This is one of the main reasons why I have grown to hate mainstream PC gaming. I have bought Witcher II last week, eager to give my money to brave Polish developers from CD Project Red. On Saturday I sat down to play it on a powerful PC - what could go wrong? Well, a lot of things.
I installed the game for the first time, then downloaded the patch. Patch refused to install, claiming the version of the game is wrong. Right, I did install English voices, maybe that's the problem. Oh, there's now way to remove them without removing the whole game? All right, uninstall, reinstall, patch. What, still wrong version? Googling, googling... ah-ha! I have English version of Windows 7 and need to install Polish character encoding for non-unicode something. Okay, I will. It is a little strange that a Polish game has problem with Polish diacritic characters, but I will. What, I need to restart computer after that? In XXI century? Whatever.
I finally get to run the game. Five samey animations reeking of standard After Effects effect? Mmkay. Menu - wow, pretty. I can't see the actual menu items, but it's still pretty. I start playing, see Geralt running, then tortured, then someone asks him a question and game hangs. No, wait, it didn't hang. The game is actually waiting for me to chose an answer... but I can see them! Yes, each line of text only shows itself when I hover above it with cursor. Dammit.
So I quit the game, run it again a few times with different settings, nothing changes. I chose to install newer ATI drivers then, which turns out to be a big mistake. Blusescreen of death. Two hours and four different drivers later I give up and fall back to system restore. Unfortunately, the only option is to go back to before Withcer installation. Which means another reinstallation, once the restore process is over. After two more hours of furious googling and one more restore, I finally find a way to install ATI drivers without bluescreen. Another hour goes by trying to find a combination of Witcher and Catalyst settings that would allow me to see dialogues and menu items - but to no effect.
Let's sum it up: half a day on Saturday plus one or two hours on Sunday, lots of nerves, lots of googling - and I still didn't get to play the game I paid for. It is not entirely CDProject Red fault, of course, ATI and Microsoft are also to blame for crappy drivers and hopeless operating system, but the outcome for me is that I have just wasted a chunk of my life.
Why I wrote "mainstream PC gaming" in the first sentence? Well, strangely enough, I rarely had this kind of problems with indie games or consoles. Some might say that it is due to their simplicity, but frankly, I don't care. What I know is that each time I want to play AAA title on a PC, I get into seventh circle of hell, full of drivers, reinstallation, patches, dlls and wasted hours.
As for Witcher 2, I still am very much rooting in favour of its authors and the game itself. I am glad I could give them my money, I would have done it even if I did not have a PC. But the fact that I can't really play it due to combination of bugs and drivers being shit is really sad.
