Andrzej 'Flash' Kwiatkowski, who was the author of the extremely popular Full Combat Rebalnce mod for the original Wticher, is now a game designer for CD Projekt Red and has developed a sequel for the mod, Full Combat Rebalance 2, due out on the 20th of this month. This mod is a whopping eight gigabytes (to put that into foucus, The Witcher: Director's Cut is 8.5 gigabytes) with a whole slew of changes, tweaks, and fixes and reason enough for me to reinstall the game come June 20th. You can find the whole changelog here: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-witcher-2s-full-combat-rebalance-2-mod-comes-out-june-20th-massive-changelog-revealed/. The guys at CD Prjoekt Red have really out done themselves this time, I eagerly anticipate the next game in the series, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt.

Awesome. I've been waiting for this. I considered FCR essential for playing The Switcher.

Woohoo.. Finally I can get around and finish Witcher 2 :D
I hope gog adds this to the Witcher download package by default.

Wow, I was about to go through my 3rd playthrough here.
Now I don't know if I should wait for the mod...

Is it? I heard that the first FCR was unfairly difficult, which kind of put me off. I'm reinstalling The Witcher 1 and I am going to actually try out this mod. What would be the best difficulty to start with?

Well there are 6 difficulty settings in FCR but you can only get 3 at a time due to how vanilla Witcher had the settings. If you install the Easy package you get Casual, Easy and Medium. Installing the Hard package gives High, Hardcore and Witcher. Which mod package to use kind of depends on how you play the game now. If you played on Easy or Medium in vanilla Witcher then go for Easy in FCR, if you played on Hard then you may find FCR Medium to be a little too easy in some places, but Hard will be slightly more challenging. Hardcore and Witcher mode are for your 4th or 5th play through when you get really good and know what you are doing. I tried Witcher difficulty once and never made it past the tutorial.

I personally feel that Flash went a little overboard with all the changes in FCR for the first Witcher game. Read the FCR manual first and maybe the thread on The Witcher forums too. You'll see a lot of frustrated players. However, he also released another mod with increased difficulty and game improvements called FlashMod, which for me is indispensable and which I heartily recommend to anyone who plays TW1 more than once.

That being said, I am MASSIVELY looking forward to the release of FCR for TW2. Heck, I was sold after reading "Responsiveness of controls increased 80%".

That's a lot of changes, I'm feeling I really need to try this when it's released.

I think I may have to play this game for the fourth time with this mod :)

Can someone clear this up? The OP says "a whopping 8 gigabytes" but in the article at DSOGaming it says "Kwiatkowski himself revealed the release date on CD Projekt RED’s forum, and stated that the mod will be 2GB in size."

Here you go:

"Update on mod status.
All the features for the mod are finished. I can release source code and assets but moving the mod from editor to the game requires time consuming trial and error cooking process. I need to optimize installation size, now it weighs 8GB".

A few weeks later he posted this:

"Sorry for being quiet for a while. As you can imagine, everyone at CDPR was very busy lately because of E3. I've managed to decrease download size to 2GB. I still need to test the mod before release to ensure there are no blockers in quests.

Release date: 20th of this month.
I'll post a changelog today."

So the download is 2GB but the files are 8GB? Ouch, I'll have to do some clean up on my SSD but thanks for the information.

That's what I was, indeed, wondering. Will the Full Combat Rebalance 2 (for The Witcher: 2) be included when it comes out tomorrow?

It's a mod so I doubt it and secondly there's bound to be one or two issues, no point in adding into a package that fast without fixing early issues.

does this mean you install the game from here, then install the mod? Or has the install here been updated?