The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf Interview

IGN was able to score some more details about the console port in a new interview with The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf project lead Adam Badowski.

IGN: The first trailer released for Rise of the White Wolf showed Geralt practicing his swordsmanship around a campfire. It’s an impressive video and highlights the importance of swordplay in the game. Will melee combat be handled the same way in Rise of the White Wolf as it was in The Witcher, or are you using a different approach?

Badowski: The changes we’ve made to the combat system make for some of the most significant differences between Rise of the White Wolf and the PC game. Combat has been totally redesigned for the console audience; of course, the focus is still on Geralt’s finely honed sword-fighting skills. When you have a controller, you expect every button press to do something immediately; the PC’s timing-based system just wouldn’t be as responsive as you’d expect it to be for a console game. Fights in Rise of the White Wolf are a lot more action-oriented, with everything at your fingertips switching fighting styles, magic, blocks, parries, counter-attacks, potions and more.

Players will be able to quickly grasp the fundamentals hit a button and attack, hit another button to block, etc. but people who commit to mastering the system will see a lot of tactical depth. We’ve also gone back and re-captured all of the combat animations to make it more fluid. yes, The Witcher’s combat was already motion-captured, and yes, we’re doing it again. It’s a big project, as I said. Of course there will also be a lot of blood, violence and heads getting chopped off. we’re going for very visceral action combat to help drive players forward through the story.

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IGN: PC RPGs, including the Witcher, often have gigantic inventories, skill trees and magic systems. These things can be overwhelming to manage with console controls. How do you plan to handle this problem in Rise of the White Wolf?

Badowski: The interface has been one of our biggest challenges with The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf. Our designers spent a lot of time thinking about that issue; on one hand we didn’t want to remove any elements from the game, but on the other, we knew that it would be unacceptable to make players scroll through massive inventories just to drink a potion. Fortunately both consoles have controllers with a lot of buttons that we can use :-). Really, though, we’re working on the user interface a lot to make sure that everything’s easily accessible and intuitive. We want to keep people playing, rather than rummaging through their inventories. We’ll show off the changes in the future. we don’t want to spill the beans about everything just yet.