With The Witcher series, the lead character is taken from one featured in a series of novels. Are you given free rein of what you can do with him?
As a whole, we have absolute freedom with what we are doing with the franchise and what we are doing with Geralt at this stage. We feel quite comfortable with it, but I guess we are controlling ourselves, we are not abusing the system because we believe that the books are really great, the storyline was impressive, the way Sapkowski was creating his world was really interesting, and we don’t want to change the shape of it too much.
There’s an incredible level of detail, even in the pre-alpha build. The man asking Geralt to stay and have a few drinks, with the fur on his shoulders you could see every single hair. How do you manage to fit in so much intricate detail without sending any computer or console screaming?
We are working hard on our brand new technology, REDengine 3, and it’s still not optimised, so I guess it’s going to be much better, both in terms of the quality and the speed it’s running on PC, but it’s hard to say. We’re just trying to do our job and get the best we can get out of a specific architecture and out of a specific machine, and it looks good. I guess we’re quite experienced at this stage!
There’s over a hundred hours of gameplay, how big do the scripts get when you’re in development?
I’d have no idea, it’d be really hard for me to give you an exact number of quests, because it’s just massive, I usually operate in numbers. The rough estimate right now is that we are delivering about fifty hours of main storyline and fifty hours of side-quests whilst exploring the world and all of those different events happening in the world.
There’s around thirty-six endings to think about as well, is that correct?
Yeah, but we refer to it as “the state of the world”, so at the end of the game the world can be in thirty-six different, meaningfully different states, and these are all reflective of your decisions and the consequences of the world that happen because of those choices.
