The Witcher 3 Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[ERYFKRAD]

I thought it ran on potato?

 

[WhiteGuts]

Potato doesn't contain enough polygons, I am told.

 

[tuluse]

I thought it ran on potato?

What do you think is inside the pierogies?

 

[Decado]

When I worked in the oil business there was a pierogi/sandwich place down the street from our terminal. They made this awesome sauerkraut sandwich with huge chunks of kielbasa, onions, and lots of mustard. And the two girls who worked behind the counter were that special kind of prickly, icy-cold Eastern European.

 

[Perkel]

The Witcher used a heavily modified version of the Aurora Engine. In the making of videos, they say they've modified it up to 75% or something.

They scrapped entire renderer IIRC. What was left of Aurora were tools and non graphical engine things.

Game looked like that because they simply used its own graphic engine. Which imo shows as TW1 looked better even than NWN2 which was released later than TW1. And it runs better than NWN2

 

[DalekFlay]

How so? I am not a native speaker but the enhanced edition did not sound glaringly wrong. I think there were 7 or 8 instances at most at which I heard something that was not translated properly. Can you remember any specific examples? (I know this is a hard request but one or two instances will do). I am genuinely interested since I played the game a long time ago and I thought they did a good job (I liked the dialogues in the first a lot more than in the second).

I think tuluse explained it well. Almost every conversation was a mix of weird pauses, small grammar errors that harmed the flow of sentences and seemingly missing information.

"Zoltan!"
"WHAAAAAAAAAAT?"
"Yes."
"Right."

 

[Roguey]

The English dialogue in The Witcher was Abso-fucking-lutely beautiful. I piss on your juvenile scorn.

 

[Paul_cz]

Frankly it is kinda a miracle Witcher 1 was as good as it was, considering it was all new young debutants with zero experience on a shitty engine.

 

[Cadmus]

The English dialogue in The Witcher was Abso-fucking-lutely beautiful. I piss on your juvenile scorn.

Fuck the english dialogue, I want a czech voice acting, that's the best. Glorious slavic swear words don't translate into english properly.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Well, the Witcher is certainly a far better use of the Aurora engine than anything Obsidian managed to pull off, once you get used to the controls. Whereas I was still fighting NWN2 into MotB.

The Witcher was TPS game while NWN2 was very much playable when played in tactic mode with camera zoomed out as as ISO game. It looks 1000 times less shit this way too.

 

[J_C]

Well, the Witcher is certainly a far better use of the Aurora engine than anything Obsidian managed to pull off, once you get used to the controls. Whereas I was still fighting NWN2 into MotB.

The Witcher was TPS game while NWN2 was very much playable when played in tactic mode with camera zoomed out as as ISO game. It looks 1000 times less shit this way too.

And that is the way it should be played.

 

[Copper]

Nah, every camera mode is fucked in NWN2, they just each have their own special deficiencies. Tactics mode might be the best, but it's still a pain to use for some stuff. (I think my version was bugged though, so rotating the view was a nightmare, etc.) Thinking back it's not like the Witcher was super smooth either, I remember still having awkward camera bits all the way into the first chapter. Blame Bioware.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

The Witcher used a heavily modified version of the Aurora Engine. In the making of videos, they say they've modified it up to 75% or something.

They scrapped entire renderer IIRC. What was left of Aurora were tools and non graphical engine things.

Game looked like that because they simply used its own graphic engine. Which imo shows as TW1 looked better even than NWN2 which was released later than TW1. And it runs better than NWN2

You're aware that 2006 (NWN2) came kinda before 2007 (TW1)?

 

[Perkel]

Oh shit you are right.

 

[Infinitron]

New CD Projekt logo: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...red-promises-no-more-delays-for-the-witcher-3

CD Projekt Red promises "no more delays" for The Witcher 3
"This is not our first game; we are not newbies."

By Robert Purchese Published Thursday, 15 May 2014

Polish developer CD Projekt Red has promised "no more delays" for massive role-playing game The Witcher 3.

The move from autumn to February was a one-off, company co-founder Marcin Iwinski told me at Polish conference Digital Dragons. If CDPR needed more time, it would have taken it then. In other words: you can bank your house on that February date.

"This is not our first game; we are not newbies," he said. "It's not like 'hey we are delaying and we'll keep on delaying'. If we would think we need more time we would say 'hey we'll release it not in Feb but, I don't know, June'. We made the decision at the moment we were able to judge how much time we needed, and we planned it well and it works well for us. So, no more delays."

The reaction to the delay surprised CD Projekt Red. Iwinski knew it was bad news his company was announcing, knew he was letting people down who - like him - had expected to be playing a big and long fantasy adventure during their Christmas holidays, on their new machines.

"But we were really positively surprised with the response," he said. "It was 'hey guys, great that you have the balls to say that you take your time and you spend money on it'. Because it's not happening for free. That's a really important thing to mention."

It's not like the decision was made lightly; not only was fan-reaction a concern but CDPR also had to justify the delay and extra expenditure to its shareholders, which heaped on "an additional load of pressure".

But quality is paramount. Iwinski freely admitted that The Witcher 2 could have used more time towards the end. "We could have done a better job for The Witcher 2 when we released it," he said. But that wasn't possible at the time, and so there were problems such as an out-of-whack difficulty curve that spiked at the beginning, plus other things that would have benefited from testing and finesse.

"You can always take more time on a game, especially with huge games," he said. "You're never able to plan perfectly, and then the closer you get to shipping, the more you see 'oh I could use these [extra] two-three months...'"

With The Witcher 3, a delay was possible, and a more secure and experienced CD Projekt Red decided to take it. The extra months will be used to go over the game with a fine tooth comb.

"Is the beginning of the game self explanatory or not? What is the difficulty level, how does it spread through the game?" They're the kind of questions you can't really answer until the end of development, I'm told.

"Content-wise, we exactly knew what we wanted to create," marketing director Michal Platkow-Gillewski chimed in, "and we could push really really hard and deliver the game this year still."

I looked to Marcin Iwinski who nodded his verification.

"But we knew what kind of quality we are expecting," Platkow-Gillewski continued, "and, I believe, what gamers would expect from us as well. And that was our aim. We knew that to deliver that we needed extra time."

So the delay had nothing to do with Dragon Age: Inquisition, and it's hefty EA marketing budget, being released around the same time?

"No, not at all," Iwinski shook his head. "Having said that, if they were shipping on October 8 and they would announce it before us, then we would look, I don't know, for November or something. Because there are so few RPGs that it's really a very stupid idea to ship them at the same time."

As a slight aside, CD Projekt Red announced a little re-branding for the studio and for The Witcher 3 last night. The new logos are below - anything to get rid of that old company logo!

The bird is based on the Northern Cardinal and a mythological firebird called the Rarog. It's supposed to represent ambition and inner fire.

The new Witcher 3 logo puts the Wild Hunt front and centre. The Wild Hunt is the dreaded menace attacking the world of The Witcher 3, its importance intertwined with everything you'll do.

 

[Perkel]

Wild Cunt will be wilder with this new logo

 

[Gerrard]

Is it me, or is promising "no more delays" a really dumb thing to do.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Is it me, or is promising "no more delays" a really dumb thing to do.

They said February, they didn't say which day

 

[Karwelas]

Is it me, or is promising "no more delays" a really dumb thing to do.

They said February, they didn't say which day

And there is nothing about year. By the way... only me or this brid looks like phoenix?

 

[Crispy]

By the way... only me or this brid looks like phoenix?

The bird is based on the Northern Cardinal and a mythological firebird called the Rarog. It's supposed to represent ambition and inner fire.

Barely Literate

 

[Necroscope]

(...) Glorious slavic swear words don't translate into english properly.

I'd say they don't translate at all.

One of the most amazing things about the Polish language is that you can stick prefixes onto nearly everything. Except furniture. You can add them to one vulgar word in particular and create a whole bunch of completely different (but still rude) verbs. This type of language is useful to know, if only to recognize it’s being used in your presence.
First, look at Polish prefixes of which there are boatloads: od-, prze-, przy-, na-, po-, za-, etc. (the list is long). You can take a verb like jechać (to go, to drive) and glue on some prefixes and wind up with different words: przyjechać (to arrive) or odjechać (to leave). Consider this extensive system of prefixation as economic linguistic recycling.
One particular Polish word has prefixation possibilities galore. It’s vulgar but we’re all adults (are we??? ) so let’s treat his clinically. The Polish verb pierdolić (to fuck) has super-semantic flexibility. It’s also considered more vulgar than its English equivalent which has a few recycling capabilities too. For example, the English f-word is an interjection but also a verb. The –ing or –ed forms are used as adjectives. Prepositional particles render different meanings like “fucked up” or “fucked over.” Yes, terribly coarse and downright offensive but the point is that we can squeeze several uses out of different forms of one word (for a less offensive example, check out the verb “to put” in the dictionary).
But we don’t add prefixes to the f-word so actually the Polish p-word makes the English f-word look pretty sorry when it comes to different forms and meanings. For example, add the prefix w- to the Polish form for wpierdolić (komuś), which means to beat someone up. But wpierdolić can also mean to scarf something as in chowing down. Substitute the prefix za- and you’ve got zapierdolić which means to steal something. Podpierdolić also means to steal, or to report on someone in a nasty backstabbing way.
And then there’s na-: add that to the Polish p-word and it has the sense of filling up or putting in too much of something. For example, if a waiter serves you a cutlet the size of bean and a mountain of potatoes, he “napierdolił ci ziemniaków”. That is, he screwed you over with potatoes – the proportions just aren’t right. If someone “napierdolił mi farmazonów” it means he’s telling me all kinds of lies, filling me up with unlikely impossible stories (farmazony is slang for “stories” in the sense that they’re not true).
And then this vulgar word can be used like the very ordinary English word “to put”. “Pierdolnij mi to na stół” would be like saying, “Fuckin’ put that here on the table for me.” Here’s my favourite: “Pierdolnąć obrazek na ścianę” would be “to hand a picture on the wall” – in less than casual terms, that is.

 

[Infinitron]

About the dialogue in Witcher 1:

Translation wasn't the only problem. The dialogue in the game was structurally weird. There were NPCs that required you to end the conversation and talk to them again to explore their entire dialogue tree. There were NPCs that wouldn't allow you to talk to them again until you'd left the area and returned. Combined with the poorly translated-sounding individual lines noted by DalekFlay, the overall effect was that dialogue felt stilted, disjointed and almost "buggy".

 

[Cadmus]

(...) Glorious slavic swear words don't translate into english properly.

I'd say they don't translate at all.

Slavic languages also use more hard sounding consonants like R and K "kurva, mrdat, zasrany" to create harsher sounding swear words than your typical "fuck". They are also more based on genitals than the English swear words and can also sound more comic. All this provides for a larger (even without recycling the roots/stems?) and more colorful swear word palette.

For example I don't understand why muricans seem to have problem with watching movies in the original language with subtitles. You are missing half the fun that way.

 

[Misconnected]

Americans aren't the only ones. And on the one hand, I totally approve. I'm sure subtitles suck ass if you're dyslexic and don't speak the original language. But on the other... It takes my ability to suspend my disbelief and throws pies at it while playing Yakety Sax. And that just doesn't work for most things. At least, not if I'm remotely sober.

 

[DalekFlay]

For example I don't understand why muricans seem to have problem with watching movies in the original language with subtitles. You are missing half the fun that way.

We aren't trained to do it. 99.9% of our media is our own, unlike pretty much every other country I have been to. So you could go 30 years into your life without even realizing the French make movies, let alone watch one. One day a kwa bro encounters his first subtitled foreign movie and he's like "wtf is this shit?" and quickly changes the channel before his world view is challenged.

Also video games aren't movies. If your English version sucks, it just means your translation sucks.