The Witcher Interview

The Witcher France has an interview up with Daniel Sadowski (programmer), Katarzyna Kuczyńska (designer), Paweł Majak (community manager) and Łukasz Mach (PR manager). It can be found here in French and English.

Do you plan to implement a multiplayer option, like in some other RPGs, or a co-operative mode? If this is not the case, we’d like to know what are the problems or difficulties which prevent you from doing it.

Right now implementation of any form of multiplayer mode is not taken under consideration. Multiplayer games require a slightly different approach, not mentioning the technical changes that would have to be done to our engine. It is hard to imagine a world populated by “Geralts” or even by a large number of witchers, who are relicts of the past and almost an extinct profession. On the other hand implementing something like Diablo II or Neverwinter Night, where a player can choose from various races and professions is nearly impossible in The Witcher’s world – it just doesn’t fit. On the other hand we are aware that interacting with other players is very important and fun. In my opinion the best way to allow that is to implement some kind of co-operative mode (like in Gears of War for example), but this is a question for the future.

Katarzyna Kuczyńska, designer

Well we’re definately not interested in any MMOs at this point. As far as multiplayer — the reason there’s no multiplayer in The Witcher is not because we were prevented from doing it technologically — it’s just something we chose not to do, because first of all the gameplay and story was built around the idea of a game for one player and secondly we just didn’t think multiplayer would work in the current setting we had.

Daniel Sadowski, programmer

Spotted on RPGCodex.