The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Short News Roundup

If you've looked at the thermometer lately, you will have noticed winter isn't coming, it's well and truly here. That's why the outside has turned into a bleak wasteland reminiscent of the North of Game of Thrones' Westeros, or the frostier realms of The Witcher 3's similarly brutal fantasy world.

Where the recent RPG based on George R.R. Martin's brutal fantasy world was deeply disappointing, Telltale's ongoing effort is a definite improvement. Still, it doesn't give you the freedom to wander off exploring. For an experience that blends the elements of Game of Thrones that make it so popular with a fully fleshed-out fantasy world, The Witcher 3 may well be the answer.

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What are you working on right now?

Jakub Szamalek: Right now the story team is adding the finishing touches to the game. We are doing some onscreen text, some letters and documents. Basically we are wrapping up the entire story part of the game. There a lot of polishing, that’s actually what we are using this time for.

What’s the biggest departure from The Witcher 2?

Jakub Szamalek: I think it’s the open world- it changed everything. It’s a matter of scale, things are much bigger. But it’s also changed how we create the game and how we make quests work.

In The Witcher 2 the structure was linear. There was a lot of non-linearity in the choices you made and the paths you chose, but basically the quests were aligned in a nice neat line. In The Witcher 3 you can do them in whatever order you please and they still have to connect and make sense.

The other thing is that we had to make this huge world interesting. The Witcher 2 had a number of side quests, but since the world was much smaller well could get away with fewer of them. Whereas this time we have built a world that is forty times bigger and so we had to put a lot of attention and time into making the world interesting.

There’s lots of points of interest like ruins, caves, abandoned building and whatnot. We have to make each of these places worth visiting. So there a little bits of back story, there’s someone to meet, a story to discover and a secret to find. There has to be a reward. So we spent a lot of time with that.

From a story perspective there’s this extra layer on non-linearity because you can do the main quests in the game in different orders. Depending on the order in which do them you actually get a slightly different story. So this is really a game changer- opening up the world and making it so big.

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joxer said:

No. It can't be Game of Thrones video game unless it kills Sean Bean.

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guenthar said:

If it was A Song of Ice and Fire Geralt would be the first to die. (and I mean permanently)

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lostforever said:

No he won't. People says this all the time about GoT and how main characters dies but none of the "real" main characters die in GoT. And Jon Snow is not dead, you will see!

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lostforever said:

No he won't. People says this all the time about GoT and how main characters dies but none of the "real" main characters die in GoT. And Jon Snow is not dead, you will see!

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rjshae said:

This is circular logic. You define "real" main characters as those who didn't die, hence none of the main characters die.

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crpgnut said:

It'll be interesting to see how Geriatric develops. In the previous games they were short enough that the three armor sets, handful of weapons and the potion/magic system were fine. This game is supposedly much longer, so you need more things to keep player interest. It looks very nice, but I wasn't seeing much variety at all in G's gear.

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Soulbane said:

I guess you could compare and find similarities between the authors: both are tremendous douchebags.

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Soulbane said:

I agree on losing much in translation, even though I don't speak Polish. And the Last Wish is one of the best translations of all the books, mind.

As for SoIaF, I probably sound bitter because I wanted to like it very much, loved the first novel, then slowly it dawned on me how I was tricked into this neverending drivel which has no direction whatsoever, and will never have a remotely satisfying ending. I mean, c'mon, we know how the author planned to have a trilogy based on the War of Roses, but later got convinced by his success and his editors/publishers to go on and draw this out as much as he can. He wrote himself into a corner, and he admittedly lost inspiration. The HBO show revived some of his writing potency, but it's still a drawn-out affair. And what's even more infuriating is how people now think it's the second coming in fantasy or something. "The American Tolkien" my ass.

Sapkowski may be a grumpy old conservative who never liked fantasy but at least he wrote the Witcher stories because he had something to say, not because he was taken over by greed/fame/whatever (and no matter how successful the cRPG franchise is, the Witcher will never ever be a commercial success on the level of SoIaF). The moment he felt Geralt is becoming a cult figure in Polish fiction he killed him off and finished the whole thing, because he felt it takes attention away from what he was writing about.

But don't mind me, this is a hobby horse of mine, I tend to sound overly harsh on the matter. I fully accept if someone thinks otherwise.

As for the Witcher 3, I can't wait!

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zahratustra said:

:lol:

wiretripped - Soulbane is right. I have read "Last Wish" and "Sword of Destiny" in Polish and English and the translation of them both is of the very high quality.

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