The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Short News Roundup

Lets get started with a new video from Eurogamer about why the site thinks the Witcher 3 is the  Game of Thrones of video games. Sounds crazy right?

Well give a watch then decide for your own.

If you've looked at the thermometer lately, you will have noticed winter isn't coming, it's well and truly here. That's why the outside has turned into a bleak wasteland reminiscent of the North of Game of Thrones' Westeros, or the frostier realms of The Witcher 3's similarly brutal fantasy world.

Where the recent RPG based on George R.R. Martin's brutal fantasy world was deeply disappointing, Telltale's ongoing effort is a definite improvement. Still, it doesn't give you the freedom to wander off exploring. For an experience that blends the elements of Game of Thrones that make it so popular with a fully fleshed-out fantasy world, The Witcher 3 may well be the answer.

Next I have another interview this time on a site called State of Play.

What are you working on right now?

Jakub Szamalek: Right now the story team is adding the finishing touches to the game. We are doing some onscreen text, some letters and documents. Basically we are wrapping up the entire story part of the game. There a lot of polishing, that’s actually what we are using this time for.

What’s the biggest departure from The Witcher 2?

Jakub Szamalek: I think it’s the open world- it changed everything. It’s a matter of scale, things are much bigger. But it’s also changed how we create the game and how we make quests work.

In The Witcher 2 the structure was linear. There was a lot of non-linearity in the choices you made and the paths you chose, but basically the quests were aligned in a nice neat line. In The Witcher 3 you can do them in whatever order you please and they still have to connect and make sense.

The other thing is that we had to make this huge world interesting. The Witcher 2 had a number of side quests, but since the world was much smaller well could get away with fewer of them. Whereas this time we have built a world that is forty times bigger and so we had to put a lot of attention and time into making the world interesting.

There’s lots of points of interest like ruins, caves, abandoned building and whatnot. We have to make each of these places worth visiting. So there a little bits of back story, there’s someone to meet, a story to discover and a secret to find. There has to be a reward. So we spent a lot of time with that.

From a story perspective there’s this extra layer on non-linearity because you can do the main quests in the game in different orders. Depending on the order in which do them you actually get a slightly different story. So this is really a game changer- opening up the world and making it so big.