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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

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Revision as of 17:00, 11 September 2014 by Anonymous (talk | contribs) (Undo revision 107567 by Superuser (talk))

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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
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Developers
CD Projekt Red
Publishers
CD Projekt
Engines
REDengine
Release dates
Windows May 17, 2011
macOS (OS X) October 18, 2012
Linux May 22, 2014
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings on Wikipedia
The Witcher
The Witcher 2007
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings 2011
The Witcher Adventure Game 2014
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 2015
Gwent: The Witcher Card Game 2018
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales 2018
Gwent: Rogue Mage 2022
The Witcher: Remake TBA

Key points

Has official modding tools.

General information

GOG.com Community Discussions
GOG.com Support Page
A comprehensive list of known issues and potential fixes.
The Witcher 2 for PC Technical FAQ.
Steam Community Discussions

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
DRM-free
DRM: SecuROM. Removed in patches and later retail releases.
Error: key type 'GOG' not recognised
Error: OS parameter cannot be empty
GOG.com
DRM-free
Error: key type '{{{5}}}' not recognised
Error: OS parameter cannot be empty
Steam
Icon overlay.png
Error: key type 'GOG' not recognised
Error: OS parameter cannot be empty
All versions can be registered on GOG.com even if a product key was not included; see Witcher Backup for details.

Essential improvements

Patches

Install the latest patches to fix bugs and remove DRM.

Modifications

No Intro Videos

The No Intro Videos Mod skips all intro videos except the logo by CDProjekt. [1].

Market Price Mod

Makes buying and selling prices within markets more fair to the player. It reduces the 24:1 ratio between buy to sell prices and reduces it to 5:1 as seen in the original game. [2].

Text size

For people having problems with the size of text on large resolutions or on small displays, getting any variation of the Comfy Font from here [3], and placing the .dzip in the CookedPC folder will make it bigger and more visible.

Semi-Official Combat Mod By CDP developers

Full Combat Rebalance is a mod created by the developers of the game. A lot of changes as an 80% increase in responsiveness per Geralt's animations and decreased time for returning to exploration after combat is two of the many changes. The mod is available on CDProjectRED's REDKIT site [4]. Registration on the site is required to download the mod. The file is 1.5 GB in a compressed format.

Utilities

The Witcher 2 Savegame manager

Allows for the easy backup, management, and removal of The Witcher 1 and 2 save files. Can tremendously improve the clutter of savegame files. [5].

The Witcher 2 Tweaker

Allows for greater customization of graphics options to further tailor your game for the PC. Also has helpful tips for improving performance on some computers as well. [6]

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

Template:Game data/rowTemplate:Game data/rowTemplate:Game data/row
System Location
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/20920/pfx/[Note 1]
This game follows the XDG Base Directory Specification on Linux.

Save game data location

Template:Game data/rowTemplate:Game data/rowTemplate:Game data/row
System Location
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/20920/pfx/[Note 1]

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
GOG Galaxy
Steam Cloud

Video settings

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GPU/CPU Intensive Settings

Enabling the following options will result in a significant reduction in in-game frame rate:

  • Cinematic Depth of Field: Of the three depth of field options available, cinematic depth of field results in the biggest performance decrease. Enabling it applies a stylised depth of field effect to cutscenes and dialog sections. It is important to note that enabling it essentially enables depth of field anyway, so this option should be used in conjunction with 'Depth of Field - Cutscenes'. Again, it's performance impact is significant.
  • Light Shafts: This option adds realistic light glares as sunlight filters through trees, etc. However, in graphically busy areas such as forests it can result in a major performance hit, and as such disabling it is recommended on lower end systems.
  • LOD [Level of Detail] Distance: This decides how far away detailed objects (such as some shrubbery, objects, etc.) are rendered. The higher you set this value, the further away such objects will be rendered, and the larger the impact on FPS. As the difference between the 'Near' and 'Far' options is visually negligible in almost all instances, 'Near' is recommended for most systems. For systems which only just meet the system requirements, consider using the 'Minimal' option.
  • Motion Blur: Enabling this option will result in a stylistic blur effect rotating the camera, which also results in an overall performance decrease.
  • SSAO [Screen Space Ambient Occlusion]: This option improves the overall quality of shadows in-game by increasing their definition and contrast. Enabling it will also largely impact performance.
  • UberSampling: This option essentially requires your system render everything on-screen multiple times before displaying, resulting in a drastic increase in overall visual detail, maximising object detail and smoothness, with the expense of a huge performance hit. It is only recommended to enable this option if you have a very high-end system.
  • Wet Surfaces Rain Effect: This option is only active when it is raining in-game, and adds a semi-transparent filter to many objects to make the rainfall impact appear more realistic. It can result in a sizeable performance hit during rain sequences, however, so disabling it is a good idea for performance increases.

Note all other graphics options can be enabled/disabled with little or no FPS impact. Note that whilst 'Texture Downscaling' has a significant visual impact on the 'High' setting, reducing downscaling to 'Low' or disabling it entirely can drastically improve the look of the game with very little performance impact.

Sharpening filter

The Witcher 2 makes use of a sharpening filter that increases the sharpness of the game's visuals. While this setting has a negligible performance impact it does cause increased aliasing and adds an unnatural sheen to many objects, if those bother you it can be disabled with an INI tweak.

Instructions

Field of view (FOV)

The FOV can be changed using the mod Change your FOV.

Input settings

Template:Input settings

Mouse acceleration

Instructions

Audio settings

Template:Audio settings

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English
Traditional Chinese
Czech
French
German
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Polish
Russian
Spanish
Turkish

Issues fixed

TweakGuides has created a comprehensive guide for fixing issues in this game. It can be found here.

Continued Stuttering During Gameplay

There are two possible causes for this issue:

  1. Incorrect texture settings. Launch the game and navigate to the 'Options' menu on the launcher. Locate the option for 'Texture Memory Size (MB)'. This is how much of your graphics card RAM is allocated to texture storage. For a 512 MB card, it is recommended set this to 'Small', whereas for a 1 GB card set this to 'Large'. Allocating insufficient memory for texture storage can result in delayed texture rendering and constant stuttering during gameplay.
  2. Rendering too many frames in advance. To fix this use your GPU configuration panel to manually set the value of "Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames" (Nvidia) or "Flip Queue" (ATI) to 1. You may also need to limit framerate and/or enable Vsync.

First Time Setup Lock

The game attempts to reinstall the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 every time the game is launched.

Option 1: Registry Change (recommended)

Instructions

Option 2: Folder rename

Instructions

Crash on startup with error 0xc0000142

Instructions

Patch 2.1

Instructions

Black Screen During the Cut-scene after the First Chapter (Enhanced Edition)

Instructions

Random Crashes while Saving Game, Loading a Save Game or AutoSaving

Instructions
Instructions

System requirements

Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) XP
Processor (CPU) Intel/AMD Dual Core 2.2Ghz
System memory (RAM) 1.5 GB (Windows XP) - 2 GB (Vista, 7)
Hard disk drive (HDD) 16 GB
Video card (GPU) ATI 3850
NVIDIA 8800GT
512 MB of VRAM
macOS (OS X)
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) 10.7.5 or higher. 10.8.0 or higher
Processor (CPU) Intel Core 2 Duo
System memory (RAM) 4 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 25 GB
Video card (GPU) GeForce GT 650M 512 MB (on 1440x900, low)
Radeon HD 5770 1 GB (on 1440x900, low)
512 MB of VRAM
Linux
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Steam OS
Processor (CPU) Intel Core 2 Duo
System memory (RAM) 4 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 25 GB
Video card (GPU) GeForce 9800 GT (1280x720, low)
512 MB of VRAM
OS X version has no support for Intel integrated graphics chipsets
Linux version has no support for Radeon graphics cards and Intel integrated graphics chipsets

Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 File/folder structure within this directory reflects the path(s) listed for Windows and/or Steam game data (use Wine regedit to access Windows registry paths). Games with Steam Cloud support may store data in ~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-id>/20920/ in addition to or instead of this directory. The app ID (20920) may differ in some cases. Treat backslashes as forward slashes. See the glossary page for details.

References