Witcher 2 Receiving a Second Patch, Hopes to Fix Issues
The Witcher 2 tries so hard, but just can’t seem to catch a break. The whole situation reminds me of going on a date with a beautiful woman, only to find out on the ride to the restaurant that she doesn’t talk, and when she finally decides to, it’s about her ten cats and royal wedding commemorative plate collection. Oh, and when you pick her up for a second date, she’s completely forgotten about the first date, but at least she talks to you this time.
Perplexed? Intrigued? Read the rest after the jump.
The first hurdle for The Witcher 2 was that the game launched with crippling DRM, which according to users, caused a performance decrease of anywhere between 5-30%. Admittedly, after ten days of users ranting and raving about such stifling DRM, Atari did the right thing and removed the DRM entirely. This news of the gaming public triumphing over the publisher greatly pleased the majority of the Witcher 2 community. Notice I said “the majority,” as in, not the people suffering from the other crippling launch issue, which just so happened to be that they couldn’t even launch the game.
Next, in comes the game’s developer, CD Projekt, to save the day with the long-awaited patch 1.1. In a perfect world, this is where the story would end happily ever after, with much monster slaying and lady wooing to be had by all. However, in the real world, the first patch inevitably fixes some of the main problems, but almost always adds in at least one more major issue. Well, CD Projekt didn’t disappoint. When users rushed to patch their slightly crippled installs, they were treated to a 9GB update, which basically meant an entire reinstall. This just added insult to injury for the users who had been reinstalling since last Tuesday in an effort to alleviate the failure to launch problem.
The good news is that bugs have been fixed, such as the aforementioned DRM, problems with DLC – and most importantly to southpaws like me – enabling more keys to be remapped. The bad news is there has been no word on whether patch 1.2, due next week, will again require a complete redownload.
CD Projekt is aware of the issue, and is working with Steam to rollout a solution, but either they make users wait for another much-needed patch, or they make users download the entire game again. It’s a good thing you’re so pretty and smart, The Witcher 2, because you’re making this relationship damn difficult.
The GOG version of W2 didn’t have DRM!
Did your patch 1.1 notes say anything about the performance increase that the versions bought through other sites are getting? I’m curious to know whether it was strictly DRM-related or not.
They did mention it here:
http://www.gog.com/en/news/the_witcher_2_1_1_patch_is_available_now
I think it’s important to point out that this is not even close to the first case of a game on Steam that required a redownload of almost everything for each update; it’s very common with games that store all of their data in a few large files (an increasingly common technique). The problem here is with the Steam client; specifically, that it can’t download anything except entire files, so, even if only a few kilobytes worth of data have been changed, a new copy of the entire 9 gig data file has to get downloaded. The GOG version of this was patch was 9 *MB*, not because it did fewer things, but because that version of the download contained only the bits of the data files that were different from the old ones. So, the reason the download was so large is a technical limitation of the Steam system, not any mistake that CD Projekt made.
Haha this article is a bit sensationalist. The drm only affected retail and the 9 gig patch was only steam. No one experienced both and gog users got neither