Who's hiped for the new Witcher!?

Overflowing with hype.

my loins quiver with the hypegination of the moment.

Of course people are hyped (although there are lots of vocal negativity going on), CDPR has tortured us for so long. There's 2 reasons, to finish Geralts journey and to see how can I run it.

Hmm.. Perhaps I should have switched the order of those things.

I just want the wait to be over so I can get on with my life. =P

Where beards and hairstyles are considered premium content. Beard of the Year/10. Much hype.

After reading in one of reviews that items now have durability and we have to visit smith to fix them, as they became worn very fast, and that fast travel is not that fast and usable, my hype train lost somewhere around 40% of carts. :D

I am ULTRA hyped! Game is stirring up a controversy and all twisted, delusional entities bitch against it and moan hard! Couldn't be more hyped! Not even a GTA became such a great eyethorn for so many people! This can only mean ONE thing; game is full of great features!

I'm listening to The Witcher 3 FLAC soundtrack at the moment and foaming at the mouth with anticipation with major wood.

Add me to the super hyped list :) this is the first game in years that I have been this hyped for and I even tried not to be that being said it will be months until I can actually play it so I may of overdosed on hype by that time >.<

Are the flac files that much better than mp3? I don't think from memory I noticed too much difference.

FLAC is lossless compressed audio so once decompressed by the codec you end up with the exact original raw CD quality audio data. MP3 is lossy compression which degrades as the compression ratio is increased. FLAC will always sound better than MP3 in every scenario because it is the raw audio data that is used as a source to create the MP3 lossy data stream which discards information.

Whether or not one can tell the difference when listening is left up to the ear of the listener though. When listening to something as background music or in game one's mind is occupied and unlikely to ever notice any difference. If listening to music while paying attention to it however then one is more likely to notice the differences although they can be subtle and vary from one style of music to another.

I'm a musician and when I am listening to music carefully to transcribe it into guitar tablature for example, any form of lossy compressed audio is poor quality for any kind of fast music passages or hard to hear phrases I find. MP3 just tosses out too much information detail so when you are consciously listening for the detail it just isn't there. When I listen to uncompressed original audio when transcribing music the detail jumps right out and notes that were almost inaudible or blurred over and muddy come out much more crisp and clear. This is particularly pronounced when you slow the music down using special software and then compare the two. In slowed down MP3 or OGG music often a fast guitar solo is garbled noise or at best inconclusive, but when I use the original FLAC/WAV/CD source the notes jump right out crisp and clear.

Ultimately, CD audio, WAV audio and FLAC audio are identical when sent to the sound card. MP3/OGG and other lossy formats are reduced in quality and the listener may or may not be able to notice the difference depending on whether they are consciously listening to the music detail as well as other factors, but it most definitely is audible. Much moreso to a musician who is looking for the detail.

The average person probably couldn't tell the difference by default, but with a few minutes of explaining and showing them little clips from various music in FLAC versus MP3 comparisons they too will hear the differences easily, and be able to notice them more if they're listening to music more consciously. One area where this is more pronounced for example is in uncluttered non-distorted music such as a single classical guitarist playing classical guitar passages. If you listen to an MP3 of that compared to FLAC/WAV/CD you will hear all kinds of digital distortion artifacts in the MP3 version that vanish when you listen to FLAC/WAV/CD.

Another way to look at it more visually is to compare a PNG graphic image with its JPG equivalent. PNG is lossless so the original image is 100% preserved in the PNG compressed form. JPG is lossy though and so depending on the compression level it throws away more and more data and the image starts to lose some of its detail and definition. As you increase the compression ratio on JPG eventually it starts to get more blurry and you eventually will start to see that mosaic tile blockiness that looks like crap.

Basically, MP3 is the audio equivalent of JPG in this sense, and FLAC is the audio equivalent of PNG.

As should be!

A beard can make or break, a man or a dwarf! Now, a witcher too!

Beard is PREMIUM! Loc Muinne in 2, remember the BEARDED WOMAN? Anyone? You had to pay 200 orens in game (maybe more, can't remember) in order to see a real woman wearing a real beard!

Gimme beards, moar beards, beards EVERYWHERE, roar!