Witcher 3 - Interview @ GameStar

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GameStar interviewed CEO Marcin Iwinski of CD Project RED about the developers future goals, and of course they talk about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

You always emphasize the size of The Witcher 3 and I guess the Cyberpunk should be about the same scale. In the future you’ll be striving to make bigger and more mature games?

There’s always question «What is more?» Like, if we make a game five times longer than usual will gamers enjoy it? I think it’s all about the story, the characters, their development and how you go through it, so definitely we’ll be experimenting with new ways to tell a story. Cyberpunk definitely will be offering a lot of new ideas. But we’re working on that really hard already in The Witcher 3. The game engages the player much better. We really wanted to improve on what we did in The Witcher 2 in terms of the initial immersion for a gamer, though. In Russia, in Poland, in Germany gamers are different, we are more hardcore. If it’s a hard game it only motivates us. But if you look at Western Europe and especially US, which is a very important market, if a gamer feels that the immersion is steep, the game is hard and you die a lot at the beginning, people will most likely drop the game and say that it wasn't good enough. We don’t want that to happen. «Easy to play — Hard to master» is what we are after. And I draw a lot of comparisons between games and TV series — for example Game of Thrones…

So when both games, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, are done, are you going to focus on a next big RPG or maybe something different?

I can tell you one thing for sure: we’ll be doing story-driven mature RPG and this is what we think we’re pretty good at. It’s really very early to say and we’ll see when the time comes, but right now we really want to focus fully on The Witcher 3 and take all of our skills to a next level, so that we can really deliver a multiplatform story-driven RPG in an open world. That’s the main goal. After that we’ll probably set a new goal that is even higher to achieve!

Do you think that games heavily relying on realism have a future? Not combat simulation games like ArmA but very complex games that would, for example, simulate a life in a metropolis where you could enter every building and talk to every citizen? Would it make sense to try to recreate our life with such precision in a computer game?

Yeah, this question is always opened, isn't it. If it’s boring simulator — I would totally not be interested. There has to be something more to it. A lot of people play games to relax, so the main question should be whether it's relaxing or entertaining you?

And again, our profession is to tell great stories. Whether I’m watching TV or reading books I generally want to have a bit of fun with that or I want the medium to make me think about certain things. Maybe something important that you don't think about every day in your usual life. If it’s a part of the game — it’s cool. If it’s just a simple simulator you have to ask yourself what is the goal? Of course, there are games like SimCity, for example, where there is a kind of economic model and management system and there’s always a certain goal. That works well. Everything could work as long there’s a certain group of gamers that finds it cool. As for us — we’re all about story.
More information.
 
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I know through a friend of mine who works at CDP that several weeks ago the build of the whole world was almost exactly 72 times larger than the Witcher 2 world. They had to cut back on it, pushing it down to 60 times. They are still debating as to what to do with it. But you don't know that from me. ;)
 
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Well, I'm one of those who prefers a smaller but denser game world to the big and empty ones. To explore you have to have something to explore. Miles and miles of not much is just tedious.
 
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And I'm one of those who don't care how big the world is as long as it's not repopulated indefinetly.
 
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Just for the record, we're talking about exclusively hand crafted areas full of content, according to my source.

I have no idea how respawns will work joxer, but I'm guessing similar to the previous Witchers: some areas always have respawns, others go empty when you kill the nests. Here in W3, since they put such huge emphasis on monster hunting as a separate activity from quests in general, I can't imagine respawns, because that would make the whole monster-extermination kinda pointless.
 
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Joxer likes worlds you can empty out and never have anything return, why bother going back to towns you were in before. Clear them and move on.
 
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That's ridiculously large. I don't see them pulling that off without having a significant amount of filler. I'd rather have something around 10-20x the size of TW2 (which would still be very large) but more dense with content.
 
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So I guess Joxer needs to find some lifeless planet to move to since he obviously doesn't like our respawning planet.
 
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@JDR13
They are aiming at 35xW2, but got carried away adding sidequests, content, areas to explore, fluff, etc, and ended up with the size of 72x. Now they are cutting back by selecting the better quality stuff only. I was told density was never a question, there are no 'empty areas' and such.
 
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Well, there's no way to make a game with 72x times the content of TW2 without having several thousand in-sync developers - so the number is kinda pointless.

If the game turns out to have more than, say, 3x times the (ACTUAL and meaningful) content of TW2 - I'll eat my hat with vinegar on it.
 
If the game turns out to have more than, say, 3x times the (ACTUAL and meaningful) content of TW2 - I'll eat my hat with vinegar on it.

And I will want to see it posted on YouTube for the enjoyment of all :biggrin:
 
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72x the content of TW2??????

Are they saying they made a 2160 hour game (72*30)? Or that they did 30x more kill monsters quests? Do they count travel time too?
 
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72 times the area of W2 basically means a game area 9 times longer, and 8 times wider than W2. And as we have seen from the pictures, part of that 9 x 8 times bigger area is ocean. The whole game area might be an archipelago, with 50% or more of the region being water.
 
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Yes, the area was 72xW3. They cut back from it because they felt it was too much. Yet I would not worry, as my source tells me it's all hand-crafted and not generated at all.

@Dart: Believe it or not (and ofc you won't), I was told that at this phase of the development, a handful of level designers who know their trade and have ideas can produce content (geographical content now primarily, but most of that is according to writers' notes) at a crazy speed. Pretty much working 24/7, naturally.
 
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I'm not talking about area - but about meaningful content.

Frontier and Daggerfall are both infinitely larger than TW2 - but that doesn't mean they have infinitely more meaningful content.

In fact, they both have infinitely less.
 
@Dart
I understand what you are talking about, no need to explain what the difference between area and meaningful content is (though the latter is somewhat vague). That is why I wrote that I am talking about geographical content at the moment, which is mainly generated according to quests and story design and lore background. Like I said, according to this dev who actually works there that I talked to, they have to cut content at the moment, because they deem it too much.

How meaningful all the content will be in the end, everyone will have to decide for themselves when the game ships, I guess.

@Thrasher
By hand-crafted I meant that geography and locations are not procedurally generated. That's what I was told.
 
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That's just the bones, I would say. Need good storytellers to add people, quests, monsters, props/clutter/loot, merchants/service providers, and gasp maybe even factions. Crossing fingers.
 
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@Dart
I understand what you are talking about, no need to explain what the difference between area and meaningful content is (though the latter is somewhat vague). That is why I wrote that I am talking about geographical content at the moment, which is mainly generated according to quests and story design and lore background. Like I said, according to this dev who actually works there that I talked to, they have to cut content at the moment, because they deem it too much.

You sure made it sound like they were adding massive amounts of content and had to fill out areas accordingly.

Here:

They are aiming at 35xW2, but got carried away adding sidequests, content, areas to explore, fluff, etc, and ended up with the size of 72x. Now they are cutting back by selecting the better quality stuff only. I was told density was never a question, there are no 'empty areas' and such.


There's no way they could possibly generate 72x times the amount of content of TW2 in the amount of time they've had available.

I don't care if they hired every developer in Eastern Europe and put them on both crack and speed. It's not possible - end of story.

Anyone with the slightest amount of common sense would realise that.

So, we're obviously talking about mostly generated stuff and not fully voiced quests with C&C, etc. - which wasn't at all clear from what you originally said.
 
There's something to be said even for hand-generated landmass. No one in their right mind would travel for long through the outdoor areas of Daggerfall or Arena for that matter.
 
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