Witcher 3 - Interview @ Stevivor

CD Projekt Red’s Michał Platkow was interviewed by Stevivor to talk about Witcher 3.

Stevivor: One thing that people really admired about the past two The Witcher titles was their difficulty, and that you couldn’t just breeze through them. Will The Witcher 3 continue with this tradition, and will there be a ‘nightmare’ difficulty in this game as well?

Platkow: I don’t know yet what will be the name of the difficulty levels, but for sure you can expect several levels, with something easy (where maybe ‘easy’ will be even easier than what it was for The Witcher 2), but you can also expect something hard. As I said before, we wanted to create it so that it would be easy to learn but difficult to master, so it will be easy to survive, but if want to do cool stuff or advance relatively faster it will be harder. We don’t have a monster scaling level, which means that if something is too easy for you, you can always look for a more challenging monster and try to beat it if you are a veteran of the franchise. I guess everyone will enjoy the game.

Stevivor: We recently learnt that two gameplay designers had left the studio to join a smaller indie studio. Has this had any impact at all on the development of this game?

Platkow: The big impact was that they were both friends of mine, so I’ve been missing them. A good thing was that they didn’t move too far, they left for a really nice company which is, I would say, our friends, so we aren’t working too far from each other and are still in contact. They were responsible for parts of the game which were already done, or at least planned, so I would say ‘no’. The other thing is that we have over 220 talented people from 19 countries working on the game, so we shouldn’t worry about it. I wish them luck though, because they were seeking new challenges and they wanted to have a bigger influence on smaller games. They both loved indie games so I wish them the best.

Stevivor: An interesting thing about The Witcher 3 is that it features no loading screens. What kind of work or changes have been made to the game to make that happen?

Platkow: OK, so to avoid loading screens in such a big world we had to work more on our engine, to develop it further. We are using the Red engine, which is our own technology, that is adopted to the next-gen and to role-playing games. We  designed that from scratch while working on The Witcher 2, so it exactly matched our needs and there’s nothing on-top that we don’t need. With this technology, and the power of the next-gen consoles and PCs, we can achieve that. That said, it’s not so easy – I’ve made and put it simply, but there’s guys responsible for things like edging and programmers who could talk for hours on how they did it. Good work guys!