The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interview

The latest interview for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to reach the web comes to us via AusGamers, where they’ve quizzed CD Projekt RED’s Michal Platkow-Gilewski about the team’s decision to go open-world this time around, the improvements they’ve made to character progression, why there won’t be any “boss” monsters, what type of “adult” content we can expect, and more. Here we go:

AusGamers: Something that I find a lot of games of this nature tend to get wrong is economy. Early in the game, it takes a while to earn a certain amount of money, but often when you get to the end of the game, you’re so rich that money doesn’t matter anymore. Can you guys talk about how you’ve approached the economy, and what money actually means in the game?

Michal: Yeah, so it’s always tricky with economy, because you have to aim for the average gamer, which will not use or exploit a system just to get super rich. In theory, in The Witcher, you could go to a fisherman’s village, buy the fish which are relatively cheap over there, then go into the mountains and sell the fish to get some cash. You can spend a lot of time doing that, but the question is: what’s the point in that?

So we wanted to balance the economy and the progress of the character in order to help you and not distract you to do something different. On the other hand, there will be, for example, quite powerful items which you can craft; you can’t buy them, you have to craft them. So economy actually doesn’t affect you here, because you have to travel to a given place, kill a monster, skin it, then use his hide to create the armour, and the economy doesn’t play any role here.

AusGamers: So what about the world itself, in terms of. because you’ve got monsters, but I saw deer running around and stuff like that; we saw the whale in the water. What sort of ecology is there in terms of wildlife and things like that? Are they different region to region? Does the weather affect how they work, and do they have an impact on things like crafting and the economy as well?

Michal: They might have an impact, but what’s the most important for us is that when we design the world — which is huge, if you guys played The Witcher 2, our world is 35 times bigger than the world of The Witcher 2; so it’s huge — and we wanted to have it as diversified as possible. So you will have different regions with different inspirations, like Skellige Islands which are inspired more by Nordic and Celtic mythology. We have No Man’s Land which are a more dark swampy place ravaged by war. The Moot is a little bit like from The Brothers Grimm tales, so you can expect to have some deadly and really bad monsters over there, and you have Novigrad, which is a metropolis, the closest connection you might have is medieval Amsterdam; a port city.

Depending on where you are, the wildlife will change as well, and you can use this wildlife somehow. It’s not crucial — it’s not the most important — because you’re not a deer hunter, you’re a monster hunter, so you will get the most from killing the monsters.

AusGamers: In The Witcher 2, you had some subterranean places to explore, and obviously now you’ve got this open-world, and we’ve only really seen people out in the exterior. Are there a lot of interiors and underground places? Can you talk about interiors versus exterior in terms of playtime — how much time people can expect?

Michal: I don’t know if anyone has already measured the ratio between interior and exterior. The world is huge outside, but it’s big inside as well. You will be in a lot of really good-looking places which are either underground or just the interior of a big castle — especially when we are talking about Novigrad, a metropolitan city, there will be a lot of action in the interiors as well.