The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interview

Leviathyn has treated us to an interview with CD Projekt RED producer MikoÅ‚aj Szwed, focused, as you might expect, on the upcoming Witcher threequel. It covers a variety of subjects, from “maxing out” hardware, to Charles Dance’s voice acting gig as the Emperor of Nilfgaard, to the title’s influences. Of course, choices and consequences are also covered, so here’s a snippet on that:

4 Many games claim to have a choice system in place where there is a variety of different outcomes. However, many end up like Mass Effect 3 with specific endings regardless of your choices throughout. Will every action in the game that is not so black and white result in a slightly different ending for your character? Or will it just be what you see in the game that gets affected, resulting in an ending that feels like it has a canon of sorts?

We will have a couple of different, main endings to the game, strictly connected to the (big) choices you’ve made during the game. Apart from that, we will also have a number of smaller scenes depicting the different changes that you affected in the world by making various smaller choices throughout the game, showing how your actions actually shaped the world and individual characters.

5- Many people talk of story driven games and open world games separately and you guys have been touting this game as one and the same. In many open world games, the player can lose sight of the story due to the overwhelming availability of missions and side quests and collectibles etc. How will Wild Hunt combat this feeling?

The Witcher 3 is not like most open world games in this regard. We put a lot of effort into making the game’s pacing just right, as we think it’s key to avoiding the sort of feeling you describe. In The Witcher 3, two mechanisms will battle it out to determine what you’ll ultimately do the urge to explore will compete with your need to know what happens next plot-wise. We can control the intensity of each feeling by introducing new stuff (plot and gameplay-wise) along the way, so you should never feel like there’s a million of things to do and only one Geralt.

6 Talking of canon, the second game had many different endings. Will the 3rd pick up from whichever one is (canon) (is there a canon?), or will it be where the game asks you a series of questions in the intro/import save data and pick up where you left off?

All of the endings are canonical. Making only one (count) would really depreciate all the choices gamers made during the previous game. That’s why we decided to find one common connection and start The Witcher 3 from there. This (common denominator) is the Nilfgaardian invasion that we see at the end of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Nilfgaard is advancing into the Northern Kingdoms and Geralt is now free from all the political intrigue he’s been so tangled up in. As for the choices gamers made during the previous game, we can confirm save game importing on the PC and we’re heavily exploring various solutions for consoles.