VG24/7 has an anniversary interview with CD Projekt RED about The Witcher 3.
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Thanks Farflame!How did the game evolve during development - did you move away much from the initial vision?
The high-level vision didn't change that much. We wanted to make an open world game with an emphasis on storytelling, where players assume the role of Geralt searching for Ciri - and this is the game we released. But finer details changed a lot.
For the longest time, we couldn't settle on how many Skellige isles we should have, or how big they should be. We initially didn't plan to have underwater exploration - but ended up adding it quite late in the process and had to retroactively add this gameplay mechanic to already existing quests. Oh, and we also originally wanted players to be able to change horses. Which, in hindsight, would have been a terrible decision - how could we encourage people to get rid of trusty Roach?
Was there anything you changed because it wasn't possible at the time?
We planned to have a sequence where Ciri fights enemies on a frozen lake, while skating - a reference to a similar scene in one of the books. But preparing that sequence proved extremely complicated. For example, we couldn't easily record the necessary gameplay animations - imagine recording motion capture for skating sword fighters.
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