The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Interview, Part One

The folks over at Game Rant have published the first portion of an interview they conducted with CD Projekt RED’s Tomasz Gop and Marek Ziemak at this past weekend’s Eurogamer Expo. As you might have expected, the Q&A focuses on The Witcher 2:

Q: You say you’ve changed the combat; is it more action-heavy now, or is it still very much a traditional RPG?

TG: No!

MZ: It’s much more dynamic, for sure.

TG: Well, it is but. The first one was dynamic, totally, but for some people, they said it was too hardcore. Some players are mainly about story, some RPG players, and there is a huge niche of these guys, and they said (Don’t burden me with this! There are complex controls and time-based clicking sequences and everything, and I don’t want to do this!) So in The Witcher 2, there is a lot of complexity, at least as much as in The Witcher, but you don’t have to do it immediately. There are no time-based clicking sequences; if you want to do combos, they are advanced. You can find out how to do fast and strong strikes, how to throw magic in between the strikes, and so on and so on, but you don’t have to. You can just mash your button and you will swipe through the combat if you want to.

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Q: Going back to some more core aspects of the game, you place narrative as a main concern; could you give us a little rundown of the story? Obviously, at the end of The Witcher, there’s an attempted assassination of the King, but the assassin turns out to be a Witcher.

TG: You have finished the first one, right? So you’ve seen the outro of the first game. I mean, in a way, it proves that we already thought about the second game while developing the first one. So, where you are in the second game. It is a direct sequel, there’s like a month or two gap between the games, some things have happened, but they’re all explained, and the idea is that you take up right after the first game. The assassination at the end of the first game was not successful, the king doesn’t feel safe, and so he asks you for his help to restore order in Tymeria because, although most of the rebellion has been quelled, there are still one or two spots that need to be tended to. And this is what you’re going to do. You’re helping out the king with the very last place in Tymeria that’s still in a rebellious state; it’s called La Valette castle, and this is the place where you start the first game. Of course, Geralt would love to pursue the trail of these assassins of kings, because that’s what he’s really interested in, and that will eventually become the main plot of the second game.