CD Projekt, the developers of the highly anticipated RPG ‘The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings’ recently held a keynote presentation at CD Projekt Spring Conference last Thursday. The event was live stremed via the internet and showcased many of the game’s new features and gameplay. Right now there are probably some people kicking themselves for missing it. Lucky, the full video presentation, complete with a gameplay demo of the The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings is now available from CD Projekt official website.
With the release of The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings now less than a month away, CD Projekt has also been kind enough to through up a FAQ to answer several questions that I’m sure many fan have bombarding them with.
The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings will be released exclusively for the PC on May 17th
THE WITCHER 2 FAQ UPDATE – APRIL 2011
- WHAT DRM WILL THE WITCHER 2 HAVE?
The primary reason for including copy protection with internet activation is to address the biggest concern of our publishing and distribution partners, which is potential piracy before release. To do so, we must implement at least a minimal form of protection.
The Witcher 2 will be delivered to external manufacturing plants weeks before release. It is virtually impossible to guarantee absolute security for this entire time. Any leak of the code can gravely compromise the commercialization of the game, and we want to be sure that the first people to play it will be the fans and customers who are waiting for their official copies. That’s why, together with our publishing and distributing partners, we decided to use copy protection. The Digital Premium Edition available from GOG.com will be the sole exception. Since it is our sister company, located in the same building, we are completely confident the code will be absolutely secure.
As a company and also as gamers ourselves, we’d like to stress that we are against any kind of copy protection that might affect the game experience or limit the usability of legally purchased copies. For this reason, we decided to implement a custom version that is the lightest and least intrusive possible. During installation, it will be necessary to connect to the Internet one time – but NEVER while playing. Similarly, the only time you need to have the disks in your drive is during installation.
While we are aware of some players’ associations with the SecuROM technology, the server infrastructure of its provider, SONY, gives us the highest level of confidence that registering legal copies will be problem-free. Every legal copy can be played on up to five machines at a time. What’s more, registrations can be revoked at any time; in effect, The Witcher 2 can be installed on unlimited number of machines. It will also be possible to make backups. Furthermore, we will make every effort to cooperate with our publishing and distribution partners to remove the DRM in a postrelease update.
- WHY SHOULD I REGISTER MY COPY?
Registration of legally purchased copies is completely optional. To make the process as user-friendly as possible, the same key is used for both installation and registration. Anyone who chooses to register will receive various bonuses (English and Polish language packs, free future DLC and more), and additional promotional materials such as bonus songs. Registered users will also receive automatic notifications of updates via the game launcher. In addition, this will be the only way to update the product – patches will not be available as separate files, making it impossible to update illegal copies of the game in this manner.
- WHY AND HOW SHOULD I USE MY SAVEGAMES FROM THE WITCHER?
The Witcher 2 will provide a complete story and game experience. It is not necessary to have played the original. As a bonus, those who did will have the option of importing their saved games. The opening of The Witcher 2 is, however, the same for everyone. Events and decisions from imported saves may be reflected later on, but only in ways that can happen anyway. If The Witcher is still installed on your hard drive, The Witcher 2 will automatically detect all saves after the last critical choice point, and either suggest the file to import, or allow you to choose from all the possible ones.
Note: The preview build sent at the beginning of April 2011 did not include the full save game system. The release version will let players save at any time PC gamers expect.
- WHAT KIND OF PERFORMANCE AND HARDWARE ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
The Witcher 2 is being developed for one platform, the PC. What this basically means, especially together with our proprietary REDengine, is that we take advantage of the most advanced performance hardware. Our game doesn’t compromise its performance, gameplay, the interface or anything else to accommodate other platforms.
The REDengine is built so players with two-core processors and min-spec machines will receive a fully enjoyable experience. Even more importantly, anyone with the recommended 4 cores and/or hyperthreading will see a visible improvement. 6 cores? 8? Cool! The Witcher 2 will make good use of them all. The game will also scale exceptionally well. It has not only low, medium and high graphical settings, but also an ultra detail level… and even an “uber sampling” mode.
Note: The release version of the game will have an advanced graphical settings menu. It will also support the 16:9 aspect ratio and be playable in 16:10 (non-native) as well as 4:3 (letterbox).
- WILL THERE BE DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE WITCHER 2?
The Witcher 2 will have the same content worldwide. There will be no regional differences aside from the languages. And no censored versions – so no wondering about importing the game, nudity patches, etc.
