http://en.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?/topic/23385-ask-me-anything-session-with-cdpr/
So CDPR did a "Ask me anything" session I figured it's something interesting to read. And to save you quoting it:

Before you all go crazy, he has a point, we've seen it happen before and chances are, we'll see it again. But that's just me. Sticks and stones.

It's funny, because to me the original Witcher was not well thought out or executed well, and I enjoyed Oblivion infinitely more. I have yet to play TW2, (I want to, just haven't gotten around to it yet) but from what I've seen of it it's certainly not groundbreaking either.

CDPR is very sassy with their thoughts on other companies. But they're one of the most fan friendly companies out there at the moment, releasing their DLC for free, actual expansions etc.

I'm currently playing through The Witcher and I think, as much as I loved Oblivion, his point is valid. There certainly aren't as many game breaking bugs ( AFAIK ) in The Witcher as in Oblivion. I expect there will be quite a few game breaking bugs in Skyrim, constant connection to Beth or not. I'll probably end up buying TW2 eventually.

I'm not really sure what "sassy" means, but by and large they do seem to be a friendly and approachable bunch.


The likelihood of bugs is what worries me most about Skyrim: Bethesda has an absolutely appalling track record in this regard, and an equally bad one when it comes to fixing stuff after release. That's not to say TW2 was perfect since no game is, but the bugs were mostly minor annoyances unlike the show-stoppers that were eventually responsible for me quitting Morrowind, Oblivion and FO3: shame, since I felt they all had more to offer but I couldn't face the usual litany of problems any longer.

To that I can only say that you have very poor taste. I can understand it if you only like open world games, like many people here, but if you don't see that for a story driven RPG it was really, really good, well... :shrug:


I feel the same. In fact, they seem to be the only company left that still respects its fans and tries to sell more products by, you know, trying to make a better product and provide good services instead of buggering legitimate customers with ridiculous drm schemes and robbing them with overpriced, low quality downloadable content. They're right in criticising Bethesda for the large amount of bugs and the poor post-release support as well, I think that one of the only companies that does worse than Beth in that regard is Obsidian.

Well, first I should say that I haven't actually finished TW. I've played it for ~25 hours so I feel like I've had a good taste, but I haven't done everything as of yet. Second, I should rephrase what I said.

The Witcher has a very deep and involved story, and I can't praise that enough. It's something that most games today are missing. (Including Oblivion.) But I found it to be fractured and detached, and not quite finished. Whether this is due to poor translating or myself not paying enough attention, I don't know. But to me it seems like the average quest is, "have a fractured conversation with someone, kill a bunch of monsters, collect items from said monsters, bring the items back." The journal entries are deep, and I can tell that people reference events in the world's history, but the game's events themselves just don't seem finished to me.

A good example is the party with Shani. The conversations jump all over the place, someone's talking about one thing one second and something else the next. You end up drunk off your ass and have to walk all the way to the inn to fix that. It just seems poorly executed to me.

And I love linear RPGs, sometimes more than open world ones. BioWare, for instance, have produced some of my favorite games, and I certainly wouldn't call Dragon Age open world.

A whole bunch of the sidequests are simple item fetch quests, that's true. I was never bothered myself about that, since you don't really have to focus on them. If you just pick them up and do the really interesting quests you usually find all the necessary monster parts along the way. It's better in The Witcher 2 though, they completely got rid of all the monster grinding quests.

You certainly have a point about the poor dialogue, that was a pretty serious issue at release. Apparently it was indeed because of a poor translation job, I've heard that the original Polish version is great. The thing is, that in the Enhanced Edition, which could be downloaded as a patch for people who purchased the original game, one of the things they did was seriously improve the dialogue to fix that. And they did it for free. That's why I like CD Projekt so much, if something is broken they are man enough to admit it, and they fix it without charging anything.

Actually, Obsidian's pretty good at that. Now, their games are incredibly buggy at release, no argument there, but they do make an extensive effort to fix them in the months afterward. Not as good as CD Projekt RED, if the Enhanced Edition of The Witcher is anything to go by, but they try, much harder than Bethesda ever will.

Though personally, for The Witcher 2, I'd rather see an overhaul of the saving system sooner rather than later. There's no justification for how hard they failed in that stupidly basic area. :flame:

Agree wholeheartedly with CD Projeckt. Had The Witcher 2 on preorder, there were some problems running at first but they were quickly solved for me, took longer for some others unfortunately. They've added a bundle of extra bits and bobs and then went and removed DRM from the game.

Bethesda at least to me are taking liberties with goodwill and reputation which has pretty much ran out.

If the competition that is provided by The Witcher, Risen 2, Mass Effect 3 et all makes Bethesda sit up and take notice and cease to be so lax then it'll be a good thing.

Don't think anyone needs to worry about Mass Effect 3. BioWare admitted that Mass Effect is just a convosational shooter.

:rofl: at Oblivion bashing. They must be fans.

PS. I am suffering from this bug.
http://en.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?/topic/1775-shader-bugpixellation-in-cutscenes-on-widescreen/
http://3mb.us/images/244_The_Witcher_Nahaufnahme.png

In every cutscene within a game consisted of cutscenes... It is very distracting, especially in motion.