The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Interview

GeForce offers an interview with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings senior producer Tomasz Gop. It focuses slightly on graphic and art design, as it’s primarily a follow-up to the environments developer diary video, though it covers general topics as well.

GeForce.com: Whereas the previous The Witcher game used BioWare’s Aurora engine, you guys have decided to go with a new proprietary engine called the RED Engine for The Witcher 2. Can you talk about this engine in more detail? Specifically, what improvements might we see from it and what does it enable CD Projekt to do that it perhaps could not do with Aurora?

Tomasz Gop: Biggest reason behind it were obviously the tools. We’ve got dozens of visual editors, scripting tools and debuggers for things that any decent RPG must have. But those are hidden from the player, so I don’t think it’s gonna be anywhere soon when we actually show these tools to public. I mean tools at work and not the result. But then, there are also graphics. These can be seen right away with no explanations or disclaimers.

When we started work on the engine, especially its presentational side, we knew that in order to top the graphics of The Witcher, we needed efficient tools. So, for example, location editor has lots of keyboard shortcuts, most of the elements (toolbars, viewport) can be docked, moved around, split to multiple screens. There are no shortcuts in this area, so with the same amount of time our artists were able to create locations that look better even better than all competition.