Co-founder Marcin Iwinski admits they ”could have done a better job” with The Witcher 2 by spending more time on it, and so they weren’t going to repeat that mistake.
Some might feel the Polish studio would be insane to think The Witcher 2 was ‘subpar’ in any way, but Iwinski admits they were a little too spooked by reactions to a delay.
This time a delay was announced with The Witcher 3 missing its Christmas release window for February 2015 instead. ”This is not our first game; we are not newbies,” he said. ”It’s not like ‘hey we are delaying and we’ll keep on delaying’. If we would think we need more time we would say ‘hey we’ll release it not in Feb but, I don’t know, June’.”
”We made the decision at the moment we were able to judge how much time we needed, and we planned it well and it works well for us. So, no more delays.” CD Projekt also promised the Witcher 3 delay didn’t impact Cyberpunk 2077.
Iwinski was still nervous about breaking the news, but didn’t have to be. ”…we were really positively surprised with the response,” he said. ”It was ‘hey guys, great that you have the balls to say that you take your time and you spend money on it’. Because it’s not happening for free. That’s a really important thing to mention.”
The studio itself was surprised by the decision to push it into 2015, and it wasn’t just fans to beg forgiveness. They needed to justify the delay to the shareholders, and that was ”an additional load of pressure” to overcome.
”We could have done a better job for The Witcher 2 when we released it,” admitted co-founder Iwinski. He pointed to the difficulty curve in the beginning of the RPG sequel, and a few other points that could have been given more testing.
”You can always take more time on a game, especially with huge games,” he continued. ”You’re never able to plan perfectly, and then the closer you get to shipping, the more you see ‘oh I could use these two-three months…’”
”Content-wise, we exactly knew what we wanted to create,” marketing director Michal Platkow-Gillewski contributed, ”and we could push really really hard and deliver the game this year still. But we knew what kind of quality we are expecting, and, I believe, what gamers would expect from us as well. And that was our aim.”
”We knew that to deliver that we needed extra time.”
The delay was nothing to do with Dragon Age: Inquisition coming out in early October, although ”if they were shipping on October 8 and they would announce it before us, then we would look, I don’t know, for November or something. Because there are so few RPGs that it’s really a very stupid idea to ship them at the same time,” added Iwinski.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt releases on PC, Xbox One and PS4 in February 2015.