GOG.com Gets Sneaky With The Witcher 2 Pre-orders

GOG.com, seller of classic PC games devoid of DRM shenanigans, has made some pretty interesting announcements regarding The Witcher games, both the original and the upcoming sequel.

They've started taking advanced orders for the upcoming The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Digital Premium Edition (everyone seems to be trying to do their best Capcom impression in regards to names these days). Those who pre-order the game on GOG.com can pre-download up to 95% of the game itself through their launcher. Once the game is released, those who pre-downloaded will be able to obtain the remaining 5% and can play the game almost immediately. Oh, and there's also no DRM funny stuff.

Now here's where things get interesting: GOG has also stated that they've made some changes to their privacy policy, and noted that people have been having issues registering their regions. They made a fix where consumers that want to purchase their titles can change their region info through their account profile page, and be able to download the version of their games for that region.

Now you may be asking "But Mr. Beef, what does this have to do with The Witcher?" Well not too long ago, Namco Bandai, the distributor of the game for the country of Australia (a country known for their ridiculous censorship laws regarding video games and their equally silly lack of a proper 18+ rating for said games) announced that their version of The Witcher 2 will be censored accordingly. For those that haven't managed to put the two cases together yet, GOG's little adjustment may in fact allow Aussie players to download a version of the game from a different region, completely bypassing the censorship altogether (as well as getting it for a cheaper $44.99, compared to the land-down-under price of $69.99).

I'm not going to say if this was an intended result of their change or not (because I honestly don't), but it's definitely a clever method of bypassing the country's laws. Of course, now we just need to worry about the Australian government getting wise about this and doing something about it.

For those that want to check out what all the excitement is about, they've put the original The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Director's Cut up for sale for an astounding $4.99. This is the version of the game that was released for NA that was intended to be on par with the original enhanced edition released internationally, only it also adds the removal of the censorship for the American audiences. GOG's version of this package comes with additional goodies, including a soundtrack, art book, wallpapers, and more.