The Witcher Blog Update

CD Projekt has added another entry to their blog on IGN, once again focusing on the company’s history leading up to the development of The Witcher.

After E3 2003 we chose engines we were potentially interested in. Apart from Aurora we tested engines for Unreal, Far Cry and another one, slightly less known. After the first tests it was obvious Aurora offered the most modest graphic potential. Additionally, it had never been licensed before (and no other company apart from CD Projekt RED has licenced it so far). Its adaptation by third parties wasn’t that well prepared. The engines of Epic and CryTech were beautifully prepared for licensing (especially the former, work on the latter was in progress) and they dazzled with graphic potential and state-of-the-art gadgetry. It may seem strange why we chose Aurora. One very simple thing prevailed. Aurora was the only complete system for creating role-play games whereas the other engines were universal but they did not take into account the specificity of this type of games where a complicated structure of the game is a real challenge for creators. As for the graphic side, we reached a decision that the renderer would be created from scratch, bearing the latest technologies in mind. The replacement of the renderer was the first serious change in the Aurora’s subsystem, but as it turned out later, not the only one. As the work progressed, our programmers gradually added more and more elements, including the replacement of the whole NWN toolset with a state-of-the-art tool functioning in real-time (an afore-mentioned D’jini). But this is not the topic of this episode.