The Witcher Enhanced Edition Announced

Following up on the promise of a surprise announcement, CD Projekt today announced that a reworked version of The Witcher will be released this May in the form of The Witcher Enhanced Edition.

Most of the changes found in the Enhanced Edition are a result of player feedback, resulting in a more polished experience. Beyond bug fixes and stability improvements, the game will receive fifty new character models for an increased variety in NPC models, over a hundred new animation gestures for dialogue scenes, and improved facial animation and lip-syncing. The game's inventory screen will be redone as well.

One criticism leveled against the game upon its North American release last year was the game's translation from Polish, resulting in a loss of detail and atmosphere. For the Enhanced Edition, CD Projekt is completely re-doing the English language version while also improving foreign languages releases where needed.

Not just the game itself will be improved, so will the contents of the game box. In addition to the game DVD, Enhanced Edition will ship with a second DVD that includes the D'jinii Mod Editor and two CD Projekt-developed adventures, a video DVD with a making-of video, a CD with the game's 29 tracks, another CD with 15 tracks of music inspired by the game, an 80-page instruction booklet, a 112-page official game guide, a map of the game world, and a 50-page short story written by The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski.

CD Projekt is currently negotiating publishing contracts for The Witcher Enhanced Edition, but expects Eastern Europe to receive the game May 16.

Current owners of The Witcher will not be left out when it comes to all these changes; they will receive the improvements in the form of a downloadable update.