The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interview

The editors at Stick Skills managed to get in touch with CD Projekt RED’s Konrad Tomaszkiewicz to briefly quiz the game director about the next title in The Witcher series. Honestly, I think The Witcher series could do with a slight reduction in combat intensity to give it a more tactical approach:

SS: Does The Witcher’s narrative priority at all hurt the combat? This is a franchise built on its story, but what are you doing in this third game to keep players interested in the mechanics?

KT: It’s not like the narrative ever hurt the mechanic, or at least we hope so! To cater to the needs of those who prefer a good brawl, we’ve completely redesigned the combat while retaining the things that gamers told us worked in The Witcher 2. The fighting will be more intimate and the pace will be a bit slower making the whole experience less chaotic and more tactical. We’ve had several approaches to what we thought would be the sweet spot of a superior combat mechanic and this time, with all lessons learned, we think we nailed it.

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SS: Do you ever see your team attempting to create an RPG similar to The Witcher that incorporates cooperative multiplayer?

KT: No, not at this point. We’re focused on a strong narrative and this is something multiplayer games, even the ones offering cooperative play, do not offer at this point. When we tell a story we want it to resonate within gamers and some choices of plot elements we show are best to be experienced alone with no-one to say (I’d do this differently) shouting behind you. Cooperative play introduces an element of dissonance to the choice and consequence process and we’d like to avoid that.