Eurogamer have an extensive interview about the Witcher 3
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-19-the-witcher-3-what-is-a-next-gen-rpg
Some interesting bits
"We will have the new mimic system, more animations, more sophisticated dialogue, editors, and this would result in more sophisticated depictions and dialogues with subtler camera work, with sounds helping tell the story rather than just be there in the background,"
"There will be some very touching moments in The Witcher 3, and you will have the time, since it's a very long game, to establish relationships with people that are close to you from the very beginning, and see the relationship grow or falter, and this might be a pretty intense experience as well."
"We're having many more physics objects like little bits of cloth dangling in the wind and chains and stuff," added environment artist Jonas Mattsson. "We want to make it as alive as possible. And when the wind rolls - so you have a grass plain and you see the wind moving - you get this motion. It's much more alive. Before it was just animation."
"In The Witcher 3 we are keeping the eroticism but we're working really hard at making sure it's interwoven with the story," added writer Jakub Szamalek. "It's not 'just because': it serves as a tool to tell a story between characters and give another dimension to the relationship we are portraying.
"Gamers do want adult entertainment, and the way in which The Witcher 2 was received shows that this is true. We're working very hard to make sure The Witcher 3 is fun but also a game for mature players and treats them seriously."
"You're correct that some players like to control everything," lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz (Konrad's brother) responded, "but because some things are unexpected you feel like this world isn't just a schematic. It's not a mechanical world where you only choose obvious things and you are always in control. People who live in it have their own motivations; factions go their own ways and things change. That is more realistic. It's just the approach we chose in our game."
"We tried in The Witcher 2 to make this high difficulty level but it was a mistake," he admitted, "because we tried to mix two different games." The Witcher fans wanted a traditional RPG with a story, not a challenge based on their dexterity.
"Dark Souls influenced me very much because I love games like this, but I understand after The Witcher 2 that we should less experiment on stuff like this but more focus on the things which people love in our games," he said.
The learning curve in The Witcher 3 will be "proper", then - not like the much lamented learning curve in The Witcher 2. There will be difficulty levels in The Witcher 3, but unlike The Witcher 2, Normal won't feel like Hard. "It wasn't a good decision," Tomaszkiewicz added. "Right now we're changing it and I believe that everyone will go in this world very smooth and we will not get problems like it was in The Witcher 2."
"No. No no no," was Adam Badowski's emphatic answer to whether The Witcher 3 will have paid DLC. "Not for small DLC or something like that.
"Maybe there's an option to have a huge expansion pack or something because of the size and scope of the game. This is the only option [for paid DLC]. But small DLC and DLC packs: it's not big enough [to charge for]."
As always check out the full article, there is even some PS4/XBOne talk if you are into that kind of thing.
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