The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Eurogamer Expo Presentation

CD Projekt RED lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz gave an interesting talk about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s development process, specifically how the Polish studio is attempting to mix the previous titles’ storytelling focus with an open-world, and luckily the presentation was streamed live and recorded.

Tomasz explains they’re using “event clusters” to more closely control the pacing of the experience (essentially breaking down objectives so that quests don’t send you too far from the current location you’re in), and using animated cutscenes akin to the ones in the first two titles to keep the players up to speed with the story while they’re constantly distracted by the variety of objectives, among other things.

The talk proper starts at around the 8 minute mark, while a Q&A with the people present runs from 23:20 to pretty much the end of the video, and covers subject such as console development for the title, the company’s expansion (apparently the Krakow studio they opened two months ago is working on its own project), SteamOS, recurring characters and more.