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Originally Posted by dcb  It's like a group of D&D high school virgins got together and made a video game... |
Hello, it's me - one of those D&D virgins
that made The Witcher.
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Originally Posted by dcb ...full of all the sex they never had, violence they never dished out, and cuss words their parents never let them say. Look, just because it contains elements of sex, extreme violence, and adult humor (and I use that term lightly) doesn't mean it's a "mature" game. |
I hope, you just haven't played the game enough, or played it without enought attention to notice that it's mature not because of sex, violence & swearing; but because the game touches quite important issues: racism, ecology, terrorism, etc. Also, it's not us (developers) who invented this setting, it was created by Andrzej Sapkowski - a very experienced and quite old writer, who is sometimes compared to "Polish Umberto Eco" because of his vast knowledge and talent. I doubt he ever played D&D, and for sure he has children...
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Originally Posted by dcb To be honest, I stopped playing at "dwarf cock." Am I a prude? No. Do I want an immersive RPG? Yes. Do pop-culture references and modern cuss words ruin a medieval fantasy RPG for me? Yes. |
Of course, I understand that it might be confusing for the first time (even Sapkowski first story was censored, because editor didn't understand "modern fantasy" idea). Just try to stop thinking about this as a "medieval world" (actually, medieval WAS only Europe - fantasy is not Europe, so it is at best quasi-medieval) but treat is rather as a modern literature (story), using fantasy only as a 'canvas' to speak about contemporary problems. It's much more appealing that just "high fantasy" world.
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Originally Posted by dcb Not to mention the incredibly awkward voice dialogue. Are the voices themselves good? Yes. Does the dialogue make sense and flow from topic to topic seemlessly? Absolutely not. It is incredibly poor in that sense. Maybe you can argue there's just something lost in the language translation, but really, I think most of us expected much more. |
I can't judge English translation. Dialogs were trimmed (we had to shorten it by roughly 20% to meet agreements with ATARI), so maybe the process spoiled them slightly. It was not intended, we judged number of dialog lines incorrectly, and needed to adjust them according to agreements (and technical possibilitied). Editing included grammar correction, "Polish-like" expressions, redundant info and lots of minor changes. Hard to judge, if it's our or ATARI fault - rather I think it's first time someone did a huge Polish-->English game translation, and we needed to learn from mistakes. Actually English language is much more "compact" and precise, than Polish one - so usually Polish text is about 20% longer than English equivalent. It was something we knew from our localization experience, and it didn't work the other way.
Polish conversations are brilliant
and, from what I've heard, English voice acting is quite good.
My personal advise – if you already bought The Witcher… give it second chance and try to play a little more. I promise you will find that it goes beyond “dwarf cock”