The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Interview

AusGamers followed up their hands-on session by interviewing senior producer Tomasz Gop on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, the interview being available in both text and video format.

AG: The Witcher was a critical success the world over, and did quite well in Europe, but a lot of [other] Western game-players maybe still haven’t even played it before, and this time around you guys have pushed the series even further; your own engine – as you say (a leap of faith), how are you going to express that when you’re launching on the PC platform, which you guys have been purists for, for such a long time, and that’s great because not many companies are anymore… obviously I’m eluding to the all-important console question that you’ve probably been asked countless times, but obviously you guys want to expand beyond that original core audience, so what’s your strategy for that at the moment?

Tom: The main idea, and the main focus or style that we work with is that we would like to focus on one project at a time. So when we will have done The Witcher 2, when we will have released it, we definitely will think about doing something [with] other platforms – we would like to release The Witcher 2 on consoles at some point – we just don’t know when, or even if it’s going to be possible, but we’ll try.

AG: Is the Red Engine capable of being pushed onto console?

Tom: Yeah, we’ve already done tests. Seriously. I have seen [The Witcher 2] working on current-gen consoles… like, we ported parts of the game to make sure that it looks good; it doesn’t look worse than on a PC, and it plays as well and the interface is already ready to control it with a game-pad, for example, so…

AG: If you went down that path could you see yourselves potentially releasing the first Witcher on next-gen consoles as well, or is that a little too hard to re-skin or…

Tom: It’s a difficult one because definitely releasing The Witcher 1 on consoles is deep in our hearts – we would love to do that. But getting back to that project would be a lot of work right now, so if it happens, it’s not going to happen now… maybe some time in the future we would love to do it, but I just can’t promise anything.