The Witcher Interview

FiringSquad had the opportunity to fire several questions about The Witcher off to CD Projekt’s director of global marketing, Gary Kieth. A little something to get you started:

Q: What were some of the challenges involved in adapting BioWare’s Aurora graphics engine to work on The Witcher?

A: The biggest challenge in the process of adapting Aurora to work with The Witcher was making it use all the features of modern graphics hardware that have emerged since Neverwinter Nights was released. When we licensed the engine it was already about two years old. We needed to make it meet the expectations (very high expectations) of what will be standard by the time we release. First we had to port it to DirectX 9, and then implement all the features we wanted to see in the game: support for sophisticated shaders, changing daytime, dynamic weather, etc. We also improved shadows, foliage rendering and the animation system. The graphics engine has been almost completely rewritten.