Dedicated group of gamers and fans alike toil for hours if not months to create the prefect mod and that to many times free of charge, and these mods are nothing less than spectacular. Mods over the past 5 years or so have really come into the spotlight, because it shows just shows how innovative and awesome a dedicated fan can be. From Deus Ex to Half Life 2, these graphical mods are nothing less than spectacular. With that said here are some of the top PC Graphic mods of all time.

(Warning: read the instructions carefully before you try to install any mod)

For more exciting features and lists, please click here. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more news and updates.

Note: List is in random order

Half Life 2 Enhancement Mod

Let’s face it, even without the mod Half Life 2 looks absolutely gorgeous and we are always looking for a reason to once again step into the shoes of Gordon Freeman. This mod gives the updated skins for players faces in the Half-Life 2 Enhancement Mod. And to be honest it looks really good, I mean you really have to pay attention to notice the difference, but all I can say is, damn that looks good!

CD Projekt RED announced during their autumn press conference that they’re now released over 50 games on GOG.com for Mac- buy the PC or Mac version of any of those games, and you get the other for free.

The Witcher 2 is also one of those games. Yep, you can now play The Witcher 2 on your Macs, and you can buy it for $22.49 for the next 48 hours, after which the game will settle back to its original price tag of $29.99.

Several other games like SimCity 2000, The Witcher: Enhanced Edition and Crusader: No Remorse are being sold for 50 per cent off. Customers who sign up for GOG.com now will get nine games free, including (but not, of course, not limited to) Beneath A Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress and Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2.

CD Projekt RED has also announced that their very own modding kit, called REDkit will be released in the first half of 2013. Meanwhile, they also revealed that their upcoming cyberpunk RPG now has the title 2077- which obviously means it’s set in 2077. So now, it’s called Cyberpunk 2077.

The Witcher 2 can be bought for Mac via Steam and GOG.com.

CD Projekt RED and GOG.com will be hosting a “special” event on October 18, and will be revealing a lot of info on their upcoming projects, including the upcoming new IP and Witcher 2’s Mac version.

First and foremost, they will be announcing the official name of their upcoming  new futuristic, cyberpunk RPG IP, currently called… well, Cyberpounk. CD Projekt RED will also be announcing several details on the upcoming release of the OS X version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

GOG.com, too, will be making some announcements about games they will be adding to their library and how they will be pricing these games.

The conference, as mentioned above, will be held on October 18 at 18.00 GMT. You can watch it online on GOG.com or The Witcher’s official Facebook page.

Stay tuned to Gamingbolt, we will be bringing updates as they come our way.

Players who don’t own the game can participate by purchasing a copy on Steam between September 5th and September 30th. Those that own the game though, get ready to embarrass yourselves.

Dress as a character from one of the developer’s games, and make it good. Either way, you have to explain why you should win.

The first Witcher game was somewhat of a breath of fresh air when it hit the PC a few years ago- all RPGs offer fantasy settings, and promise choices with impact and consequence, and quite a few modern ones promise to deliver ‘mature’ experiences. But other RPGs falter, offering only simple, dichotomous black and white choices, with little to no visible impact on how you play the game. Their idea of maturity is restricted to copious amounts of blood and gore, swearing and lewd jokes, all of which more often than not betrays the game’s immaturity by catering to the idea of what an adult storyline should be rather than what it is. Not so with the original Witcher, however.. Its choices fundamentally changed the story you got to experience. Its setting was dark, gritty, and mature in a very understated manner, with disturbing machinations and undertones, and no attempt made to hide the ugly interior hiding beneath the game’s well realized world. Its protagonist was a man who fell right in the grey zone of the moral spectrum, and who was forced to make similarly morally disturbing choices with distressing implications. In other words, The Witcher was a game that delivered on all the promises that all RPGs make, but few ever make good on.

Coming from a small Polish developer, it was a revelation, and when the sequel was announced, everybody awaited with bated breath. Its release brought to the masses what is possibly the truest RPG we’d seen in years, and one that upped the ante on every single one of its predecessor’s considerable accomplishments. And while the original game was possibly one of the best released last year, now, less than a year after the game first released, the developers have taken it upon themselves to release an enhanced edition of the game on the as a free update that all PC owners of this game will be getting, and this new edition represents the most complete and thoroughly realized edition of the game yet.

The Witcher 2 follows the story of Geralt of Rivia, the titular Witcher- think of Witchers as analogous to witches in medieval Europe, and you kind of get the idea. Suffering from amnesia, and branded a regicide, Geralt is on the run as he attempts to clear his name, and track down the true kingslayer. The story of The Witcher 2 is breathtaking and full of incredible locations, well developed, if not always likeable, characters, each with their own selfish motivations, and a flood of twists and turns that always keep you guessing as to what might happen next. To give any of it away would be to do the reader a disservice. The Witcher 2 is best experienced first hand, and its story is best when you go in blind.

What I can tell you about its story is how it differs from other games with fantasy settings. Yes, there are elves. No, they aren’t happy and mysterious supernatural folk who live in the woods, isolated from the world of humans. Rather, they are a suppressed group that has taken to insurgency to lash back at humans. Yes, there are dwarves, but again, they aren’t the busy smith and stoneworkers that we find in every other story. The dwarves in this game represent a nation in decay, a society rife with lethargy and corruption even as it rests on the laurels of its past accomplishments.

There are kingdoms, and they are all at war. Each kingdom led by a monarch who doesn’t care at all about diplomacy and statesmanship, and instead is more hell bent on carrying out his or her selfish motivations on the battlefields. Thousands may die because a king and his wife can’t agree on the succession to the throne, and have gone to war. Who cares? Not these two. They just see everything as a complex political game, and everybody under them, their civilians and their armies, are just pieces on the board for them.

There is magic, lots of magic, and yet those who use magic are are looked upon with suspicious eyes, and openly frowned down on behind their backs. There are various cities, and forests, and all the locales that you would expect in a fantasy tale- and yet in each city, corruption runs rampant, with prostitution, petty justice, roadside brawls, drunken gambling. And against the backdrop of this all, the citizens and people of this world toil away, continuing with their lives.

CD Projekt Red’s greatest accomplishment is in how well realized this world and this story is. The gritty, dirty cities of the game are presented as a real place, that would exist in spite of the player, and not just because of him. As you walk through the cobbling streets of Flotsam, you hear snippets of conversation among the people. And all of these are meaningful, all of these worth stopping and listening to, none of them just the disembodied and meaningless chatter that so often characterizes NPCs in other expansive games like Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto. Stopping and responding to someone who hails you down is almost always worth it, and not just because of the traditional RPG convention of being offered a sidequest that might yield good rewards- the people will always have something worth listening to, and you will come away from each conversation more knowledgeable about this world you have been dropped in, and as a result, you will find yourself caring that much more about what happens to it, a hive of villainy though it may be.

Your personal connection and attachment to the story is further enhanced by the fact that you have an impact on how it all plays out. Every RPG promises choice, but what all of them end up offering is multiple dialog choices that might look different, but always end up offering a few variations of the same one, at most two, alternatives. Not so in The Witcher 2. The very first dialog choice you are presented with in the game has a major impact on your game experience- depending on how you answer it, in fact, you might end up locking yourself out of certain quests and portions of the game entirely. Everything you say and everything you do all adds up. A character you might have chosen to help at the beginning of the game will turn up later and help you escape. As he helps you escape, he makes it clear that if the other guards see you, he will be forced to fight you by their side- and if you end up killing him, then you alter the flow of the story again.

It’s the little things like these that make you realize how variable The Witcher 2 really is, and just how much control you have over the story, but the true realization will probably come after multiple playthrough. Innocuous choices that you make end up altering the game and the story entirely- the middle third of the game is completely different based on some choices you made over the course of the first third of the story.

The Witcher 2 therefore convinces us that our decisions and choices really matter, and from more than just a gameplay and story standpoint. Some of the choices in the game are morally disturbing, with no correct answer. Most of the times, the player will end up choosing based on the lesser of two evils, but he will always hate himself for it. The Witcher 2’s world is a grim one, and his actions are adding more distress to a world that hardly needs more of it.

And yet, you will continue. You will go on, even as you find yourself despairing at everything that is going wrong. The story is captivating, and you have your own personal attachment to the game world, yes, but from a mechanical standpoint too, The Witcher 2 is compelling, and urges you to play on. Whether it be the combat, which plays out much more differently than other RPGs- it is a lot more tactical, slow paced, strategic. Button mashing is frowned upon, and heavily punished, and more often than not, you’re forced to use every last ability at your disposal to emerge victorious- to the game’s fully realized weapons and abilities system, to its items and equipments, enhancements, augmentation, alchemy, meditation, The Witcher 2 is the truest RPG we have had in years, and unlike other recent RPGs, like Skyrim, which attempted to streamline the RPG elements to remain appealing to the mainstream market, The Witcher 2 makes no bones about the fact, and it makes no compromises.

The result is a game that, coupled with its high difficulty, and its slower and more deliberately paced (and placed) combat, is alienating to most. Make no mistakes, just because you liked Skyrim or Dragon Age or Mass Effect 3 is unlikely to mean you will like The Witcher 2. In fact, chances are you won’t. The game is made for an entirely different type of audience, one which appreciates the sheer flexibility and wealth of options that old school RPGs once provided.

The Witcher 2 is a game made for PCs. While the Xbox conversion was surprisingly faithful, it struggles to translate the complex mechanics of the game to the Xbox’s much more limited gamepad. On the PC, however, with the infinitely more flexible keyboard and mouse combo, th game shines. It can take a while to get used to the game’s controls, particularly if you aren’t used to RPGs beyond consoles. Once you finally do get the hang of everything, however, you will be rewarded with the most mechanically satisfying experience possibly ever on a console. Recent RPGs like Dark Souls have been lauded for their difficulty, but those are games that are difficult on brute force, limiting what the protagonist can do, and throwing him up against overpowered enemies. In The Witcher 2, you will be fully equipped, a character who the story mandates is powerful, and yet find yourself overwhelmed. It’s a different kind of difficulty, one that will leave you frustrated, but that will never appear unfair, and no matter how many times you die, you will keep on trying, because you know there’s a way out, just that you can’t find it.

The one place, in addition to the game’s controls, which were clearly hamstrung by the Xbox controller, where the PC version of the game is clearly superior is when it comes to the graphics. The Xbox version of the game is no slouch, visually speaking; it looks great, and might just be one of the most visually impressive games to have released on this batch of consoles so far. However, it is limited by the technology it appears on, and the Xbox 360 is, at this point, seven years old, something that shows.

And so, in the PC version, players will find a substantially better looking game. It’s not something that’s immediately obvious – it’s down to the subtler, finer details. like the richer color saturation, the lack of blur, the complete absence of the frame rate drops and pop ins that troubled the Xbox version in the lack of installs, the smoother edges on everything, and more. It’s hard to quite place a finger on it, but the PC version of the game just somehow looks better.

What else is there to talk about? The game’s soundtrack, which is incredible. Not like the wide, sweeping orchestral scores of Dragon Age, Zelda, or Skyrim, but rather a much more subdued and grim score that adds to and enhances the atmosphere of the game. The well done voice acting, which is without exception memorable. The dialog, which is sharp, crisp, and never redundant. The Witcher 2 is just a well made game all around, and it’s a game that makes no bones about what it is- a true, hardcore RPG, telling a grim, adult story about real people moved by real motivations, all inhabiting a very real world. The sex and gore is copious, and would, at first sight, attract the mainstream gamer, but a few minutes will almost certainly turn the mainstream gamer away as he returns to play Skyrim or Call of Duty. The Witcher 2 is a game that means business, and it brings its A game. It is unyielding, and makes no exceptions and compromises. If you are to play it, you better bring your A game along too. If you do, however, prepare to be rewarded with what is undoubtedly a supremely well made RPG that remains a pinnacle of its genre.

This game was reviewed on the PC

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings- Enhanced Edition is coming out on the Xbox 360 on April 17, and with the release looming large, people have been comparing it to other famous WRPGs on the system, including the likes of Skyrim.

Namco Bandai’s marketing and PR director Lee Kirton feels these comparisons will do a lot of good to Witcher 2, in the long run.

“Having heard from many that it’s a rival for Skyrim it should fare well over a period,” he said while speaking to MCV. “We need to coach many Xbox 360 players in the world of The Witcher but ultimately this is a top class mature action RPG with one of the best stories put into a console.”

“All Xbox players of Mass Effect, Skyrim, Assassins Creed and Dark Souls should play it,” he continued. ” We have huge faith in its success and believe that word-of-mouth of The Witcher 2 will help its long term sales.

“It’s a fantastic game with an amazing story.

Its quality is up there with the best in the genre and I personally think it’s one of the best games ever developed for the Xbox 360.”

We certainly agree with that kind of praise. In our review of Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition posted earlier today, we gave it a stunning 9.5/10. Read the review here.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/namco-comparisons-with-skyrim-should-fare-well-for-witcher-2/feed 0 81448 https://gamingbolt.com/xbox-720-wont-be-much-different-from-xbox-360-witcher-dev https://gamingbolt.com/xbox-720-wont-be-much-different-from-xbox-360-witcher-dev#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:10:51 +0000 http://gamingbolt.com/?p=78568

Concept image

CD Projekt’s RED level artist Mark Ziemak, who also worked on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, says he doesn’t think the next gen will be very different from the current one. He thinks the Xbox 720 will be largely similar to the Xbox 360.

“A console is a console,” he told OXM. “The biggest [difference to overcome] is that it’s not a PC.

“I guess once you get some experience with consoles, with Xbox 360, then we are hoping that this experience in the future will help us in developing games for a next gen.

“If next gen is around the corner pretty soon, then we are hoping the experience that we got at this moment will actually help us in creating the games for other consoles. I don’t think they’ll be so much different. I hope they won’t be so much different that we have to totally change our controls and stuff like that.”

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings- Enhanced Edition releases on the Xbox 360 later this month. Stay tuned, we’ll keep you updated.

CD Projekt RED studio is proud to announce that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition has gone gold on the Xbox 360.

“We are very excited to have The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition for Xbox 360 in our spring line-up this year,” said Kevin Kebodeaux, Senior Vice President, Sales Americas, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment., The Witcher’s 2 North American distributor “This game contains all of the elements that make The Witcher a truly immersive experience that will undoubtedly captivate console gamers just as it has and continues to engage PC gamers.”

“The game is truly a masterpiece and we are excited to bring the complex and non-linear story of Geralt of Rivia to console players” added Olivier Comte, senior vice president, NAMCO BANDAI Partners S.A.S., the game’s distributor for Europe, Asia and Australia.

“The game will be released in over two weeks, but I think we will surprise players in the following weeks. On the 5th of April we will host a conference and announce something truly extraordinary – so be sure to watch our live stream at 5 p.m. GMT that day.” Said Marcin Iwiński, joint-CEO pf CD Projekt RED.

Witcher 2 is perhaps one of the most wonderful role playing games I witnessed last year. Check out our full review of the PC version over here.

Stay tuned to GB for the full review of the Xbox 360 version.

Have questions about CdProjekt’s upcoming The Witcher 2? Worry not.

CD Projekt Red will be presenting a playable version  The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings -Enhanced Edition for Xbox 360 at BAFTA on 11th April 2012.

CD Projekt ‘Quality Assurance’ lead Bartek Ocham and lead combat designer ‘Mariej Ocham’ will play the game and explain it’s design and vision and the overall development process.

A Q&A session will be overlooked by Official Xbox 360 Magazine’

The  attendees will be given a chance to go hands-on with the game.

Public tickets cost £5 and you can get one over here.

Choice, in one form or another, seems to have become a pre-requisite for all RPGs these days. All RPGs that seem to be linear and do not present the player with the element of choice seem to be considered bad, somehow, and if not, points are heavily docked off. Hell, even games like Final Fantasy have player choices these days. But what does it mean for a game to have choice? Does it only need to have dialogue choices? Or can the players change the story according to their will? Or can the element of choice be gameplay-oriented?

The popular conception seems to be that of a game having dialogue choices and actions that affect the story itself. A prime example of a game that does that kind of choice brilliantly is, of course, Mass Effect. Players chose everything from dialogue options and several actions in cutscenes to whether or not they want to do a main mission itself. It all plays out very well, and the story is affected in better ways than you can imagine. Didn’t do a loyalty mission for one of the squad members? He or she dies during the attack on the Collector base. Didn’t side with Jack when she and Miranda were trading blows? She won’t talk to you for the rest of the game, unless you can make her see reason.

It is this kind of player choice that is most prevalent in video games these days. Some games do it well- like The Witcher 2 or Dragon Age: Origins- while others fail at creating the same sense of freedom- like Dragon Age II (for most of the part) and Final Fantasy XIII-2 (that is almost laughable). But it’s funny how the same series- Dragon Age- can do it so well with the first game and so badly with the second. In the first game, what you did actually affected the story in several ways. But in Dragon Age II, no matter what you do, the last boss battle is always against Meredith, and the ending plays out largely in a similar way, and the story isn’t affected at all.

However, there have been some non-Role Playing games that do this kind of player choice very well. The perfect example here is Heavy Rain. The game tells an emotional story, and yet playthroughs of different players can vary from each other drastically, depending on what they did or did not do.

But player choice can be presented in many other ways. Take games like Skyrim or Fallout: New Vegas as example. Skyrim gives you a vast world to explore, gives you the choice to do whatever you want- marry someone, buy a house, become the Jarl of a city, become the head of the Companions, join the College of Winterhold, kill Dragons, learn new spells, or just aimlessly explore the world. You can do anything you want. It’s as sandbox as a game can get, perhaps even more so than any Grand Theft Auto title. You can do whichever quest, join whichever faction, do whatever you want, whenever you want.

Now that’s player choice. What better way to give a player freedom than to giving him/her free reign over the events of an entire world, be it political, magical, historical or otherwise? That’s why Skyrim is such a huge success, because players can simply lose themselves in the game world. Because it feels so alive, and because you have the ability to do whatever you want to, and whenever you want to do it. There are no restrictions at all.

But for that kind of freedom to be successful, the game world must be properly created. It must have a rich history, NPCs you actually care about, cities that are as awesome to look at as they are to explore and an overall well built game world. While games like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning try to mimic games like Elder Scrolls, they fail to be even half as successful. Why? Because we don’t care about their game world. Don’t get me wrong- Kingdoms of Amalur is a great game, and no RPG fan should miss it. But it just doesn’t feel as alive and as vast as Skyrim does.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/editorial-rpgs-and-the-element-of-choice/feed 0 66788