Just to be clear - I'm not against a concept of beta testing and pre-release access (though personally I avoid using unfinished versions of story intensive games), but it seems these ideas were perverted to turn them into substitute for real releases. Unless they claim some iterative development model (which is rather weird for consumer oriented games), such versions shouldn't be labeled as releases. If developers want to get funds before real release - let them turn to crowdfunding. If they want to have extra testing user force - let them open alpha / beta testing program and not claim that unfinished games are "released".

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Quoting: TheBossLike i said earlier, a release is a release. Version numbers aside, it's a paid product, early access is not a get out clause.

For me, release means it's a finished product, and subsequent updates are bug fixes, add-ons and expansions. Early Access is a weird method to provide unfinished / alpha / beta quality product for users to test. Except in the past people were paid for such testing, and today people pay themselves for this QA work. I don't call it a release.

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Still waiting for functional DX11 support. I wonder what will happen first. DX11 support in Wine, or official Witcher 3 release for Linux?

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I guess that's why it's not on GOG yet. They don't accept low quality games.

UPDATE: It looks like game isn't even beta, but alpha. The article is misleading then - it wasn't released, it was made available for testing.

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Game specific driver optimizations is an abomination anyway. That's partially what makes OpenGL such a mess. Hopefully Vulkan will put an end to it.

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I'm OK with waiting - let them do a good job with it. I didn't back it back then, but I backed The Bard's Tale IV which I'm also waiting for.

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That's a great release. I was waiting for a long time for them to be released on GOG. X3 Reunion has the common big partitions bug (which comes up on XFS partitions), since it's a 32 bit version. The common workaround with using a small loop image helps.

I put a list of some affected (and still unfixed) games here: https://www.gog.com/mix/linux_games_with_large_xfs_partition_bug [External Link]

If you know more of these, please let me know - I'll update the list (or may be even move it to the Wiki).

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I'm disappointed that Witcher 3 wasn't released today. But really I didn't expect it much. It probably won't come out for another year or so.

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Part of this "AAA are needed" and etc. is losing the point because of poorly defined terms. AAA term itself is bad and non descriptive, so if you prefer a meaningful discussion, avoid it altogether and clearly define what you are talking about. People can understand many different things by AAA. Some mean big budget games (probably most common understanding), others mean publisher funded games, yet others mean high quality games (not so common usage, but it's actually what it was originally coined for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry) [External Link]

All these usages make this term very poor for discussions. Take for example big budget games. They can be publisher funded, but there is a growing number of big budget games by independent studios (which are either crowdfunded like inXile games, or funded by investors and studio profits like CD Projekt Red or Flying Wild Hog games). I.e. these games are indie (independent), but they are also big budget. So are they AAA or not? You easily see how ambiguous it gets already. And now throw in the quality. Should horribly broken Batman game be called AAA? Not if you define AAA as quality measure. But it's big budget, publisher funded game... And surely there are high quality (in bugs sense) independent and low budget games. What a mess.

So, if you care about sensible discussion, phrases like "I mostly don't enjoy AAA" aren't helpful at all. If it's about indie vs publisher funded, that's way more clear, since for example independent studios are better at creating good art (i.e. deeper story and so on), while publisher funded ones are more likely to fall victims of the mass market mentality push from the publisher.

Or if you are contrasting big budget vs low budget games - say so explicitly. That would help others avoid arguing for invalid reasons.

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Witcher 3 didn't come out yet.

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