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Not sure if it is day 1 but watch out for "The Witcher 3" DLCs. They are going to mock larger companies by giving you their DLCs for free, well if you purchase the game. No need to preorder, just buy it.

http://thewitcher.com/news/vie...

One of the VERY few companies left that actually care about the consumer. DRM free from Day 1 - get it at GOG.com

Just in case someone wants to reinstall the original Witcher: The Patch 1.4 on this page http://www.en.thewitcher.com/the-witcher/1/ will remove the DRM that comes on the retail CD. You will need to download the appropriate language patch in the same directory. And then you can apply patch 1.5 for extra content.

CD Project are trying. They fucked up big time with the registration servers, but I do not think it was trough malice. Never attribute to malice that which, yada, yada...

3 seconds on google found me this forum post on The Witcher's official forum: http://www.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?topic=25939.0 . One poster uploaded the uncensored texture files:http://www.mediafire.com/?jyyjnmozmyv . (Disclaimer, I have not downloaded/tested the files, nor do I own or play the game. Use at your own risk, etc, etc.)

I was about to say almost exactly this.

If a game is multi-platform, then you will play it more (if you don't it's not worth any more to you).

Frankly I doubt this. Most of the games I play would not be enjoyable to play on my phone - the screen is much too small, and the phone hasn't got appropriate controls. I would prefer to be able to buy the games I play for Linux rather than having to keep a Windows box just for playing games, but I don't need any game which I do play to run on multiple platforms, because I'm only going to play it on one. Of course, if a game is Mac only (or Wii/Playstation/X-Box only) then I won't play it because I don't have those platforms. Making a game multi-platform expands the market for the game, but it doesn't make individual players play it more.

If a game is good, then you will play it more.

Oh, absolutely. I've played The Witcher at least 150 hours; Dragon Age about the same. Probably over a thousand of hours of Neverwinter Nights (which I only bought to support the Linux port) in its various incarnations and community add-ons. Certainly hundreds of hours of Sid Meier's Civlization, Alpha Centauri (both of which, again, I only bought because there were Linux ports and I wanted to support them), Pirates! and Railroads! Hundreds of hours on Settlers II, III and IV. And, back in the day, thousands of hours playing Elite, the video game sans pariel. In terms of hours of entertainment per unit currency, good games are extraordinary value for money.

I fins that about half the games I buy I only play once or twice. I don't resent that in the least, because the games that do work for me give me so much fun.

If a game gets extra content, then you will play it more.

Again, agreed, particularly if it comes with good modding tools and allows community-made content. After all, modding (and playing other people's mods) is half the fun of things like NWN and The Witcher.

I

I kind of wish that they'd have gone the extra mile and done a BG III instead of devolving into the pit of crap that is Neverwinter Nights and related games and expansions.

Without wishing to criticise Baldur's Gate, I think Neverwinter Nights and it's successors are among the best games ever. There's no accounting for taste, of course. There are certainly things wrong with NWN, but I think that's mainly the use of the D&D world - from that point of view, The Witcher, which is set in a much grittier and more realistic world, is better. But I'm really surprised that anyone into RPGs thinks NWN is 'crap'.

Bioware has repeatedly had contests where they've asked the community to open up the NWN toolset, write some dialogue and send it to them. The proof is in the pudding.

CD Project Red (The Witcher) are doing the same thing, and my team has won two out of four stages of the current contest, come second in one stage, and ducked out of one; we're probably favourites to be overall winners. I have to admit I got involved in this competition to build up a modding team towards doing a commercial independent game, but I think that it's at present extremely difficult to break into even the indie games market, let alone the 'big' games market.

Also, writers are not the most sought-after talent. 3D modellers are probably that - but concept art is also important. So if you're good at storyboarding, work on your 2D art skills.

Then, find a game which you enjoy which makes it's content creation toolkit available to the community (Bioware, Bethesda, CD Projekt Red - there's a lot of buzz at present about the new Bioware toolkit which will come with Dragon Age), hang out in the forums, get a feel of which modding team has got its act most together, and talk to them.

And it should be noted that writing typical fiction or exposition is different from writing threaded dialogue in a game, hence that is why they ask people to submit basic mods made in their toolset.

This is absolutely true. Non-linear narratives which work for the reader/player/user/audience are very much harder to write well than linear narratives, and the more freedom you allow the player the harder it is to craft a satisfying narrative. This doesn't make it not worth doing - on the contrary, like the GPP, it is my ambition to produce a really excellent story-driven game.

Bioware has repeatedly had contests where they've asked the community to open up the NWN toolset, write some dialogue and send it to them. The proof is in the pudding.

CD Project Red (The Witcher) are doing the same thing, and my team has won two out of four stages of the current contest, come second in one stage, and ducked out of one; we're probably favourites to be overall winners. I have to admit I got involved in this competition to build up a modding team towards doing a commercial independent game, but I think that it's at present extremely difficult to break into even the indie games market, let alone the 'big' games market.

Also, writers are not the most sought-after talent. 3D modellers are probably that - but concept art is also important. So if you're good at storyboarding, work on your 2D art skills.

Then, find a game which you enjoy which makes it's content creation toolkit available to the community (Bioware, Bethesda, CD Projekt Red - there's a lot of buzz at present about the new Bioware toolkit which will come with Dragon Age), hang out in the forums, get a feel of which modding team has got its act most together, and talk to them.

And it should be noted that writing typical fiction or exposition is different from writing threaded dialogue in a game, hence that is why they ask people to submit basic mods made in their toolset.

This is absolutely true. Non-linear narratives which work for the reader/player/user/audience are very much harder to write well than linear narratives, and the more freedom you allow the player the harder it is to craft a satisfying narrative. This doesn't make it not worth doing - on the contrary, like the GPP, it is my ambition to produce a really excellent story-driven game.

My team is currently leading The Witcher mod competition, and I read through this article thinking 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes'. Compared with the very well established Neverwinter Aurora toolkit, D'Jinni, The Witcher toolkit, is very fragile, and very under-documented. And, of course, we're pioneers, so while there are a few people who have already tried some things, we're having to learn a lot through trial and error.

My conclusion? This is the last mod I'll do with closed source tools. D'Jinni produces very polished results - the scenery of The Witcher is breathtaking - but when things don't work we could at least debug and find out why not. So we're looking carefully at The Blender and the Java Monkey Engine.

Agreed.

However, looking at the development of art history... I imagine gaming will do something similar as we become bored of perfectly realistic games, even if they are masterpieces of both art and game design.

Anybody else with a more extensive art background have any other comments on this?

Interesting thought, but not one that persuades me. Many games have already made a virtue of deliberately non-photo-realistic visuals. Molyneux' games, for example, have cartoonish visuals not because he doesn't have the graphic sophistication to go for near photo-real but because he chooses not to.

I think the visual aesthetic has a lot to do with the entire experience the director is trying to impart. I really love The Witcher (my review here) for its immersiveness, and part of that immersiveness is the beautiful visuals which are clearly aiming towards (although not, at least on my hardware, quite achieving it). You really can, in The Witcher, just stop and watch the moon rise and be blown away by the beauty of the scene.

Photorealism also suits stories which build on the 'film noir' genre, as it's clear that Heavy Rain does - but black-and-white might work better (it's noticeable that the palette in those Heavy Rain screenshots is pretty subdued).

However, in the game I'm trying to work on I want to end up with a 'charcoal and wash' visual - very little colour and not a lot of detail. I don't - yet - know how to do this - near photo real would be a lot easier and may be what I eventually end up with. But the reason for that choice is partly to make the game look distinctive, but it's also to comment on the culture of the people I'm trying to tell a story about.

I bought (as in paid full price for) most of the games that Loki (remember them) ever ported to Linux. I still play Alpha Centauri sometimes - it still runs on modern Linux (though sadly their port of Civ3 no longer runs - doesn't get on with modern libraries in some way I haven't bothered to diagnose). I bought Neverwinter Nights when it first came out, because it was available in a Linux port (and it still runs very nicely, and yes, I still sometimes play it - mostly user-generated content, too). And I'm one of the only 597 people world-wide who have so far pre-ordered Apricot.

And that's kind of the point.

It costs money to develop commercial games; quite a lot of money. The people who develop them want to sell them. If there were enough Linux users prepared to spend real money on games, we'd have more commercial games. Over the last few weeks I've been playing (and really enjoying) The Witcher. It runs on an updated version of Bioware's Aurora engine, so presumably it wouldn't be hard to port it to Linux. But I don't expect we'll see a Linux port, because Atari, who sell it, clearly don't think enough of us would pay for it. And sadly I think they're probably right.

I've haven't found many open source game projects which are compelling to me. There are plenty of good ideas out there, and half-finished projects. Globulation is quite polished and seems to me quite innovative, and plays well; but it's also quite shallow - you'll enjoy it for a week but you won't still be playing it in a year. Oolite is genuinely good and you might still be playing it in a year - but that's largely because it is a faithful reconstruction of Elite, which is one of the great classics of computer games. Flightgear may be good but it isn't my thing.

To create a new game takes a lot of vision and a lot of work. Until you've done a lot of work it's hard to communicate the vision, so it's hard to recruit people. And even then, too many of the talented people prefer to tinker with some project of their own which they'll never get finished, than co-operate to deliver someone else's vision. I'd like to be wrong on this. But what I see on Freshmeat is lots of 'alpha' and 'beta' projects, and very little that's genuinely playable.

For me it's The Witcher. Here is a GT review.