Oh lord, it's really happening. The Christmas sales are here. First out of the gate is GOG.com, purveyors of classic PC games and newer indie releases. And The Witcher 2, which doesn't quite fit either category.

For the next 22(-ish) hours, they're offering 75% off their Bullfrog Favourites collection. For $11.92, you get three Populouses, two Dungeon Keepers, Theme Hospital, Syndicate and Magic Carpet. While you have to get all the games to qualify for the full 75% off, any you already own will helpfully count to the total, with the price adjusting accordingly.

Also! For the next two days the site is giving away Duke Nukem 3D for free. Now you can use the cheeky 16 year old FPS to wash away the bad taste of any sequels that may or may not have happened.

Also! The whole site is holding a 50% sale off the majority of its catalogue until January 3rd. Looking through, it seems to include just about everything that isn't called Baldur's Gate. It does, however, include the other Infinity Engine RPGs, with both Icewind Dales and Planescape: Torment now costing $4.99. You can also pick up The Witcher 2 at a 60% discount of $11.99 (just under £7.50 in real money).

You can browse the full list of discounted games in their catalogue. There's some brilliant stuff in there. There's also Myst.

When facing the end of time as we know it through a cataclysmic prophecy, it's time for a sale to mark history's end with a bang. To wit, GameFly's End of the World event nixes 75 percent off select titles for the next 12 days, providing valuable buys such as a $15/£9 Witcher 2, a $25/£15.50 XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and $12.50/£8 for The Walking Dead, among others.

More games will appear throughout the sale's duration, but current offerings include Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for $2.50/£1.60, Batman: Arkham Asylum for $10/£6, and Crysis for $7.50/£4.70.

If you haven't yet taken shelter in your fallout bunker cheered at the increasing arrival of awesome holiday sales, Origin's Green Monday sale are still around for just one more day with 40 percent off on tons of noteworthy titles such as Battlefield 3 ($24/£15), Crusader Kings II ($24/£15), and The Sims 3 ($18/£11). Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a couple of asteroid-repelling planks to board up.

Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski's large body of short stories and novels has provided the basis for CD Projekt RED's The Witcher and The Witcher 2, but Sapkowski isn't interested in playing either of them. Speaking to Eurogamer, Sapkowski praised the games, but said that he has "never played any computer games," only saw art from The Witcher, and doesn't "feel like a co-author of the game."

At risk of sounding ageist, it's not surprising that the 64-year-old author has other hobbies. More interesting is his take on the games' relationship to his work. "The game—with all due respect to it, but let's finally say it openly—is not an 'alternative version', nor a sequel," said Sapkowski. "The game is a free adaptation containing elements of my work; an adaptation created by different authors."

"Maybe it's time to set the matters straight," he continued later. "'The Witcher' is a well made video game, its success is well deserved and the creators deserve all the splendor and honor due. But in no way can it be considered to be an 'alternative version', nor a 'sequel' to the witcher Geralt stories. Because this can only be told by Geralt's creator. A certain Andrzej Sapkowski."

On the topic of possible cross-overs between the games and his writing, Sapkowski said that he finds it "terrible" that we're becoming accustomed to "the strange convergence of media and the freedom of mixing them," and that "the idea to write 'adjuvant content' and create something 'complementary' to a game or a comic is an absolute pinnacle of idiocy."

In response to Eurogamer's story, CD Projekt RED Studio Head Adam Badowski passed along a comment to clarify the studio's relationship with Sapkowski and his novels.

"Our cooperation has a strict and defined direction," wrote Badowski. "I can't imagine Andrzej Sapkowski playing a game to do research for the new novels. This is unlikely and would look like writing a book for a game or movie release, which ends badly in most cases; the novel winds up in a collector's edition and then covers with dust somewhere on the gamer's shelf.

"We want to develop The Witcher's universe in other media, not only video games. We have Mr. Sapkowsk's blessing and what we create is in line with his vision of the world, no matter how the saga will evolve."

You can read the entire interview with Sapkowski, as well as Badowski's response, over at Eurogamer.

Earlier this week I had a chat with CD Projekt RED PR Specialist Agnieszka Szóstak and GOG Head of PR & Marketing Trevor Longino. We briefly discussed several topics, including CDP RED's upcoming open-world RPG Cyberpunk 2077, GOG's take on Windows 8 and its new Mac library, as well as some of the piracy issues CDP has been so vocal about in the past. Here are the best responses on those topics:

On Cyberpunk 2077's open world and modding
 
PC Gamer: Since Cyberpunk will be using RED Engine, is there the possibility of introducing REDKit compatibility, making it moddable?

Agnieszka Szóstak: You know, we got lots of questions like that before we’ve actually said that REDKit will be available, and we are doing this toolset. So, it’s like, we did that with The Witcher 1, we’re doing this with The Witcher 2, so there’s a high, high, high possibility we are going to do this with Cyberpunk, but since it’s in a very early stage of development, it’s too early to talk about that.

That will be a logical step, and knowing our team—how ambitious they are, and how supportive we are in terms of our community—it’s something we’d like to do. Will that happen? It’s too early to say, but it’s a great idea to consider and I know we would love to. It’s all about things like timing, doing it right, because releasing the tool is one thing, and then making it as accessible and working well and all those stuff, it’s more difficult.

PCG: What do you mean by early development—is it all conceptual right now?

AS: There’s actually a lot of things going on simultaneously. Lots of ideas going on, lots of creative process going on, lots of design and ideas being brought up and then left because we say, “No, that won’t work.”

We do an enormous amount of work with Mike Pondsmith, simply because, you know, there’s a challenge pretty similar to the challenge we’ve had with The Witcher, because the whole franchise was already created in the mind of Andrzej Sapkowski, basically the creator of a whole universe. So we have the same challenge with Mike, because we have the universe creator, and now we have to kind of push it a step forward and bring it to a platform like the PC.

So there’s lots of conceptual work, and on the other side you already have people working on particular assets, early models, building the art. So it’s like, going two ways. At this point, it’s also always about what is working, what is not really working. Plus, for us, an open world is a new experience.



PCG: How different is it in the open world respect? There’s still a central narrative, right?

AS: Storytelling is really important to us, so that’s one of the key features for each and every of our games. On the other hand, Cyberpunk, from definition, should allow you to do different kind of stuff. It should allow you to have a real choice between the main plot and just exploring the world and doing different side quests. So, this is one of the greatest challenges we will have to face, because we do believe that we can actually create a great story within the whole world that people will enjoy and would like to follow, so we have to think how to create a world that will be consistent in terms of what you can do outside the main story, and how those side quests are connected to the main story itself. How to make it approachable and immersive enough so gamers don’t get lost in the whole thing.

So if they’re like, 100s of hours into the gameplay and they’ve left the main plot at some point and just started exploring the world—how to make sure that after several hours they won’t be lost and saying, “So where was I? What was I supposed to do? What’s the main story all about?” So it is totally challenging, though the plan for now is to create a really gripping and immersive story that will drive the whole world, and side quests around it will be very connected and kind of, the best thing we could possibly do is actually have those side quests connected one with another, all of them with the main plot.

So, let’s say if we reveal some things in the main plot, or if you reveal some side information regarding what’s going on in the main story. So that’s very, very hard to achieve, but we do believe we will with Mike’s help and the great team working on it.

PCG: A lot of games strive for that balance. You’ll probably be compared to The Elder Scrolls series in terms of open worlds with main storylines and side material.

AS: Yes. That’s all about making the world liveable with a good story, making it immersive. There’s lots of great ideas we have to do that, and obviously we can’t reveal any of them at this point. It’s a little bit too early—we have to save something for later on—but yes, we do have great ideas for how to achieve that goal and find this balance between the open world and great storytelling. If we’re going to succeed or not—that’s a future thing.

GOG on Windows 8, Mac gaming, and Linux support
 


PCG: You’ve just released a new catalog of Mac games on GOG. You and Valve are sort of moving into that space together, and Valve with Linux, too. Is any of that a response to the reception of Windows 8?

Trevor Longino: Well, there are things I can’t say about Windows 8 or else someone will drag me out back behind the Microsoft building and shoot me. But I will say, based on what I know, I know what people’s concerns are about Windows 8. And there are some very serious ones as far as releasing new games.

But from GOG’s point of view, Windows 8 gaming isn’t quite as scary as it is for other game outlets. But we mentioned at our conference that we’re working on Windows 8 support. The majority of games that work on Windows 7—I’m saying like 90% here—work on Windows 8. But we’re based on the release candidate build that was publicly available. And one, we don’t know what’s going to change in the final build—hopefully not much—and two, we don’t know what they might change in say, Service Pack 1. It may be they get really big pushback from the community. Not just developers that are concerned, but users who are saying, “I’m not gonna upgrade, this looks like rubbish.” So they may walk back some changes, in which case what we’ve been testing on might not be what ends up being the OS that you have available.

So, we have a plan in place for Windows 8. We will support it with the majority of our titles, I don’t doubt. But I will say that moving over to Mac gaming isn’t because we anticipate seeing more gamers thinking, “Hey, you know, this Windows 8 isn’t worth it, let me go see about Mac gaming.”

PCG: And Linux?

TL: Linux gaming is also something we’d love to do, but we haven’t made any announcements about it yet. We’ve been looking at it.

I’ve been making public statements for a while that there are technical hurdles. Steam’s approach is to say, “Here’s our distro, we support this distro. Have another distro? Sorry.” That’s not how GOG does things, we’re more free-range gaming. So we’re looking at how to deliver the GOG experience on— we can’t say every computer, because you can of course hook up an E Ink display with 2-color CGA as your monitor, use Lynx as your web browser, and run some weird Debian distro that you’ve custom modded to do just what you want and then say, “How come I can’t play your games?”

PCG: I’d love to play Fallout 2 on an E Ink display.

TL: Yeah, something like that? No, we won’t support it, obviously. But we want to try to get it where the majority of gamers, if they’re on Linux, will be able to get a game and expect it works. We haven’t found a solution, yet. We know there’s a big demand for it, just like we know everyone wants System Shock with 25 thousand votes. It’s tough, because the rights with System Shock are just a mess. Likewise, we know people want Linux games. And people are saying “You could just distribute the TAR and we’ll figure it out.” Sure, we could just distribute the DOS executables and just let the Windows users figure it out, but that’s not how we do business. So making that experience on Linux is a challenge and one that we’re trying to address.

PCG: Speaking of things we want, I wish Microsoft would give you Freelancer. I’ve been looking for a copy.

TL: Oh, yes, I love it. I have a copy. I have a CD.

PCG: I can’t find mine. It might be in a box.

TL: Well, we announced two years ago what our top five targets are. We’ve signed two of them, and what we have left now are Microsoft, Take-Two, and LucasArts. We’ve gotten really far in talks with one of those guys, and we believe probably right around the time of the next big press conference we’ll be able to say, “Here, we have these games.”

They’re really exciting, and our test team is starting to look at them, because we pretty much have it worked out with these guys. So now we’re just talking about what games we can have, what games have advice for. It should be awesome news for classic gamers. These games are such great games, even new gamers should be able to say, “This is an awesome game.” There are tons of really good releases we’re working on signing on the classic games front.

And of course, new games like Deponia 2, and other new games I can’t talk about, because we haven’t signed the deal yet.

On piracy of The Witcher 2
 


PCG: So, off topic, there was a story recently from a torrent news site which said The Witcher 2 is the most pirated game at a US university.

Agnieszka Szóstak: Obviously, we are aware of news like that. We have this e-mail thread going on within the studio that says, “Hey guys, did you see this thing that says our game is the most pirated?” And it’s like—it's—

PCG: Flattering, in a way?

AS: Absolutely, because you can look at it from two different point of views. From one point of views, it’s obviously sad, right? There’s a bunch of people working on it for years, and then you get other people taking it free, pirating it, and that’s it. On the other hand, well, the game must be good, right? If there’s such a demand to do that. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s something that we’re aware of, but that will never change our attitude towards what we do and the approach we have.

I mean, we really do believe that it’s better to deliver high quality content and support gamers on several different levels. So, either releasing modding tools, or giving DLC for free, or doing huge updates which are like 10 gigs and give them out free. Instead of doing DRM, because that’s, frankly speaking, a pain in the ass for the users.

PCG: There was that period in Germany when you were able to track those who pirated the game and send legal letters to them.

AS: Yeah. It was going on. It was all about sending letters to people who we knew pirated the game, and say “Hey, we know you have the pirated version of the game, and it would be nice if you could actually pay for it if you find the game good enough.”

Although, once we started doing that, we got lots of feedback from the community—from gamers, and not even pirates, but actually legal gamers with a legal version of the game, saying “You know what, guys? That’s not entirely right to do that.” And they were like, “You’re saying that DRM is not such a great thing, and you try to give your games without it, but on the other hand, you’re doing something like that?”

So, we’re not afraid to say that wasn’t the best choice and best solution we could have done. And that’s why we kind of resigned and we don’t do it anymore.

PCG: Do you think it was unfair? To ask for money when they've pirated your game?

AS: I mean, well, the funniest question we got was, “Don’t you guys like money? That you’re actually releasing games without DRM.” Yes, it is fair. It is fair to ask for money for a job that we do. And for content we do believe it’s actually worth paying for. So, it is fair to ask for money, although one thing doesn’t collide with another. Since we’re talking about the news or things going on, I’m not sure if you’re aware of the quite funny thing that happened to us on 4chan website.

There was a guy there saying, “Hey, there is this game called The Witcher 2, and I just downloaded it from torrents or whatever, and I’m kinda stuck on this quest and I don’t know what to do so I need support from you guys.” And the whole 4chan community, they just went totally mad, and they were like, “Are you crazy? Downloading and pirating the game from those guys? If there’s anybody in the industry worth supporting and actually paying for the games, that’s CD Projekt RED. So just go… blah blah,” I will not be using bad words here!

Trevor Longino: Go do creative, anatomically impossible things.

AS: So, "We will not support you, just go and buy the damn game." That was actually the comment we get. And you know, 4chan community is—let’s call it a unique one. So if you’re getting this kind of feedback from those guys, that’s probably proof that you’re doing things right.

PCG: So it criticized the legal stuff, but the community also comes to your defense.

AS: Yes. So that’s something we don’t want to change, simply because, on a daily basis we see it works. This kind of approach works. And if you take care of the community, if you take care of your fans, if you have the kind of approach of not just releasing the game and then you’re done. Right? You’ve sold the game, so don’t care about anything else. That’s totally not us, because our approach is to support constantly our customers whether for PC gaming or Xbox gaming or any other thing.

CD Projekt RED's DRM-free policy has made The Witcher 2 a popular target for piracy, and the studio is well-aware. Though it maintains its anti-DRM stance, in 2011 it briefly tracked down holders of pirated Witcher 2 copies and sent legal notices requesting compensation. CDP has since stopped the practice and apologized, something I spoke to PR Specialist Agnieszka Szóstak about yesterday.

"Yeah, it was going on," said Szóstak. "It was all about sending letters to people who we knew pirated , and say, 'Hey, we know you have the pirated version of the game, and it would be nice if you could actually pay for it if you find the game good enough.'

"Although, once we started doing that, we got lots of feedback from the community—from gamers, and not even pirates, but actually legal gamers with a legal version of the game, saying, 'You know what, guys? That’s not entirely right to do that.' And they were like, 'You’re saying that DRM is not such a great thing, and you try to give your games without it, but on the other hand, you’re doing something like that?'

"So, we’re not afraid to say that wasn’t the best choice and best solution we could have done. And that’s why we kind of resigned and we don’t do it anymore."

When I asked if she thought asking for money from pirates was fair, Szóstak said, "Yes, it is fair. It is fair to ask for money for a job that we do. And for content we do believe it’s actually worth paying for. So, it is fair to ask for money, although one thing doesn't collide with another."

The "another" Szóstak refers to is CD Projekt's current customer policies, not only in regards to DRM, but also ongoing service. "There’s nothing we can do about ," she said. "It’s something that we’re aware of, but that will never change our attitude towards what we do and the approach we have.

"I mean, we really do believe that it’s better to deliver high quality content and support gamers on several different levels. So, either releasing modding tools, or giving DLC for free, or doing huge updates which are like 10 gigs and give them out free. Instead of doing DRM, because that’s, frankly speaking, a pain in the ass for the users."

Check back tomorrow for transcripts of my chats with Szóstak and GOG Head of PR & Marketing Trevor Longino.

CD Projekt RED has released a new timelapse video to show off its upcoming modding tool, REDkit, which will be available free to owners of The Witcher 2 sometime in the first half of 2013. The software opens up The Witcher 2's REDengine, allowing users to create their own RPG worlds or modify The Witcher 2. Exciting, isn't it?

REDkit is currently in closed beta, with 100-plus modding teams providing feedback.

In a dubious honor, BitTorrent news blog TorrentFreak has named Rutgers University as the top torrenting university in the US. And what's the most torrented game at this fine institution? The Witcher 2.

Considering that in a previous interview with PC Gamer, a CD Projekt Red exec stated that the developer can track piracy of its products with 100% accuracy and has demanded money from thousands of alleged pirates in Germany, students at Rutgers who torrented The Witcher 2 may be lucky that CDP stopped hunting down pirates back in January. CDP has long held the opinion that DRM copy protection isn't necessary for its games, with its CEO telling us last year that "None of solutions really work, so why not abandon it altogether?"

The blurring divide between what's virtual and what's real gets all the attention these days, and The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red embraces this concept with a desire to rip your face right off your head and stick it into one of their upcoming games (Cyberpunk?).

Before you dive for cover, check out the explanatory video below. Apart from the breath-of-relief usage of a digitized version of your face instead of actual flesh, CD Projekt Red's competition offers two methods of entry. For those Witcher 2-less, purchasing the game between now and the end of the month guarantees entry when you send proof of purchase and an explanation of why you should be in their game.

If buying games isn't your thing, you've probably spent your money on a magnum-opus Witcher costume for those evening walks. You're in luck! Snap a picture of yourself using whatever Witcher 2 props/pose/squibs you need, scribble up an "I'm awesome" essay, and send it in.

Looking to enter? CD Projekt's official competition page has the details.

At Gamescom this week, CD Projekt RED is unveiling REDkit, its suite of modding tools for The Witcher 2. The dev team is currently accepting applications for early access to the tools on the Witcher official site. Early access is targeted at established modders: you'll be required to provide a short bio, an example of a mod you've made (which doesn't have to be CD Projekt-related), and a website.

"We have our own vision for RPGs: they should present an exciting story and give players lots of choices that really matter. The REDkit is designed to create adventures that way," said studio head Adam Badowski. "Mature, non-linear and engrossing stories set in vivid worlds filled with believable characters."

The registration deadline for early access is September 30th, so if you don't currently have a modding portfolio to show, you've got about six weeks to get one together. What kinds of new mods would you like to see for The Witcher 2?

With the release of the Enhanced Edition of The Witcher 2, CD Projekt indicated to us that the game was finally finished. Now they're handing over the reins to the community as they prepare to release the RedKit, a set of mod tools that will "allow any player to create their own content for the PC version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, such as new, non-linear adventures, great looking locations and much more." They made the announcement in a post on the Witcher 2 site, and will be showing off the RedKit at Gamescom next week behind closed doors.

The prospect of a good suite of editing software for CD Project's luscious engine is an exciting one. It'll be interesting to see if the Witcher 2 will get Steam Workshop support as well, making it easier for players to browse and install the storm of new maps and missions that the RedKit will surely encourage. More power to the modders!