The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interview

There’s a new interview with CD Projekt RED’s Konrad and Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt over at IGN this evening, during which the game director and lead quest designer denounce level scaling, discuss Geralt’s motivations, promote the new Witcher Senses, and more. Quotage below:

(Geralt has changed his priorities,) says Mateusz. (He has regained his memory, so he remembers that he had a family once, he wants to find his long lost love Yennefer, the sorceress. He doesn’t care about politics any more even less than in previous games. There will be moments where Geralt will get involved in [political] things, but this time we have divided the plotlines of The Witcher 3 into a few categories. The first category is the basic main storyline of the character, of Geralt looking for his Yennefer, amongst much else. This is the plot that is very personal to Geralt, and this is the main driving force for the entire game.

(A second layer of this are the plotlines of each region, so to speak those plotlines will involve politics, but will have moments where you don’t’ have to get involved if you don’t want to. You will be able to skip some of those plotlines. The third layer is local things like the stories of different NPCs, side-quests, monster hunting and things like that.)

Hunting monsters is a Witcher’s basic job, and it’s a more evolved part of The Witcher 3 (as the subtitle might suggest). In an open-world setting, you’ll come across terrorised villages and monster tracks, clues that can lead you towards a challenging foe. Tracking and researching creatures before hunting them will be crucial, as fighting them without knowledge of their weaknesses and behaviour will most likely end in death.

(We want to get a system that will allow us to show who the Witcher is,) Konrad explains. (He is a monster slayer. He knows the responses of his enemies. Of course you can kill it the normal way, but it will be harder but if get to know the monster you can uncover its weak spot or discover what special ability will work. If you fight an enemy with regeneration ability, it’s quite hard to kill it in the normal way, but if you hit the organ that is responsible for that ability, it will be much easier to defeat.)

(We thought what we could do to make Geralt and the player feel more like a monster hunter,) expands Mateusz. (We thought that we should incorporate an investigation part in each monster hunt you have to gather clues about what is the monster that is troubling the village, what it is that’s hunting people around here, what are the habits of this monster, how should I fight it, how should I prepare for this encounter? We have this new mechanic that we call Witcher Senses, which is supporting this – Witcher Senses is an ability, a skill that you can use during gameplay, that helps you find different clues and track monsters. And this is something we are putting a big emphasis on in The Witcher 3.)