Yes, you are right. The Demo wasn't German, it was the only demo out there, available for everyone. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
The thing with "playing after the official ending" is right as well, I remember a *huge* excitement about that ! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />
Well, but I don't remember anymore how much earlier the game was published in Germany before the rest of the world.
I can only remember that it was like hell in the Forum : Everywhere people yelling for help, being bitten by bugs, and we had to help them - quickly, of course.
Because CDV had put the pressure on Larian, they simply HAD to relese the game that early - with all consequences. In fact, it was like betatesting for me, although I was glad I could help, because I wanted a good game, appealing to the rest of the world. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" /> There were srious bugs in it, and the Larians published 4 Hotfixes (at least I can remember 4), before they were incorporated into the first REAL Patch.
The support Ragon provided at that time is still priceless, but few remember. Lar mentioned it once in an interview, and he was right. I was the second one there, at his side, as often as I could, and soon there were more helpers, especially Barnabus and Hellfighter, not to forget Cherrybuster, who helped a lot, too. These are the main names I still have in my memory, but others helped a lot, too. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
The most difficult thing was to "canalise" everything, the bug reports, konstantly asking for system specs, for details, putting the pressure on the people reporting bugs to do so in a very detailed way so the developers could actually draw conclusions from them. By the time I saw it as a serious task to compile the complaints in a way so the evelopers could more easily draw conclusions from them than if they had been in a rather rough, "unedited" form. Ragon was the one with more technical know-how than me at the time, so he was even more efficient, ihmo, than me and could in some cases even provide real help wehere I had been more or less clueless.
It was a great relief to see other newcomers actually fall into our "support squad" <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" /> and helping as good as they could, too. It was like lifting some pressure from my shoulders. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
As I recall these memories, they get blurred by the time. People tend to exaggerate things, fit them to their memories rather than the other way round. You might know that as the "in my youth everything was better"-problem. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" /> So, with having the fact in mind that memory gets blurred by the time, I think I won't write it down very often in the future anhymore, just because the more it gets blurred, the less I can be sure that my memory is still objective. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
What I wrote is what I had in my memory. Others might have a different view on what happened at that time; I'd like to hear those views, too. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" /> Ragon ?
