The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an Open World Done Right

According to this preview/interview from VG247, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an example of open world gaming done right. While, I’d personally wait for its release to say something along those lines, I do have to agree that what has been mentioned and shown so far is very promising:

I sat down with CD Projekt RED’s game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz after watching a 45-minute gameplay demo of The Witcher 3 to discuss the series’ transition into the open world.

(Yeah, it’s very, very challenging, because we have this goal that we want you to have the same intense feeling/experience that you got you got in The Witcher 2 and we want to combine it with the open world. Not the other way,) said Tomaszkiewicz.

(We got these challenges you know, these huge distances between these points and you can forget what you need to do, and so on.)

….

(We decided to create these three main landscapes. One you saw in the presentation. It was Skellige Archipelago. This is only one of them. We got also what we call No Man’s Land. It’s a ‘˜Slavic mood’ landscape. And we got the biggest city in the world Novigrad and the surroundings.)

In the demo, Geralt begins wandering about in the Skellige Archipelago to meet Jarl Crach. Crach has commissioned the witcher to looking into the Wild Hunt, which has destroyed one of his villages. Only one survivor remains as a witness to the grisly deed. Naturally, Geralt heads off to look for this villager.

(Every landscape has got its own storyline. In every landscape, you need to gather some information. If you gather all you progress in the storyline. Every landscape got these quests that are quite near themselves, because we need to be sure that we can achieve this intensity of the storyline.

(Second thing is that after few hours when you’re playing in this landscape and you get into the city, we ask player to go far from this point. When you’re travelling there, you’ll see points of interest in the distance,) explained.