"The Witcher" by CD Projekt

[stoffe]

Some limited scripting could be available I suppose using the KotOR nwscript.nss and nwnnsscomp. Haven't tried anything yet though.

 

If they are going to release their development toolset then it would most likely contain a script compiler and hopefully the relevant nwscript.nss file. Without that one it's pretty hard to accomplish much. Remains to see when they release the tools though.

[tk102]

Yes, that is true. I am pretending that no such toolset will ever exist because it increases the excitement of modding.

[Arátoeldar]

Bewitched by The Witcher

 

If these are actual sales figures and not shipped units. Very impressive.

[tk102]

As PC platform purist, I love seeing this:

For example is the second best-selling game in Germany. It is only a PC and it is able to compete with games selling on different platforms, like consoles and play stations. We are in the first ten or even five best selling games in Great Britain and in all countries in Europe and America. In Poland, our success it is unbelievable, because in the first three days we sold more copies than some titles sell in ten years.

However, as one of the devs from CD Projekt pointed out, the true sales numbers have not been made public and the opening statement

The Witcher, the most awaited Polish computer role playing game, has premiered around the world in 100,000 copies in Poland and a million abroad, in 8 language versions.

does indeed refer to units shipped, not sold.

 

And just tie back into Star Wars, note at the very end of the article the name of the band you did the opening music.

[Lance Monance]

Reading these comments I get the impression that the Witcher is a very good game. Can anyone "rate" it for me? How does it compare to Kotor and Kotor II? Is it recommendable?

[Wookiee Rrudolf]

Reading these comments I get the impression that the Witcher is a very good game. Can anyone "rate" it for me? How does it compare to Kotor and Kotor II? Is it recommendable?

I wanted to play KOTOR and KOTOR II once more, but since I have 'The Witcher' (and newer graphic card ) I moved my next KOTOR playthrough for some time. 'The Witcher' is like vacuum - it will suck you to your computer

In my opinion one of the best cRPG ever: 9,5/10 (-0,5 becouse of quite long loading times).

[Pavlos]

I'm really not that impressed, to be honest. Admittedly, I'm only up to the first town and judging a game by its opening is never a good idea. Between the bad voice direction and a (in my opinion) gimped dialogue system it seems to be a very average game.

 

But, as I said, it's really too early for me to tell but right now the only vacuum effect is that it has no soul to it.

[tk102]

I find this to be an excellent game. It's quite different from KotOR and it's easy to forget they're using the same game engine. It doesn't have the Star Wars background or theme music to draw "soul" from, but it sets its own tone. Chapter 2 is when things start picking up IMO.

 

One thing I noticed is that even after getting rewarded for a quest, I find myself poor again and again. Not dirt poor, but there are always items that are just out reach of my pocketbook. This keeps me motivated to complete other sidequests, which in turn helps solidify the role of Geralt as a Witcher -- a monster bounty hunter.

[Aash Li]

Is this the game where its after some huge war, and the humans run around purging the elves and dwarves and whatnot because they think that they were the cause of the war or whatever?

[Darth333]

Well I've been playing until the end of chapter 2 and I am truly enjoying the game. For once, you don't have to choose between the obvious good but naive option or the stupid evil answer. No more lunch credit stealing! Instead, you get to chose between various shades of gray...sometimes you think you make the right choice but you learn the truth much later so you have to live with your decisions. Note that some Npcs have more than one quest or more info so once you finish a quest it might be worth to talk to them again. Chapter 2 was really good.

 

For the voice direction, I've read bad things about the English version so I decided to install the french version (from France) but I didn't like the voices. I just reinstalled the French version made in Quebecand I must say that I've been surprised by the quality of the voice acting.

 

I also like the fact that gold has some use and you have to work for it. Some quests require you to pay certain amounts of gold but merchants actually sell useful items that you won't necessarily find in the gameworld, mostly armor, weapons and books. Books are most useful so don't neglect them: they help you understand the environment (and collect precious ingredients from plants - some potions are really useful) and tell you about various creature's vulnerabilities (so you don't end up dying 20 times trying to find out how to kill a stupid plant ).

 

Note however, that this is a mature game. Sex and gore are omnipresent so if you are easily offended this game might not be for you.

[Aash Li]

Sex in the game? Just the way I like it, pixelated and safe! lol (joking of course).

[stingerhs]

if there wasn't already 20+ games coming out over the next two weeks, i'd definitely pick this up. i've read enough about this game to be very interested in it, but i have Crysis, Mass Effect, Unreal 3, Kane & Lynch, Call of Duty 4, and World in Conflict to play through first.

 

needless to say, i have to ask if this game is available via online download. i checked Gamestop today, and they had all of one copy on hand. just in case i can't get a copy at the store, is there a way i can download it (legally, of course)??

[Det. Bart Lasiter]

Yep. Atari has it available on their site. Make sure to back it up though, they only make it available to you for a short time (unless you pay extra) since Atari has a customer-****ing fetish. Another downside is that it's a lot slower than something like Direct2Drive (1 Mb/s+ on D2D, 800 Kb/s on Atari).

[stingerhs]

thanks, jmac. and bandwidth really isn't much of an issue since i'm stuck with a 200KB/s DSL connection. i'll have to check that out in about two weeks when i get my next paycheck.

[tk102]

Is this the game where its after some huge war, and the humans run around purging the elves and dwarves and whatnot because they think that they were the cause of the war or whatever?

 

Yes Aash Li. I found a video that describes the time period just prior to the game's setting.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=i5K0L73ERMw

[Aash Li]

Wonder if youre forced to play a male chara... it does sound interesting, and looks good.

[tk102]

Yes, you are Geralt the (male) Witcher. *

[Darth333]

Oh btw, there is one "monster" I am unable to beat:

 

Is there an easy way to get passed Shani's grandma other than getting lucky with her random dialog and catching her in a good mood? The old hag is getting on my nerves! She asks for golden gloves...of course I don't have them so she kicks me out of the house...I spend all what is left of my money to buy the damn gloves and when I come back they are no longer good enough for her and she kicks me out again...I re-enter and she dares to ask me money for the rent! I have no money left so she threw me out again...I take a single beer, enter the house one more time and now she complains that I am drunk and it's back to the street! She is the most annoying granny ever!

 

[tk102]

Oh btw, there is one "monster" I am unable to beat:

Really?

 

I paid her Shani's rent right at the beginning and she always calls me precious and tells me to go upstairs. The only time she kicked me out was when I stumbled in with roses for Shani, still drunk from the party...

 

Funny voice acting during that exchange:

 

"Eh! Oh you're drunk!"

*stumbling* "Not truuuuueee...."

 

 

[Darth333]

Really?

 

I paid her Shani's rent right at the beginning and she always calls me precious and tells me to go upstairs. The only time she kicked me out was when I stumbled in with roses for Shani, still drunk from the party...

 

Funny voice acting during that exchange:

 

"Eh! Oh you're drunk!"

*stumbling* "Not truuuuueee...."

 

lolz

 

well I didn't had money left when she asked me to pay..only 3-4 Orins after buying the damn gloves so I told her to get lost (I was angry that she didn't wanted gloves anymore...she told me "Are you crazy?" when I tried to give them to her) and that option didn't show up again

So now she hates me and I have to wait until she's in a good mood or until I have the option to tell her that I've been sent by the hospital. She and Vincent are the two npcs I managed to piss off for good I guess. Vincent tells me that if I say one more word to him, he'll send me back to jail lol

 

[tk102]

Patch 1.2 is scheduled to be released before Christmas. This patch is expected to speed up the load times between areas and provide the ability to disable the autosave.

 

****

A couple days ago I started attempting savegame editing on this game but alas, changes to the player.utc get overwritten by the game's data from elsewhere. There are a couple .sav files within the .TheWitcherSave file format that are indiscernible and I suspect these are doing the rewriting.

[stoffe]

A couple days ago I started attempting savegame editing on this game but alas, changes to the player.utc get overwritten by the game's data from elsewhere. There are a couple .sav files within the .TheWitcherSave file format that are indiscernible and I suspect these are doing the rewriting.

 

The Witcher may be doing things differently, but in Neverwinter Nights at least the player data was stored in the PlayerList field in the module.ifo file of the module they were in when the game was saved, IIRC.

[tk102]

in Neverwinter Nights at least the player data was stored in the PlayerList field in the module.ifo

Also with KotOR. The .sav files probably do contain the .are, .ifo, .git files within them since they're the largest (~3M) files within the .TheWitcherSave file. Unfortunately the .sav file is either compressed or obfuscated. I cannot find any strings or dwords within it that are recognizable.

[stoffe]

Also with KotOR. The .sav files probably do contain the .are, .ifo, .git files within them since they're the largest (~9M) files within the .TheWitcherSave file. Unfortunately the .sav file is either compressed or obfuscated. I cannot find any strings or dwords within it that are recognizable.

 

That would make sense, given how extremely bloated the GFF format becomes when it needs to store large amounts of data like instance info of all objects in several areas in the game world. NWN2 started compressing some of the save game data as well, and its saves are still huge when you get well into the game.

 

Have you tried standard zlib or zip compression?

[tk102]

LOL. I just changed the .sav extension to .zip and voila. The .zip contained a .sav file within it. I extracted it and its signature is MOD V1.0. I used ERFEdit to then extract the .are, .git, .ifo, .ncs, and even some .nss and .ndb files (ha ha ha).

 

The thing is I was going to do this, but talked myself out of it or something after being convinced it was obfuscated. Thanks for pointing out the obvious to me stoffe because who knows how long that would've taken me.

 

Edit: WitchSav has been upgraded from an extractor to an extractor/repacker. If you have KGFF and WitchSav in the same directory, you can extract the player.utc from the savegame and then launch KGFF from WitchSav. When you're done editing (and saved the changes to the .utc), you can repack the savegame and see the changes.