Iron Tower Studio - Updated Roundtable

CD Projekt Red's Michal Madej has added to Iron Tower's recent RPG developer roundtable, with his entry added at the end of each section.  Here's a bit on setting, and you can find links to the story and character parts in the article:

I think our case is really an interesting one. From the beginning of the project, we were aware of how a good setting is important for RPG, and that’s a large part of why we decided to use The Witcher license. As a result we got a very rich background, full of vivid characters, hundreds of stories and foremost the unique idea of modern fantasy without the 'good vs. evil' cliché. On the other hand, Sapkowski didn't ever pay great attention to making a detailed, complex and comprehensive setting - for many years he even refused to draw a map of the world. That’s a really unusual approach in fantasy literature, completely different from what Tolkien did - but the writer did that on purpose, he didn't want to reveal all the lore and strip the world of mystery and secrets.

...and VD also added his own answer in the comments:

We started with the main quest. It required a "fall of an empire" setting where the past is more advanced (technologically and magically) than the present. The fall of the Roman Empire was the first thing that came to mind. It fit what we needed perfectly, including even the Dark Ages period (which is where AoD takes place, basically) between the fall of the Roman Empire - which was also the fall of the Western civilization (frequent wars, population decline, limited written history, exodus from urban centers, loss of knowledge, technological and cultural), and 1000 AD when mankind decided to crawl out of the gutter and start playing civilization again.

While our game has very few things in common with the actual Roman Empire and the post-fall history, it's very helpful to have such a great reference material allowing you to trace and understand the fall and the period that followed. Not for realism as that was never our goal, but for the in-game logic.