Witcher 3 - Interview @ Examiner

Examiner: As we end this current generation of gaming, how has the genre of open-world gaming evolved?

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: Game worlds have gotten really big, immersive and, most importantly, detailed. There was a time when open world gameplay meant that you just had to travel from point A to point B with nothing to do in between. The surroundings tried to emulate the wilderness, clumps of polygons were meant to look like animals and so on. The big difference is that, nowadays, there’s like a second game between point A and B. If you want, you can forget that point B even exists. It happened slowly, so many gamers just take it for granted. But when you think about it for a while, it’s really a magnificent thing!

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Ex: Will open-world titles become living in the sense that developers can always change the world, the game and make it so the player will always have new content and will never have to buy a new game? Is that looking too far down the road?

KT: It’s called an MMORPG *laughs*. Our game is quite different in this regard - The Witcher 3 offers a deep single player experience and it’s here to tell a story. And all good stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending. We could sell extra content to gamers “down the road,” but we don’t believe in that - we believe patches, fixes and additional content should be provided to gamers free of charge. Only something REALLY big, and something that will not make you feel ripped off, justifies a price tag. Remember “PC add-on discs” back in the day? Yeah, I’m thinking about the ones that extended the original game by offering many hours of additional gameplay - if we ever decide to charge you for something, we think you will appreciate what you get in return.

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