CD Projekt RED - On Building Worlds

The blog at CD Project RED has been updated with an entry about world-building    in videogames. It seems like it is the first post of a series on this subject. As always, an excerpt.

Creating something gamers will enjoy is a long process. The game doesn’t begin on high-end rigs, but on paper. In our case, it begins in the STORY department. That’s where the first ideas for The Witcher world sprang to life. This is a long and complicated process, but defines everything that will happen later. Their work is the base for the whole studio and later influences the work of everyone else in it. Sometimes, of course, we have to remove certain elements of this foundation, because they don’t fit into the whole structure. We have to be 100% sure, that we want a specific element in the game.