I’ll probably go ahead and do that eventually, this was just a bit more drama than I wanted before 9 AM. It’d be unfair to call out The Witcher for this form of copy protection since every boxed MMO ever and also Spore have used similar methods to stop gamer siblings from sharing, and some of them (FFIX and Spore) have used even more nefarious systems on top of that to inconvenience even the primary user.

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but mass homicide really is good times!

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Oh, so if the main protagonist was woman, you wouldn’t feel this as an issue then? Since Sapkowski doesn’t have this kind of problem, and both male and female protagonists are promiscuous (or not – depends on specific character of course).

They should have made Ciri as the protagonist – I wonder, what would ‘angry internet reviewers’ have said then :) Guess that cards with all those young men wouldn’t be as popular .-) I think it could have been interesting though. Maybe suggestion for a mod?

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I actually had nothing to say about the way the cards were presented, because I know as well as anyone that they’re just a tacky way of handling game-art unlocks. I was actually playing devil’s advocate in regards to how people will kick up a stink if human mating rituals are taken as anything less than sacred, whereas mass homicide is good times.

The point I was trying to make was that in a game of that ilk, pretty much everything is tacky, but I think it’s meant to be. In talking about the cards, and Geralt’s experiences with women, I think it’s silly to overlook the rest of the game. The whole Witcher thing is an amusing example of alpha male mentality, as Geralt the Übermensch lords over the countryside.

What I was trying to get at with my point, albeit a tad satirically, was that it’s interesting how only the tacky sides of a game which are sexual are raised. That fascinates me, I can’t help that. And that’s what I was trying to get at there, more than anything else.

So I think I might’ve been misunderstood in that post, I was primarily highlighting that discrepancy more than sexual content. You see, I wasn’t saying that people had a problem with sexual content, taking it in context I was saying overall that I’m amused that in a tacky game, it’s only the tacky sexual aspects which are raised.

Reminds me of Duke Nukem, really. Everyone kicked up a fuss about the women, and the pig cops were barely even mentioned.

/shrug

It’s just interesting, from a sociological standpoint.

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Regarding that card issue – it is just a bonus, nobody is forcing you to it. I find it mostly funny – rather than erotic/disgusting – funny as in funny dialogues and encounters (and funny pictures on most cards) – and funny in a good sense I mean. Rather nice stops and pauses amidst all that slaughter. Concerning ‘womanizing’ – seems that women don’t have right to want just sex, do they? At least from some of the opinions/posts here I got this vibe some of you think so :)

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You don’t *get* anything (no loot, no XP, no plot development – nothing!) from running around and seducing women in the game, so why do it, unless you’re as immature as the cards that it’ll hand out to you?

Anyway – the Enhanced Edition does fix a lot of the problems. It’s still best played with the original Polish voice track (which has a far more emotionally nuanced Geralt, rather than the monotone/deadpan treatment he got in English) with subtitles though.

My main problem with the game was that it had the same difficulty curve as a Bioware RPG. Brutally hard at the start (the first boss is largely a matter of luck and/or exploiting areas where it gets stuck on geometry), and insultingly easy at the end. If anything, shouldn’t it be the other way round?

Wish there was an easy way of just opening up the game data and monkeying around with the enemy variables a little. It wouldn’t take much to make the combat more enjoyable simply through altering enemy toughness and strength.

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Personally, I think I’m going to install the french language pack, so that even the daftest of lines spoken by the women actors sounds sexy/filthy/dirty/insert-sex-related-naughty-word-here.

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(I AM VERY HUNGOVER. And thus dismayed more than I otherwise would be by this thread.)

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They seem to represent Geralt’s fond memories of those sexual encounters, which is surely quite in-character with him.

This. I’m not sure why there’s so much wailing over “immersion breaking” aspect of these cards when they seem mostly to be compromise between development time needed to produce content, and a wish to provide the player with diverse sex scenes. So the cards provide some rough narrative to optional parts of story that couldn’t be developed fully and shown in detail. Noes, there goes my immersion.

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By the way I’m about 12 hours into clear sky without a single crash or error on the Steam version.

the lack of communication on gsc’s side has convinced me that i will never purchase one of their games on launch again. i understand they’re a small dev and all, but i give to charity already. there’s not even the bare minimum of “there’s a patch coming soon, stay buttoned down” out of their camp. now, it appears a .05 patch is coming, but that’s according to a translation of the russian forums. what that’s worth, i know not. (nor how long it will take to come to steam)

anyway:

my neat bug is that having bought it via steam, i can install and play it – once. once i exit the game, regardless of whether i just relaunch clear sky, steam or reboot the entire machine, i get a freeze upon trying to load, change graphical options or even start a new game.

the 30 minutes i played were very good, though!

perhaps this is revenge for my having been able to play the original game unpatched with no gamestopping bugs or errors. (subsequent patches did improve performance significantly, though)

since i bought the steam version, i may very well be buggered (is that the proper britishism?), have no tech support from valve and can’t even just sell it on ebay and call it a day. i figure i’ll come back in a few weeks and see if the situation has improved, but right now i’m presuming that clear skies are not in my future.

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The loading times are much more tolerable, and it’s running smoothly apart from that (on high-ish settings on my ageing PC). The dialogue seems improved from what I can tell, and it remains pleasingly violent. Oh and I get a kick out of the Elvish language in the game being a mix of Welsh and Scots Gaelic.

Loving the music and atmosphere once more.

The sex cards are still bafflingly out of place but who cares.

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By the way I’m about 12 hours into clear sky without a single crash or error on the Steam version. The only bug I’ve noticed is the invisible grenade one. Yes the game has bugs, but less than SOC did on release, and in my opinion the gameplay is brilliant.

I enjoy reading the RPS guys articles and reviews no question, but I’m going to take their opinions with a couple grains of salt from here on out.

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