The Witcher 2 “Deep-Dive” Roundtable Interview

NVIDIA’s GeForce website is sporting a two-part roundtable interview with The Witcher 2’s Tomasz Gop, Marek Ziemak, BartÅ‚omiej WroÅ„ski, and Grzegorz Rdzany about the team’s reasons for sticking to the PC platform, how the sequel caters to both linear and non-linear seeking players, the morally ambiguous choices we’ll have to deal with, and more. A little something from part one:

Because you have to design extra work for non-linear games, do you ever feel like that extra effort might go unappreciated for someone who just plays the game through once?

Marek Ziemak: It is a lot of extra work, but we’ve prepared our pipeline to prepare the game in a non-linear manner. We have all the tools. We have our thinking, prepared the way to produce those quests and all the different parts of the game in non linear ways. Of course it takes up efforts, more cut-scenes and more dialogue, and players who play through it once won’t see everything, but I think that’s the price of getting to true nonlinearity in the game. So if you, you have to show players something, you have to take something away from them, they’ll have this feeling they’re not seeing everything. They’ll feel like their decisions really feel like they mean something and I think that’s cool and that’s our feeling of making the game.

Tomasz Gop: Adding to what Marek said, from this developer point of view, it’s always worth remembering, that as a developer, we wanted to invest in non-linearity from the very beginning. It was the principle. It was one of the ideas when we actually started to do this game and this is why decisions like this are easy for us. Seriously, if we think about, we will be doing extra content for people who will not see it, but still, it’s the main feature of the game, we did not hesitate to do that.

And we’ll continue into part two, as well:

So in regards to the first game, in your opinion, how was it received both commercially and critically?

Tomasz Gop: I never liked to say that we were, how do you call it, totally surprised by this success of The Witcher one. We always dreamed for this. We always hoped for this. It came out with good results. .One misconception people think, and a lot of people think, some people told us that we did not succeed with The Witcher one because we did not earn three times as much money as we actually invested in our title. It wasn’t our goal. Our goal was to make a brand and right now, with an established brand, we can say to anybody in the world that we’re doing The Witcher 2 and they know what the game is. So, to answer your question, it was a great success because we especially achieved what we aimed for with that project. It did really well.