CD Projekt RED Storytelling Interview

Gamasutra is offering an interview with “key members” of the CD Projekt RED team on the subject of storytelling. The developers have the Polish studio talk about what they learned from The Witcher titles,the lessons they’ve learned from the Game of Thrones TV show, and how all of that will apply to their Cyberpunk RPG:

Iwinski pointed out that while the popular HBO series removes content from the books and takes some serious liberties with its source material, audiences still understand the essence of what makes the series great. It keeps things simple, without losing any of the details that really matter.

“And that’s what we want to capture. In [Cyberpunk], we want to create a story that is very profound, but the novice players should be introduced to [the world] better than they were in The Witcher 2,” Iwinski said.

Of course, CD Projekt still wants to ensure that Cyberpunk’s world remains satisfyingly complex for the game’s diehard fans. Unlike in The Witcher games, however, the studio doesn’t want to jam this complexity onto the game’s critical path. Instead, it’ll be readily available to players who choose to seek it out on their own.

“Players should be able to choose how deep they want to enter the story or the plot,” said CD Projekt’s head of marketing, Michal Platkow-Gilewski. “If they’re really hardcore, they can really dig deeper and deeper and deeper, and if they’re just casual, they can still learn about the characters and the story, but they’ll do that by going in another direction.”