The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Interview

RPG Codex had the opportunity to grill CD Projekt RED’s Tomasz Gop about The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and as you might have guessed, their questions are more focused than the others we’ve seen at standard gaming sites.

I’ve heard there will be an ironman mode. In what ways will this mode differ from other difficulty modes? What about the save-system? To give an example, the last game I played ironman was Knights of the Chalice. In that game your savegame would be deleted after you loaded it, then, before quitting the game, you had to save manually. Should you forget to save or should the game crash you were out of luck and your ironman game was gone. Contrary to that in the old Goldbox games your old save was only deleted when you created a new save, which could be exploited by intentionally crashing the game if things went awry. How do you handle it?

To start with people who play games on ironman-style are hardcore. They know what they’re asking for and there are no handicaps, no help, tons of obstacles. That’s actually where they find fun. So yeah, we did it like this:

To unlock Insane difficulty you have to finish the game on Hard. Insane not only raises stats, but there will be new attacks and tactics opponents will gain, so anybody who masters the game on Hard shouldn’t feel too confident! The game regularly saves your progress, but once you die, the game deletes all current savegames, and it knows they should be gone. There won’t be easy exploits this time. If you finish the game on Insane, you’re obviously one uber-awesome individual!

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Finally, concerning another buzzword these days, choices and consequences. In The Witcher it turned out that the choices you were able to make weren’t all that significant, whereas choices you would have liked to make were just denied to you. Care to share a convincing – not yet known – example of Choices & Consequences in The Witcher 2?

I know I’ll sound like a PR guy here, but it’s a story-driven game. I know that many people would like that story to turn out differently, but then, it would have to be more of a sandbox game. By the way, did you know that after some surveys we’ve done across our community, one of the most desired choice in The Witcher would be the possibility to. kill Alvin? As a developer, we constantly struggle between where we tell the story, and where players shape it. In The Witcher 2, there are more branches and more factors that differentiate the storyline. I can only hope that you will be satisfied, though I hope you can understand that we aren’t really able to share much of the story as an example. Again, you have sixteen different endings to the game based on what you do throughout, and one good example we’ve shown recently is the Dwarven city of Vergen depending on your choices in the game, you may not see that location at all!