The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interview, Part Two

The second part of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt interview has been now released, dealing with the title’s combat, difficulty curve, consequences and, uh, sex. Here’s a snippet:

RPS: How much have the nitty-gritty basics of combat changed this time around? At its core, is it similar to what it was in The Witcher 2, but with more abilities and more potions and things? Or have you totally revamped it?

MichaÅ‚ Platkow-Gilewski: What we wanted to do with Witcher combat is that we wanted to show how Geralt uses the sword. He’s the master of the sword. Geralt’s true mastery comes out in the crowd fights, where can take on five or six enemies on his own. What happened in Witcher 2 is that people were telling us that the combat was just a little bit too arcade. The rules were a bit too arcade, to be honest. What we decided is to go a bit more over to the tactics side, to give you the feeling of having absolute control over the battlefield. That’s what we aimed for.

For example, we improved the camera. We’ll always show the fights from the right angle or perspective or distance so that you’ll be aware of all the enemies around you. If they communicate among themselves and decide that it’ll be a good idea to surround you, you’ll see everyone who’s going around behind you.

There won’t be any situation where someone attacks you and you won’t know what’s happening. The enemies will move around you and you will move as well, but it’s not wild and frantic. It’s a slow walk, like a slow dance. With swords. For all the enemies, we’re using real fighting techniques, many valid techniques. We have a few experts on our team, and we’ll be using stuntmen with huge experience for that as well. But Geralt’s fighting technique, it’s like sword dancing. He’ll have cool movements that you wouldn’t see in a real fight.

Jakub Rokosz: But it’s not over the top. He won’t do a somersault with three twists. It’s still effective.

MichaÅ‚ Platkow-Gilewski: But he’s different. He’s faster and stronger than anyone else, so his fighting technique is different.

Jakub Rokosz: I think the camera helps a lot.

MichaÅ‚ Platkow-Gilewski: Yeah. That reminds me of another change. When you hit a button, you won’t see a sequence of a few swings that tend to get interrupted. Each press of a button will correspond to one swing, a swing generated out of 96 different animations that we’ve prepared for the fights. That means that when you’re in combat, you can create almost unlimited chains of swings from the left, from the right, from different poses. You can change your target freely at any given moment. You can attack two times in front of you, then pierce the guy who’s approaching you from behind. If you know the technique for it, that is. You can chain those moves together without stopping. It all gives the impression that you’re the master.

Jakub Rokosz: So there’s no more jumping and stunning with one push of the button, like in The Witcher 2.

RPS: In Witcher 2, especially before you patched it a lot, the combat was really hard. Witcher 3 sounds like it’s being designed to be quite empowering, to say the least. But are you still going to have that element of sometimes merciless difficulty? And what does all of this mean for the learning curve?

MichaÅ‚ Platkow-Gilewski: We learned a lot from Witcher 2. We know that our learning curve wasn’t the best in that game. This is one of the most focused parts of the development of Witcher 3, the learning curve and the difficulty curve for players. In many aspects. The combat was hard at the beginning and became too [routine] later on at the end. The plot could be, for some, a little bit too complicated at the beginning.

Right now we’re taking a different approach. For the quests, for example, I believe we can say that we have a kind of rocket science behind it. I’ve seen huge graphs showing how much information we can put into players’ hands at any given moment of the game. We don’t want anyone to feel like they’re overloaded with information, but on the other hand, we want to keep everyone interested. The same goes for the combat. You’ll learn some moves during the game that you wouldn’t ever think of at the beginning.