The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interviews

We have rounded up a couple of new interviews centered around The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the first being a chat with quest designer Paweł Sasko from GamingBolt:

Ravi Sinha: Initial reactions for the screenshots have been great, but we were surprised to hear they’re from an older version of the game. With DirectX 11, will we be seeing visuals that surpass the current crop of next generation games like Crysis 3?

PaweÅ‚ Sasko: It all comes down to the fact that CD Projekt RED loves challenges. With tunnel-like, linear levels created by a talented team, it’s relatively easy to deliver eye-candy graphics, because it’s always clear where player is looking. But when the game has the size of The Witcher 3, it becomes an incomparably bigger challenge and this is what makes our artists totally excited.

Screenshots that we’ve shown are from an old build of the engine that ran using a dated renderer. Much of it is already rewritten and judging from the effects, we are aiming for CG quality of in-game graphics.

But this is not only an achievement of our programmers. Our art team is one of the best staffed departments in the company, mostly because the men and women involved have been with CD Projekt RED since the beginning of The Witcher 1.

We also know that in many cases with canny art direction, it’s possible to do more than using monstrous textures and having them loaded and displayed flawlessly. We are aiming for the title of prettiest RPG of all time.

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Ravi Sinha: Will we be looking at multiple endings or even different end-bosses?

PaweÅ‚ Sasko: This game is the conclusion of the trilogy of Geralt of Rivia and we want players to be satisfied. That’s why we’ve invested a lot of time and energy into crafting multiple endings. There are three completely different closing sequences, each a few hours long, while the whole world at the end is going to be in one of 36 different states, derived from player’s choices through the game.

We have no such thing as bosses in our game, but there are plenty encounters with huge opponents and important foes for the storyline. All of them have unique abilities and attacks, but unlike in The Witcher 2, everything here is based on RPG systems. We listened to fan feedback and learned that introducing completely new mechanics for boss battles is not good design decision. This also means no QTE gameplay that detracts from what people should expect from a deep RPG.

While the other is a podcast interview from Pure Sophistry with writer Jakub Szamalek. Here’s a snip from the transcripted parts:

We believe that the core of the RPG experience is the choice, this is what really matters- making the character do what you would have done. In the very end of the game you will have to make one final decision, that I think will be extremely difficult and emotionally draining.depending on what you decide you’ll have three different epilogues and they’re different not only in terms of locations and NPC’s but also in the ambiance and feel.

You can make a decision that will be good for Geralt, but bad for everyone else and vice-versa. These three epilogues will allow you fell the consequences of what you’ve done throughout the game.