Seccond part of the RPS interview is up

CDP On Role Of Combat, Sex, And Choice In Witcher 3

Geralt has a beard now. We know this much for certain. Oh, and I suppose he’s also got that whole open-world thing going on. But adding a new number to your title’s a big responsibility, and a simple promise that you’ll feed it, water it, and add boats for some reason (because year of the bow is over; hopefully year of the boat will be a worthy successor) doesn’t always cut it. So what else is going into The Witcher trilogy’s 50-100-hour swan song? To hear CD Projekt tell it, pretty much everything they could think of. The Witcher 3′s scope is beyond ambitious, but that doesn’t mean the Polish powerhouse is skimping on details. Read on to see senior quest designer Jakub Rokosz and marketing mastermind Michał Platkow-Gilewski discuss revamped combat, managing difficulty/learning curve, how big of an impact choices can have, using sex for the benefit – not detriment – of story, and what multiplatform development from the get-go means for the PC version. It’s all after the break.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/06/cdp-on-role-of-combat-sex-and-choice-in-witcher-3/

The Witcher 3: The Skyrim debate, the game on PS4, nuggets of clarification and a whiff of multiplayer

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-12-the-witcher-3-the-skyrim-debate-the-game-on-ps4-nuggets-of-clarification-and-a-whiff-of-multiplayer

"Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz raised eyebrows when he said Skyrim's story and quests were often "generic". He said he couldn't name five characters from the game by memory, and he played the game a lot. His point was that The Witcher 3 could improve on that. It could be an open world RPG like Skyrim but with a strong story as well. It could be, he said, the "perfect RPG".

"He was harsh too much," reflected Adam Badowski, managing director of CD Projekt Red, when I spoke to him last week.

"What does it mean, generic? It's a different type of gameplay experience. We know how to make hand-crafted quests and we have tonnes of ideas for quests. It's a different level of detail.

"We have different tricks for how to fulfil - how to make the living world. And really it's not the same way Bethesda has. It's a different approach."

"Sorry," he chuckled, "but we are pretty confident we will make it.""

"Today, CD Projekt Red employs 150 people. They're split into three teams: one for The Witcher 3, one for Cyberpunk 2077 (which is currently smaller) and one for the proprietary Red Engine. More people will be hired, Badowski told me, but the upper limit for the studio will be a headcount of 200."

"Not so. "We don't want to make any compromises in storytelling," he told me. "We simply needed to come up with a larger-scale story. That's it. The world is bigger so we need to fill it with good stories.

"We don't want to change the gameplay into the sandbox experience - that's not the plan."

Badowski reiterated: "We don't want to lose anything that we achieved in The Witcher's six years. Don't expect too many sandbox, mechanical solutions in The Witcher 3. It will be hand-crafted very precisely.""

"That renderer will soon boast DirectX 11 "bells and whistles", but the initial focus was on creating a dynamic game world - beautification could come later. And with the game not due out until next year, "we have time to achieve it", Badowski said. Also: "I can tell you that screenshots are taken from our desktops and our policy is not to pimp up anything on screenshots.""

""For transitions between plains, forest/woods and cities, it will be seamless," confirmed Badowski. "You can travel from one point to another without any loading, and loading is in the background, so there's no difference between woods, plains, castles.

"The only difference is if we're going to have very dense internal locations. I'm talking about small, highly detailed rooms, and we are doing some prototypes. But I can't confirm it yet whether everything will be accessible without any loading; probably yes, but let me suspend the final answer."

Hero Geralt can explore the open world of The Witcher 3 in new ways, too. He can jump now, and he can climb. It's "not exactly" the climbing you'd find in a game like Assassin's Creed, said Badowski, "it's similar to what we have in Uncharted". "For example," he added, "climb up and there are special sequences, there are special animations built into the system.""

"You can go wherever you want, you can travel wherever you want," he said. "There are no invisible barriers in the world; you can jump down from the cliff and simply die."

Scripted quick-time events (QTEs) have been dumped for The Witcher 3. "We won't have any quick-time events," confirmed Badowski, and that lack of scripted battles means you can stumble upon and kill powerful monsters when you are only comparatively weak. "This time around you can defeat your enemy taking point by point," he said. "If you are good enough as a player you can do it," although "it will take hours and hours" to do so.

The Witcher 3 will also have a slow-motion ability you can use in combat to target vulnerable parts of monsters. It was thought that this was similar to Fallout 3's VATS system, but actually it's a part of the The Witcher 3's Senses mechanic. Geralt uses this to build up a detailed knowledge of his foe before battle. He can use his Senses to pick up tracks and spot clues that other people miss, and then he can literally deploy that accrued knowledge in battle. "And the game helps you," Badowski said, "slowing down a little bit, and you can use the perfect moment to have a killing blow. But it all depends on your knowledge."

You won't be able to kill civilians in the open world of The Witcher 3. That's to do with Geralt being a pre-defined character with a fiction he needs to adhere to. "I can't imagine that Geralt is going to the village and killing everybody," said Badowski. "It's just stupid. So we have to prevent such situations in some quests."

The Witcher 3 is due at the end of next year and there's still much we don't know about it. For instance, will it have multiplayer (a first for the series)? "We're thinking about something," Badowski answered, "but I cannot explain it now. You can expect some information later on. Sorry for that!" I probed about whether it could be something similar to the Dark Arena mode in The Witcher 2. "I don't think so," he said.

New info from polygon:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/26/4146714/the-witcher-3-will-have-three-different-playable-epilogues-driven-by

The Witcher 3 will have three different playable epilogues driven by player choice

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will track player choices and actions to help weave an ending for gamers that can vary in tiny and sometimes major ways, the developers tell Polygon.

"There will be 36 different endings," said Adam Badowski, managing director of CD Projekt Red.

"Thirty-six world states," corrected Michal Platkow-Gilewski, the company's head of marketing.

It's a subtle difference, but the two explained that the PS4 and PC game so thoroughly tracks player choice that the end result are a lot of changes, from the tiny to the major. When I asked the two how many smaller changes the game endings might see, Platkow-Gilewski said the team stopped tracking those when they got to 300.

The safest description, they decided, was to broadly tell players that The Witcher 3 will deliver three entirely different, playable epilogues. And those three different playable endings can only be achieved by playing through the game and making different choices, they said.

"The game is quite complex," Badowski said. "We didn't mean to develop something special for the endings, it's a natural consequence of the story line. The story has hundreds of different branches and sub plots. We have to just sum all of those elements up in the epilogues. Some of those elements are taken from the very beginning and some from other moments of the storyline. All of them will connect in the epilogue.

"We have a lot of things to summarize. We didn't spend time on inventing endings, it was just the consequence of those choices."

The Witcher 3 picks up after the the Nilfgaardian Empire has attacked the Norther Kingdoms following the end of the last game, and after Geralt of Rivia, the Witcher, has fully regained his memory.

The game, which is in development for the PS4 and PC and "something more maybe", will feature more than 100 hours of gameplay evenly divided between the game's mammoth main story line and a vast array of side quests, the two said. The open world, they say, will be roughly 35 times the size of the previous game's world.

The game will also feature enhanced combat which includes a new Witchers Senses system that allows you to attack weak points of enemies.

Because the previous games weren't available on the PS3, and this one is coming to both the PC and PS4, it has been specifically designed to be approachable. But the team is also working on a mechanic that will allow those players who invested time playing the game on another platform for their choices to somehow shape this new experience on the PlayStation 4.

"We are going to give you a possibility to use your save from The Witcher 2, but it will depend on the platform," Badowski said. "On the Sony platform we are developing the game for the first time, so we invented a way to define your old actions and decisions.

"If you decide to play on the PS4 and played on PC previous, you probably want to have continuation, you want to have a similar character."

Badowski said they are not yet ready to talk about the specifics of how that will work.

Good news for those fans who want to play it on PS4, and 36 endings? Who the hell will get them all?

Kotaku has an article up with some info
http://kotaku.com/everything-ive-learned-about-the-witcher-3-468670725

PC Gamer has a new preview, with some new screens

http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/the-witcher-3-first-look/

The Witcher 3 is going to make for a very interesting digital foundry article!

Anyways, pumped for the game!

Projekt RED: Single-Player Only, DRM 'Worst Thing' In Video Game Industry

Witcher 3 Project Lead, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz (left)

To many fans of the series, the Witcher games are some of the last great single-player role-playing games being made. Recently there have been murmurings of a possible multiplayer mode in CD Projekt RED’s upcomingThe Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

This speculation has led to some understandable worry.

With companies like EA abandoning single-player games altogether, and many beloved franchises like Dragon Age and Mass Effect seeing tacked-on multiplayer elements, it would be pretty painful to see the same thing happen to the next Witcher.

Good news, then, for fans of Geralt of Rivia and the Witcher universe.

CD Projekt RED has told me in no uncertain terms that this is not in the works, noting that “the game will be an epic, story driven, single player, open world RPG experience” and that they “strongly feel that this final saga of Geralt has no place for meaningful multiplayer.”

I always like to start the day off with good news.

But what about the rest of the game? How will The Witcher 3 take what madeAssassins of Kings so great and repackage it into an open-world experience?

More to the point, how will the Polish developer manage to do this without suffering the fate of so many open-world games: big, beautiful worlds with lackluster stories….

continued http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/04/24/talking-the-witcher-3-with-cd-projekt-red-single-player-only-drm-worst-thing-in-video-game-industry/

Is it just me or are CDProjekt due to become as big as Bioware and Bethesda have this gen? Lots of positive PR and two incredible looking RPGs in the pipeline for early next gen.

It sounds like a recipe for great success.

In quality, I'd say yes. In sales, not yet.

This game is going to consume me for quite a while. Love the Witcher franchise, RPG perfection.