What The Witcher Taught CD Projekt About RPGs

Gamasutra is offering a quite extensive, three-page interview with the developers at CD Projekt RED on the upcoming Cyberpunk RPG and the lessons they’ve learned from The Witcher titles they’ve worked on previously. There’s really quite a lot in there, so I recommend you to read it in full, but just in case you don’t believe me, here’s an excerpt that should do the trick:

While we’re looking back on The Witcher 2, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the game’s second act, in particular. You basically designed it such that players would see one of two batches of content based on their previous choices. Why did you choose to design the game that way, considering players wouldn’t even see a huge chunk of content unless they played the game twice?

AB: Because we are rich! (Laughs)

MI: And we didn’t have to reuse assets! (Laughs)

AB: No, no, no. Really, it was kind of a design experiment. We want to treat our players right. It’s true, the story has different branches, and for us, choices and consequence are very important, and that is the proof. In Act 2, we basically made two different acts, and from the production perspective, it was kind of a hell, but we did it.

MI: I mean I think another reason we did it is just because we wanted to play a game like that. We had never seen it before, and we think it’s really cool, and it gives the game a lot of replayability options.

Now some people might say, “Oh, but I don’t want to have to play it again,” but we had a lot of fans who said, “Hey, I liked experiencing things completely differently.”

AB: Also, as the creators, it was just fun to do it. For our next game, we have some new ideas that we want to keep secret.

You mentioned that it was an experiment for you. Was it a success? Was there anything about it that didn’t go as planned?

AB: For sure it was a success, but probably half of our players didn’t even realize that they can choose totally different paths.

MI: And that’s actually something we could improve in terms of communicating with the player — telling them that there is such an option in the story. There were so many people who only found out about the choice over the internet or by their friends, or they never found out at all. So in that case, you can say that all the work we put into that other area of the game went to waste for those players.

AB: But we don’t want to tell people, “Okay, this is a special moment where you have to make a choice,” or you’ll lose something. In Act 1, we had a few of those moments, but maybe we could do it a bit differently.

MI: I think we didn’t successfully communicate it. To make it a more appealing feature for players, we didn’t make it visible enough.

AB: But I don’t know how we can communicate that without spoiling things or destroying the immersion. It’s very though, but that’s why it was an experiment.

MPG: Everything is about choices and consequence. For us, it was natural, because we had Iorveth and Roche, two strong NPCs, and if you stand against one of them, you should get a different story.

MI: I also think it was a very bold statement for us in terms of respecting the fan base. A lot of companies would put that in and be like, “Hey, that’s perfect for an expansion set. Charge 20 bucks, more revenue!” But that’s not our way, we like it like this. You can be sure to expect more experiments from us. (Laughs)