GB Feature: The Witcher Week, Day One

To celebrate the release of CD Projekt’s The Witcher, we’ve put together a variety of content that will be released in four separate installments throughout the week. For today, we bring you a post-release interview with chief designer Michal Madej, a large batch of exclusive wallpapers, eighty-eight ultra high resolution (2560×1600) screenshots, and details for all of the unlockable abilities in Geralt’s four attribute ability trees. An excerpt from the interview:

GB: The Witcher takes place in an unforgiving world with a lot of mature-themed content, including prostitution, corruption, racism, and an abundance of violence. Did Atari or anyone else ever express any concern over such content during the game’s development? Or were you given total freedom to do justice to the world depicted in Sapkowski’s novels?

Michal: One of the reasons we decided to work with ATARI was their full understanding of the game idea and theme. They never insisted on any changes of the mature-themed content, and they were very encouraging throughout development. Nowadays, the average American gamer is over 30 years old, and we developers should stop treating customers as stupid kids; they naturally deserve mature and intelligent games! Most publishers still think with stereotypes – before signing contract with ATARI we spoke with almost all major publishers in USA and Europe, and some of them even wanted to make Geralt a sexy Elvish girl!