. However,
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>Steam doesn't indicate on a game's store page if said game is DRM-free
If you get the Enhanced Steam addon for Firefox, it will tag any game you look at with if it has bonus DRM or not. Or shit like UPlay.
It also shows you historic price data for every game, so you know you're paying three times the Spring Sale price, or twice the GOG price or if you're getting a good deal.
>Steam mandates use of a client. Even if you want to run the game outside of the client, you need the Steam client for downloading
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Agreed. Steam makes it a lot easier for me to manage my game collection.
Blatant lies (Score:1)
Wow, you're some *special* kind of stupid, aren't you? Or did you just think we all are?
Directly from the page you linked:
Go die in a fire, DRM-apologist.
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But GOG is great. It's made of win and awesome.
Apart from not having any games I want to play.
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But GOG is great. It's made of win and awesome.
Apart from not having any games I want to play.
My impression is that there is a higher percentage of GOG games worth playing than Steam games worth playing. Obviously, Steam is a much bigger platform with thousands of games, but still, games on GOG have generally stood the test of time. Anyway, if you've never tried some of the best old games, you could be pleasantly surprised.
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Give it time, it's growing. It won't ever have titles from EA of course (and nothing of value was lost), but indie dev studios have discovered it, and the percentage of new small titles available on both Steam and GOG is growing. And who knows, with the success of their own AAA title, some of the bigger studios might finally cave as well - at least those not so arrogant as to be exclusive to their own homebrew distribution network.
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Steam isn't the problem, developers are. You can get genuine DRM-free games on Steam, meaning it'll handle downloads/updates/mods for you, but you can also run the game from it's own folder, copy the folder to another PC, run it from there without Steam, etc. It really isn't the one holding you back. If you want more DRM-free options, ask the people who make the games.
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I usually use a couple of computers at once, and I sometimes have a slow-paced game on one and want to play something faster on another while, say, waiting for turns to process or something. I can do this with even the most draconian DRM schemes, but not with Steam..
If a Steam game is DRM-free, you can still load the executable directly without Steam running at all, no need to mess around with offline mode.
Steam doesn't force any kind of DRM on games - I have several genuinely DRM-free games on Steam.
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Interesting! I wasn't aware that this was an option. I will have to investigate that. Thanks!
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If a Steam game is DRM-free, you can still load the executable directly without Steam running at all,
Its not quite as simple as that. If the game supports steam achievements, workshop, trading cards, cloud saves, etc then its not necessarily steam "DRM" that is causing a reliance on being logged into steam.
There are lots of genuinely drm free games that 'like' being tied to steam... not for the drm, but for the other steam features.
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I installed Neverwinter from Steam and later installed the Arc client for promotional freebees and some how the Arc client found Neverwinter buried in the steam folder. When I launch Neverwinter from Arc this play time doesn't register with Steam...
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if (!steam_is_available) panic();
If the game relies on steamworks cloud saves etc and doesn't gracefully run without them that's not DRM any more than this is:
if (!sound_card_is_available) panic();
Its lazy at worst, but its not DRM.
You are so very full of shit... (Score:1)
No, that's definitely DRM.
A game that needs my "sound card" (lol) can still be played if the same game is on another PC. It certainly isn't going to object if another game that I happened to buy from the same *store* is being played on another PC! It can still be played if I swap out the sound card for another one. It can *probably* even be played just by turning off sound...
Steam doesn't allow any of that.
If Steam let you just access those features which are needed for game support while simultaneously bei
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It certainly isn't going to object if another game that I happened to buy from the same *store* is being played on another PC!
The game doesn't object. Steam itself does. There *is* a big difference, even if the end result is indistinguishable in practice.
It can *probably* even be played just by turning off sound...
Depends where "if (!sound_device_available)" is.
If you honestly thought that just because they *told* you it was purely for technical reasons it therefore isn't DRM, you are a colossal idiot
If the
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There have also been games which were released with DRM, and later patched to remove it. There have even been games which were released without DRM, some publishers added DRM, and later it was patched out again.
Steamworks looks like DRM and quacks like DRM. In what way is it not DRM? Just because they removed the DRM later doesn't mean it wasn't DRM in the first place. That's what Steam is. I'll even grant that in some cases the developers honestly didn't *intend* it to be DRM, but if they use Steamworks an
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Steamworks looks like DRM and quacks like DRM. In what way is it not DRM?
It has a cloud save game component - that's not DRM.
It has a match making service - that's not DRM
It has its whole 'achievements' tracking, and leaderboards and stuff, that's not DRM.
Steam is download manager, and automatic patching system, and that's not DRM either.
But yeah, Steam ALSO has a DRM component, no question about that.
Steam is DRM.
Saying "Steam is DRM" is like saying the Wizard of Oz is a story about a scarecrow. Its not r
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Valve tries to push Steam as the friendly DRM, luvvable and plushy and not that evil kind that the competition uses.
Check out gog.com instead, and get some of the same games as Steam but DRM free and cheaper than Steam sales.
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"Some" of the same games is about right.
GOG is great for old games and the odd indy title but there catalog simply does not compare.
I love old games, but I also enjoy playing games made this century and in this regard GOG is simply nowhere close to the depth of Steam.
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True. But whenever people start gushing about great deals they can get on Steam these are usually titles also on GOG, whereas the games I want to get on Steam tend to be high priced in the $50-$60 range.
Re: What kind? (Score:2)
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Waiting for turns to process?
Are you playing on a PDP-11?
So what you're saying is you know very well it's technically possible to do what you want on Steam, but because some customer service rep tells you they don't want you to, you find the whole platform "really annoying".
Bah.
When a pla
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When a platform comes along that gives developers a sense of security and reason to invest in games and gives users the ability to install their games on more than one machine and when that machine goes belly up, to install them automatically on another machine
To be fair, that has existed before....on consoles.
Valve has done a pretty good job of being really friendly to gamers. They create a whole ecosystem of games and forums and support and communication to the dev community that never existed before.
That never existed before on the PC....consoles are a different story. We've had that sort of thing since the PSone days.
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Yeah, but that's a console, which by its very nature is a less preferable method of gaming, meant mainly for children and the developmentally disabled.
There may well be other features of console gaming that once presented some advantage. I can't think of any, but theoretically it's possible that they exist, for gamers willing to degrade themselves by playing on a console.
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Yeah, but that's a console, which by its very nature is a less preferable method of gaming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
So tell me, what PC games were you playing from 1972 to 1977? Let me guess, you were'nt, unless of course you were some university lab playing Hunt the Wumpus or something, but odds are you weren't playing electronic games at home.
Now take a look at the price for
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
or the Launch pr
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Also, do you know about the new "family accounts"? Maybe you should give Bob @ Phone Support another call to ease your suffering.
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Multiple accounts /w shared games (Score:1)
One thing I've noticed is that the "family mode" allows one to play games from "Account B" on "Account A" (after an additional step to authorize the secondary machine/account). I can't remember if I've done this while logged into both accounts, but perhaps that might work for you?
I've got one account on the "family PC" that does auto-login, and is authorized to play games from my main account.
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My Steam games are often very slow to start, and sometimes refuse to start at all. I'm not a huge fan of whatever it is Steam does to my games (though easily installing it on multiple machines is certainly nice).
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Link to Article (Score:2)
http://www.vg247.com/2014/04/2... [vg247.com]
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Actually, scratch that. This is a better link to the source:
http://www.redbull.com/en/game... [redbull.com]
Link (Score:2)
http://www.redbull.com/en/game... [redbull.com]
A new advance on not RTFA (Score:5, Funny)
The Witcher 2 (Score:2)
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Yup. It was.
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Right here. [wikipedia.org] It's a subsidiary of CDProjecktRed.
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The first or the second? I really enjoyed the first, but about the only improvement in the second was the graphics (and my laptop could only handle the lowest detail at a playable rate anyway). The combat was a lot better in the first one and the characters seemed more interesting.
It's a difficult balance in this kind of game between making it open (so the player feels in control of what's happening) and providing a story (because part of the reason for buying the game like this is to be told a story).
They get it! (Score:1)
DRM is pointless there is no need for anything past a cd key because it's going to be cracked no matter what you do.
DRM:
It's a challenge
It's reputation
It's curiosity
It's self enlightenment
It's testing your limits
Adobe - has one of the most diehard DRM setups ever created costing millions to make and it was completely fucking destroyed in four hours.
Re: They get it! (Score:2)
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Buying, installing and playing a game with Steam is just easier than downloading it from some torrent tracker, applying a crack and then struggling to find cracked patches as time goes by.
I don't pirate PC games any more. I can afford to pay for them, I feel good about spending the money on them and I don't feel like I'm jumping through hoops to get what I want.
For me, Steam is good enough that I wish a similar solution was available for TV and Movies (Unfortunately, due to the various network and studio de
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lend a friend the CD), but these days it's easier to give someone a link to a .torrent file than to lend them a CD anyway.
1999 called, it want's it's disc-based game distribution medium back. You mean "DVD" or perhaps "BD-ROM"
Another thing Projekt Red gets right... (Score:1)
Is that when they eventually release a director's cut version of the game several months or a year after release, they don't make you purchase it separately if you bought the game previously. You get the full version update for free.
Now if only Capcom would do that with the PC version of games like Street Fighter 4, which only has 3 or 4 different versions now.
Hope it lives up to the books this time. (Score:2, Insightful)
Try reading the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski. They really 'transcend the genre' - much like Patrick O'Brian's Master & Commander series. If Sapowski was writing in English he'd be a far bigger deal than George R.R. Martin or any of the other current fantasy hacks.
Is this a lie like last time? (Score:1)
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No idea what you're talking about. I got Witcher 2 totally DRM free.
Hmmm (Score:2)
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Not only did they do away with DRM, but... (Score:2)
CD-Projekt actually gave away all of the DLC they made for the game, and allowed you to download it through the game configurator. Even better, after you downloaded the game, the DLC menu allowed you to download voice acting in any of the languages you wanted.
I really have to recommend the original polish voice acting. I'm not polish and I do not understand the language, but I truly enjoyed the work they had done. I'd say most voices were a better match than in the english version (especially in Witcher 1).
I think they call that "open"? (Score:2)
I think they have a name for that already: "open-world RPG".
(What did I miss?)
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Reading comprehension class, apparently. It's not that hard to figure out: they're saying it's technically an open-world RPG, but it has the strong overall plot and rich storyline that is characteristic of (successful) closed-world RPGs.
In fairness, it's nothing new. A lot of games have tried to strike that balance; in fact, it's been a while since I've seen a classic open-world RPG, and I'm OK with that. But, I'm also really glad to *have* that freedom, even though it's not required for the central appeal
Unusually? (Score:2)
The studio, CD Projekt Red, reveals that, unusually, it'll be releasing the game as a DRM-free download.
Unusually? The Witcher 2 was also DRM-free (if you bought it from them, and not through some other distributor, at least). Releasing DRM-free is standard for them, and one of several reasons why I like them so much. (Other reasons are that their games are unbelievably gorgeous, and they do interesting stuff with really driving moral choices in their games.)