CD Projekt RED Digitally Downloaded Interview With Michal Nowakowski

Digitally Downloaded is offering an interview with CD Projekt RED’s Michal Nowakowski. Predictably, the interview covers The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077, so I’m going to start from there for my quote:

Digitally Downloaded (DD): What are your priorities for the year ahead?

Michał Nowakowski (MN):Our main priority right now is The Witcher 3. The game will be released in 2014 and we are working really hard to achieve our goal combining our unique way of storytelling with an open world. This is a really ambitious goal and we want to reach our fans expectations. Preparing for this launch is our top priority, thought his does not mean that we stop supporting our other projects.

The Wild Hunt is the final part of Geralt’s trilogy and we’ve couldn’t have made it this far if it wasn’t for our fans. If it wasn’t for the support of the players, we could not even dream of such a conclusion to this tale. The game will be a new milestone in RPG development and we are working hard so it exceeds the expectations of our fans.

We are still building the Cyberpunk 2077 team. We’ve got some great talents working on that project, but we are still expanding. Our HR does a great job when it comes to helping people move to Warsaw, so if you are interested in moving to Poland, please see what our expats have to say on cdpred.com. There’s a bunch of job offers there, so feel invited.

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DD: The Witcher 3 will be the first game you release simultaneously on consoles with PC. Do you consider consoles a critical part of your growth strategy?

MN: It depends on the particular market. In Europe, we have markets where PC is the dominating platform, while the console market is really strong in the US. Having a multiplatform release does not only increase your audiences, but diversifies your risks worldwide.

Developing a game for different platforms is a little different than for a single one, but we want the Witcher 3 to be designed so it feels appropriate for wherever you play it. This means we are putting a lot of detail in designing the interface and other features, so it uses the maximal potential each platform gives us.

The release of the Witcher 2 of Xbox 360 gave us a lot of experience and has also proven that our target group mature and ambitious players – is widely present on that platform. Many people say that console and PC players look for different types of entertainment. The success of The Witcher 2 on Microsoft’s platform, shows that even if it is true, there is still a large audience for our games who want to play them in front of a TV, with a gamepad in their hands.

Also, EDGE talked with the company’s CEO about the reason The Witcher 3 is not a cross-generation title, aka why it won’t be released on PS3 and Xbox 360 too:

(We’re looking for triple-A experiences from the next-gen,) added Iwinski. (The Witcher 3 is so large. with a world bigger than Skyrim, and everything that we wanted to put inside it, there’s just no way that it would run on current-gen. We’d have to put a couple of years of development into [360 and PS3 versions], and then the experience would be so-so. we’d never do that.)