The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Interview

Gamasutra had a chance to sit down with CD Projekt RED’s Tomasz Gop and quiz The Witcher 2 senior producer about the game’s current state in development, how they go about implementing tough moral choices, the writing processes that they typically utilize, and more. A snip:

Those kinds of systems have traditionally been what Western RPGs strive for. Can you talk about any of them in more depth?

TG: There are a lot of things, actually. You can see it even just in [this gameplay demonstration, featuring a combat encounter and branching dialogue]. There are systems that let us branch the story because we have more endings to this story than we had in The Witcher. Not one or two more; way more. We have a lot more factors that influence how the story branches and what you will see.

It’s not only dialogue choices. For example, you want to take care of who you stick with throughout the game, your companions and so on. We also have companions in the battlefield. You don’t command them directly, but they are independent guys or women who can help you, and they can change the outcome of a battle.

You have communities, societies. A lot of things are going on inside the cities, inside the places you will visit, and they’re often independent of your actions. There are things that are going on that don’t always wait for you to see them. Dialogue looks more lively. People can join in or join out of the dialogue. There’s no limitation towards number of participants.

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How do you approach designing or writing moral choices? More and more games these days are trying to include that kind of situation, but most of them do it with numbers or scales.

TG: Yes. You know, I have to start with saying it’s a really comfortable situation for us to be able to draw from the world that was created by Andrzej Sapkowski, the guy who wrote the books The Witcher is based on. We don’t have a generic fantasy world, which is great. I can tell you that’s one of the major sources for the gray morality system, because he created that.

The main principle is that you don’t think about [morality] when you’re making a choice in the game. It’s a matter of whether the game wants you to recognize that you’re good or you’re bad, or if it just wants you to think about what you should do if you were the Witcher. It means that all of these choices have consequences, but they’re not based on whether you’re good or bad. They’re based on what you want.