The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interview

Forbes has been getting into games journalism in a big way over the last several months, and today they’ve provided an article-style interview with CD Projekt RED on their upcoming game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Most notably, the interview contains some choice words regarding DR, but there’s more to read in there as well.

(The most important characteristic of all of our games is their nonlinear, mature storylines,) Tomaszkiewicz says. (We took the game model from Witcher 2 and simply added to it an open world, not the other way round. We wanted to achieve the same feeling and pacing that our other games have.)

The biggest challenge was taking that story and fitting it into a huge world, especially since players will have access to the entire world from the very beginning. (That’s why we split key bits of plot information among different regions of the world and every time you learn one of these plot points you need to solve local problems to achieve your personal goals,) Tomaszkiewicz notes.

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Other changes are coming to The Witcher 3. Quick-Time Events (QTEs) are out, for instance. While the second Witcher didn’t have too many of these to begin with, QTEs always struck me as an easy way out for developers. Tomaszkiewicz says that the inclusion of QTEs in the pas is often little more than an attempt (to change a cutscene into something more interactive.)

Negative fan feedback was overwhelming, however, and based on that response CDP RED has decided to remove QTEs from the third game.

(In my opinion,) Tomaszkiewicz says, QTEs (didn’t fit this type of gaming experience and usually frustrated players. There is a small number of games where it is fun, like, for example, in the Uncharted series, where you don’t even realize that you’ve just finished a QTE sequence. And I think that only this way of using QTE has any kind of future in games.)