The Witcher 2 patch 1.1 arrives, removes DRM, is enormous

Last night CD Projekt released the first big Witcher 2 patch into the wild, after a short delay to fix a few teething problems. If you have a retail version of The Witcher 2, you can download the patch now from The Witcher 2 site . Those with the GOG version of the game can get the patch through that service, and Steam versions will auto-update. Make sure you have some room on your hard drive, some versions of the patch weigh in at over nine gigabytes.

The patch completely removes the game's DRM system for owners of the retail edition, improving in-game performance by up to 30%. You can check out the patch notes here .

Game development director Adam Badowski told wrote on The Witcher 2 blog to say that CD Projekt's "approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version. This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services."

"We felt keeping the DRM would mainly hurt our legitimate users."

It sounds as though it was hurting legitimate users' framerates in particular. There are a few other issues the patch hasn't yet addressed. The latest statement on the Witcher 2 blog says "The "Downloadable content" option in the Game Launcher does not work properly, please don't use it." The Troll DLC that players were struggling to access has been included in the patch (perhaps accounting for some of its size), though the various language packs are still unavailable. CD Projekt say this will be fixed in nest week's 1.2 patch.