The Witcher Enhanced Edition Announced

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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.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    February 18, 2008 9:21 AM

    I'm kinda glad I waited. This sounds like a good deal to me.

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      February 18, 2008 9:30 AM

      Ditto.

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      February 18, 2008 9:35 AM

      Yeah, I've been waiting to play this but this seems like a good incentive to wait till May

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      February 18, 2008 9:39 AM

      [deleted]

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      February 18, 2008 9:43 AM

      Yeah. This is my chance to try this out :)

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      February 18, 2008 9:46 AM

      Yeah, I've never really heard of a company doing something quite like this. Developers release patches and point releases... but it sounds like they are taking feature changes normally held for the next release (next game in the series)... and putting them right into the current release. That's pretty impressive.

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      February 18, 2008 10:07 AM

      [deleted]

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      February 18, 2008 10:08 AM

      I've had the game sitting here for a while. Waited for the patch but still haven't started it. (Not playing games much at the moment; too busy coding or watching DVDs. I go through phases.)

      I guess I'll wait until May now. Pretty cool of them to give the new code/assets away free to existing owners, I must say.

      (I still haven't started STALKER properly yet, either. Such a commitment starting a big game like these that I put things off even once all the patches are out of the way. Then again I haven't played Crysis and a bunch of other games yet either.)

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      February 18, 2008 11:40 AM

      Yeah no way am I buying this until the update.

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      February 18, 2008 12:21 PM

      Me too... it sounded like a cool game, but I just didn't have the time for yet another game. Maybe in June or whenever it comes out, I will.

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      February 18, 2008 12:58 PM

      Yeah me too, the bugs and dialogue stuff had m hesitant, they polish that up well and I'm there. Sounds like a really god move.

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      February 18, 2008 5:25 PM

      same here!

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      February 18, 2008 7:30 PM

      Yeah. Was on the fence about the original...now this is a definite buy.

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      February 18, 2008 9:31 PM

      Ditto, I'll definitely be picking this up now (UK version, that is)

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