Witcher 3 - Interview @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer continues their interview from last month on their visit to Poland with CD Projekt Red. This segment deals with answers gathered from a few employees about what makes Witcher 3 a next-gen RPG.

Quests and hidden consequences

 

"The consequences in our games are not immediate," said Szamalek, "so when you do something you learn about what happened because of that later on, so that you cannot simply reload and try a different option. We definitely want players to take responsibility and feel responsible for what they do in the game."

I saw this first hand in a demo, when Geralt sided with a faction only to witness an unforeseen and significant twist later on. I'd have picked differently had I known. Will people wanting to pick a very deliberate line through the hazy-grey morals of The Witcher 3 feel this is unfair?

"You're correct that some players like to control everything," lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz (Konrad's brother) responded, "but because some things are unexpected you feel like this world isn't just a schematic. It's not a mechanical world where you only choose obvious things and you are always in control. People who live in it have their own motivations; factions go their own ways and things change. That is more realistic. It's just the approach we chose in our game."

No paid DLC, no multiplayer, maybe an Arena

 

"No. No no no," was Adam Badowski's emphatic answer to whether The Witcher 3 will have paid DLC. "Not for small DLC or something like that.

"Maybe there's an option to have a huge expansion pack or something because of the size and scope of the game. This is the only option [for paid DLC]. But small DLC and DLC packs: it's not big enough [to charge for]."

There will be some online features because of the online nature of the platforms the game will be released on, but not multiplayer. "None. At all. We had some rumours about it but that was just a misunderstanding," Badowski said.

How about an Arena mode like The Witcher 2 had? "Arena mode was a kind of an experiment, quite cool. We don't know yet," he shrugged, "and this is true. We have other plans.

"When we are saying 'we don't know' don't get me wrong: we know, it's just that the decision is not made because the market is changing, the situation is changing. The game is set in stone but all other surroundings are fully dynamic."

"It wasn't my intention to say that Skyrim was a poor game," he added, "because it's not. It's a great game; it's got different advantages than The Witcher. That's all."

The Skyrim comparison

All that stuff Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said about Skyrim, about how the quests and story were "generic" - that was a "misunderstanding", he told me.

He wanted to say that he loved Skyrim but it wasn't a game about story. "This is the game about the exploring of the world, about finding the items, upgrading my character." There is a story that's "quite entertaining" but short. "They don't even try to make these characters very memorable ... It was some simple story."

He mentioned it to highlight how CD Projekt Red is doing something different - taking a different tack.

Consider Grand Theft Auto 5, he said. "It's good to compare these two games. GTA is not RPG, but if you took the storyline, which is movie-like in GTA, compare it with the world of Skyrim and the open-world game where you've got a lot of things to do - you've got character development, you can kill the monsters and so on - and add to this choices and consequences: this is what I want to achieve with The Witcher 3. That was my point.

So anyone want to ask me why I prefer this game over anything Bioware makes?