The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Interview
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There's a new interview with CD Projekt RED's Michał Płatkow about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt up on Stevivor this evening, with the topics ranging between recent changes within the development team to why they've focused on the latest generation of hardware versus the previous generation. Here are a few questions and their answers to kick things off:
Stevivor: The past two The Witcher titles have been relatively linear, with the third now claiming to be completely open-world. Why did the developers decide to go down this route?
Platkow: There's a matter of definition of '˜linearity', because for us, linearity means if you can decide or shape the world around you if you can influence it somehow or change it, either story-wise or gameplay-wise, then there is no linearity. To tell the true immersive story, we believed that with The Witcher and The Witcher 2, they missed the last essential element, that being the open world. So right now, what you can do (and what you couldn't have done in the past) is that you can travel back and check what consequences your action brought to a particular place at any moment you can leave what you're doing and change the place, change the mood, and experience another adventure. This is what's cool about an open-world, but it's not for the sake of just having an open-world, it's for having a really cool and a really good immersive story.
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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!
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Stevivor: On that note, are the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 now as good as PC, or do you always find that PCs are still a little better in terms of what they can handle?
Platkow: I'm not super into the technical specifications of each of the systems, I just recently bought a next-gen console and I really enjoy how powerful it is, and it's enough for me. There will always be a PC system that is better I recently visited a website for a manufacturer of good PCs and they give you the option to create the computer of your dreams, and they created this system which cost, if I remember correctly, more than €50,000, which is super-cool and way better than any console you can find on Earth, but you know, the consoles are quite powerful right now, and you can really create beautiful looking games on them. I'm looking forward to more titles because there aren't so many right now.
