Every main quest and side distraction is being ”hand-crafted very precisely,” so as not to compromise ”anything that we achieved” throughout the series. A big world needs ”good stories.”
The studio knows they’ve got a lot to do. The Witcher 3 is said to have a game world larger than Bethesda’s Skyrim, but CD Projekt doesn’t want ‘generic filler’.
”It’s a matter of scale,” said Adam Badowski, CD Projekt Red managing director. ”Bigger team will achieve bigger goals.”
”You have to remember that the team is much bigger and much more experienced. Right now we are on consoles and we have technology already established, we have all the story plots done, so it’s not so bad,” he told Eurogamer. Bethesda invested around $85 million with manpower of 90 developers into Skyrim. Can CD Projekt really surpass them?
One of the essential issues for The Witcher 3 team is ensuring there are no story telling sacrifices made going into the open world arena. This has been an alarming revelation for fans of the series which has been a completely linear experience until now except for the choices made along the way.
”We don’t want to make any compromises in storytelling,” said Badowski. ”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.” We won’t be seeing ‘generic quests’ pop up like in Skyrim.
”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.”
”It’s just words right now,” he acknowledged. ”We need to prove it. But I’m quite confident with it. Plus, you know, the game, the first iteration, is implemented, so I know how big the scope is, so I’m really confident.”
Check out the full interview between Adam Badowski and Eurogamer. CD Projekt Red has announced The Witcher 3 for PC and PS4, and admits it’s ”too early” to compare the two. ”We have to wait for a while to judge.”
