Talk about Polish hospitality — I’ve never heard tell of a game developer who takes as good care of their customers as Eastern Europe’s CD Projekt. While we don’t have the unprecedented complete re-localization of The Witcher quite yet, Patch 1.3 should more than keep us busy.
In addition to fixing a host of random crashes, bugs and pathfinding issues (finally!) the patch actually adds additional gameplay in the form of a two-hour quest called “The Price of Neutrality” that features interaction with other Witchers:
Populated with new NPC’s and other new graphical assets, the adventure takes the player into the little explored outskirts of Kaer Morhen in a compelling story with tough decisions and more than one possible ending.
If that’s not enough, how about creating your own adventure? CD Projekt also made a beta version of the D’jinni Adventure Editor downloadable today, and if this press release is to be believed it’s more than just a level editor.
The English language D’jinni beta adventure editor will let fans craft complete new adventures for Geralt using the existing graphical assets, maps and environments in the game. By creating new stories, cut-scenes, graphical effects, dialogue and gameplay actions, users of the adventure editor can let their imaginations run wild predicting the turmoil and tests waiting in Geralt’s future, or even filling in the missing years between the close of Andrzej Sapkowski’s last Witcher novel and the start of the game.
While “existing graphical assets” turns us off a little bit, the prospects for machinima in particular are exciting.
Now for the bad news — you can kiss your save games goodbye. Buried in the patch release notes is the following warning:
WARNING! The Witcher 1.3 Module Edition is only partially compatible with saved games from previous versions (1.0, 1.1a, 1.2). Loading older saved games is still possible but may lead to unexpected behavior and other problems. The players are advised to restart the game from the beginning using The Witcher 1.3 Module Edition.
I’d planned to restart the game anyhow once proper localization had allowed me to re-suspend my disbelief… but I just can’t see myself playing through the game a third time. Bring it on, 1.4!
September 4th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
“I’ve never heard tell of a game developer who takes as good care of their customers as Eastern Europe’s CD Projekt.”
Well, to my knowledge, Bioware did something similar to this in Neverwinter Nights when they released the witches wake module(scenario) and 2 others for free with a patch(afterward they released a remastered version of WW, as a premium module, but the initial was for free) , as well as supplied the buyers of the game with the Aurora Toolset, something similar to the aforementioned adventure editor, but not in beta.
September 4th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
@Fearnil: Thanks for the info — I’ll have to look into this. Very interesting, considering CD Projekt originally collaborated on The Witcher with Bioware (to some degree) and ended up using a heavily modified Aurora engine to build the game.