The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interview

Gaming Illustrated has managed to sit down with Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director on CD Projekt’s upcoming game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Their interview covers a variety of topics, ranging from changes to the combat, to how to handle CD Projekt’s brand of heavy storytelling in an open world setting. Overall it’s a bit more detailed and nuanced than some of the information that we received during E3.

Sean: I think the biggest thing I learned about The Witcher 3 from watching the presentation is how ambitious this project is, that you have a ton of story coming from great source material that you are going off of. You have incredible graphics and you are going to be going to Next-Gen systems, and on top of that I have been hearing approximately 100 hours of game play with 50 of that dedicated to the core main storyline. Talk a little bit about the story development and just how immersed it is . You touched on this already a little bit. How do you balance being able to put in great side quest with great mainline story?

Konrad: It’s really, really hard and putting it in an open world; it’s even harder. Because the main challenge is that you need to make intensity in the storyline. In the open world it’s harder because you got bigger disturbances and you can forget what you need to do from point to point. That’s why we put in quests that are longer and placed in smaller areas.

When we are telling players to move from point to point, through some other location or other area in the world, and you are going there, we are going to put points of interest in your way. We don’t want players to be bored, it’s not good when you’ve got an open world game with nothing between the points of destination. We’ve got these points of interest and these points are created to use a player’s inner motivation.

Check here for the full interview.