GameStar interviewed CEO Marcin Iwinski of CD Project RED about the developers future goals, and of course they talk about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
More information.You always emphasize the size of The Witcher 3 and I guess the Cyberpunk should be about the same scale. In the future you’ll be striving to make bigger and more mature games?
There’s always question «What is more?» Like, if we make a game five times longer than usual will gamers enjoy it? I think it’s all about the story, the characters, their development and how you go through it, so definitely we’ll be experimenting with new ways to tell a story. Cyberpunk definitely will be offering a lot of new ideas. But we’re working on that really hard already in The Witcher 3. The game engages the player much better. We really wanted to improve on what we did in The Witcher 2 in terms of the initial immersion for a gamer, though. In Russia, in Poland, in Germany gamers are different, we are more hardcore. If it’s a hard game it only motivates us. But if you look at Western Europe and especially US, which is a very important market, if a gamer feels that the immersion is steep, the game is hard and you die a lot at the beginning, people will most likely drop the game and say that it wasn't good enough. We don’t want that to happen. «Easy to play — Hard to master» is what we are after. And I draw a lot of comparisons between games and TV series — for example Game of Thrones…
So when both games, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, are done, are you going to focus on a next big RPG or maybe something different?
I can tell you one thing for sure: we’ll be doing story-driven mature RPG and this is what we think we’re pretty good at. It’s really very early to say and we’ll see when the time comes, but right now we really want to focus fully on The Witcher 3 and take all of our skills to a next level, so that we can really deliver a multiplatform story-driven RPG in an open world. That’s the main goal. After that we’ll probably set a new goal that is even higher to achieve!
Do you think that games heavily relying on realism have a future? Not combat simulation games like ArmA but very complex games that would, for example, simulate a life in a metropolis where you could enter every building and talk to every citizen? Would it make sense to try to recreate our life with such precision in a computer game?
Yeah, this question is always opened, isn't it. If it’s boring simulator — I would totally not be interested. There has to be something more to it. A lot of people play games to relax, so the main question should be whether it's relaxing or entertaining you?
And again, our profession is to tell great stories. Whether I’m watching TV or reading books I generally want to have a bit of fun with that or I want the medium to make me think about certain things. Maybe something important that you don't think about every day in your usual life. If it’s a part of the game — it’s cool. If it’s just a simple simulator you have to ask yourself what is the goal? Of course, there are games like SimCity, for example, where there is a kind of economic model and management system and there’s always a certain goal. That works well. Everything could work as long there’s a certain group of gamers that finds it cool. As for us — we’re all about story.
Last edited: