The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Interview

With The Witcher 2 just released the editors at Gamasutra have taken the opportunity to release an in-depth four-pages interview with senior producer Tomasz Gop. Among the subjects tackled are the game’s non-linearity, the economic viability of non-linear content, the game’s technology, the tools the game was built with, the game’s integration of social media and much more. Here’s a snippet:

There’s always a sort of tension, particularly in Western-developed RPGs, I think, where the tension between creating a story that has an authorial hand and having a defined character, and then offering up freedom. You’re based on a novel series, so you have some elements of that. You have a defined main character. It’s not create-a-character, but you do offer freedom.

TG: Yeah, we do.

That’s an interesting creative tension.

TG: I don’t know if it actually is a tension. It’s like the game that we always wanted to do was about stories. I don’t know if you know this, but we spent a lot of time, way before we did The Witcher 1, choosing the main hero. After being really inspired about doing the books, we were thinking about doing the game about some other Witcher, not exactly the same guy, so we took like a year and a half designing his look, designing his gameplay features, and so on and so on and so on.

And after that, it was like a week when we tried to prototype things, we had seen it, we had thought about it. “No, it has to be Geralt. Sorry.” If you want to have a character that’s cool to play, it has to be this guy. It all changed within days. I don’t think it’s a problem, because if you think about it and if you weigh everything, you have a really solid hero where you can create personality, and still be able to give a lot of freedom to players.

Well, it’s interesting because there’s also the audience. People have different feelings about that. I personally like defined characters and defined scenarios. Some people want to see themselves as the character. Some people want to inhabit another character. Some people just want to hear a story.

TG: Yeah, but it’s just a matter of, where do you invest your work? We invest lots of it in the story. Other people have to share, split it between character and story, and that’s okay as well. It’s just, you know, we have to make sure the story is good enough to draw everybody.