The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Informationen und Diskussionen

[LordCrash]

Lykaon – A quest completed
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Getting to know REDkit

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I was pretty surprised when I was chosen as a part of the REDkit beta for The Witcher 2. When I applied, my experience with game development included building custom maps for Age of Empires 2 for my friends and me, building a landscape with the Crysis Editor for my own enjoyment and creating a small horror mod for Skyrim, “Arheim” (which I never finished). So since I thought that this would probably not sell myself very well, I added some videos I made with the movie editor for Grand Theft Auto IV.

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So all in all, one can say that it was a very lucky coincidence that I was chosen. In the October of 2012, I received a mail explaining how to download REDkit. I downloaded the whole thing, started it, sat down and was overwhelmed. So many buttons! So like any reasonable man would do, I showed it to my girlfriend, who is much better at stuff like this, since she, coincidentally, studied computer science. We managed to get a new level up and running and I could start to just take the mouse, move it to the so-called asset browser (a library with every object of The Witcher 2) and just drag stuff onto the level until it looked nice.

Since I obviously „have got extraordinary sense of artistic beauty“ (don’t we just love comments like that about ourselves?), I created an in my eyes nice looking environment in a few hours. Or at least some nice looking square meters with a lot of empty space around them.



As the level grew, I started to think that I might actually make an adventure out of it. So I thought of an intriguing storyline. Would it be about politics, the struggle of a witcher in a world that has no use for him anymore, a tale about love and betrayal? Nope, “I want to do something with werewolves. Werewolves are cool!”. So what kind of name would I give an adventure that is about werewolves?

Since I studied archaeology and history at that time, I thought of an ancient Greek king, who was turned into a wolf by Zeus. His name is the origin of words like “Lycanthropy”: Lykaon. So it was settled. Had I known that most people have no idea how to pronounce the word, I would have probably thought of alternatives. But there it was, and I liked what I saw.

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Learning Game Design

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So developing an adventure in the world of The Witcher takes a few things. One has to do the level design, write a story and create quests around it. So at that time I knew how to build levels (I was not particularly good at it, but it worked) and I thought “heck, writing a story and dialogues can’t be that difficult. You read a lot and do you remember back in school? You ruled at writing stuff!”

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Obviously, I overestimated my skills. I was just not able to learn the whole quest editor. So, as any reasonable man would do, I showed it to my girlfriend, who implemented my ideas into REDkit, while I was running around the apartment shouting ideas. Of course she did not learn it out of thin air. One of the great features of the beta was the REDkit Wiki, where we could find some tutorials and more importantly (since there weren’t a lot of tutorials in there at the time), we had a so-called REDkit chat, where we could talk to the developers, most importantly to a guy who called himself Banan (yes, this means Banana in polish). Without this guy, I would have never been able to even start Lykaon, let alone work at CD Projekt RED. So the first weeks of my REDkit experience were building the level, writing dialogue, running around the apartment shouting stuff and writing in the REDkit chat.

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As the level developed and I already had a nice little village with people, a high mountain, forests, a lake and grave fields, I started to post pictures and videos of my work to the REDkit forum.

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After a while, I got a mail by Banan asking me if I’d like to talk to some of the developers about my level design. I started an e-mail correspondence with them and in the end, I was asked to do the “CD Projekt RED Level Design Test”, which included building a level with two hills or mountains, a river in the middle, a trading route, a town and the lair of a troll. Those of you who played the demo of Lykaon probably already realized: The test level I built for CD Projekt RED is the level I now use for my Lykaon adventure.

As a goodbye to my old level, I made a movie about it.

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Going professional

So my goal with the test level was to build something big and impressive. The new Lykaon would be more than twice the size of my old level and I wanted to build the biggest level that was ever made for The Witcher 2. After a few days (after a while I got pretty fast with level design in REDkit), I was able to send a prototype out to CD Projekt (around 90% of what you see in this early video is still in the level).

As I changed the level, I also changed the backstory. I wanted to tell a fictional short story set many years before the saga or the games. Two things were certain right from the beginning: we will see how Geralt met Triss and, most importantly, Dandelion should be the companion of Geralt. For me, personally, Geralt as a lone wolf was always the same as the fact that Geralt should always be neutral: He always tries, he tries really hard, but he almost never succeeds. And who could be a better companion than the witty Dandelion? It was quite a struggle to implement a real companion into REDkit, who could take part in dialogues and who would react to what the player does. But after we (my girlfriend did most of the work in this area) researched in the files a little bit, it was quite easy (there is a tutorial out there explaining how to do it now). Work went very smoothly as I learned that music helps me a lot in being creative. When I was doing Level Design, I was listening to the soundtrack of Conan the Barbarian or of course the ones from both Witcher games. And one special tip for anyone who is experiencing a lack of motivation or is out of good ideas: some good ol’ Scarface “Push it to the Limit” always does the trick!

As work continued, I learned how to do quest design myself, since my girlfriend did not have a lot of time. So after a while, I also implemented my quest ideas on my own. As the new year started, I got a response by CD Projekt RED that they would not need a level designer right now, but only some days afterwards, I was asked what I thought about being a quest designer. At that time I already decided to go and study game design, so when I said that I only had three months time during the summer and then had to go back to Germany, I did not think that they would agree. To my surprise, they did. In May, REDkit finally went into the open beta and I released a demo and a trailer for Lykaon.



It was unfinished, was missing most of its content, but to my surprise, people actually liked it. I got a lot of criticism and comments I could use to improve the mod. I also won the REDkit Beta Competition and got a bag of goodies, but most importantly, a giant witcher sword I hold very dear. It will have an honourable place on the wall in my new apartment (detachable of course, in case I feel like swinging it around, which I do a lot).

In July, thanks to the support of Banan, I got into the plane to Poland to start my new job as a Junior Quest Designer at CD Projekt RED.

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The Wild Hunt

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As a fan, it is kind of weird to work at the company that made your favourite game at first. I always thought about it, but it was a surreal feeling to sit down at the desk and start working on the next Witcher game. Thanks to the guys at CD Projekt RED, especially Danisz, another young quest designer, I felt at home very quickly and learned how to use the editor and my REDkit experience helped a whole lot.

On my very first day, I sat down on a chair, got a controller, and got to play The Witcher 3 for the first time. Although I already talked with some people at CD Projekt RED because of REDkit before, I only knew as much as anyone outside the company of the game. And it blew my mind. Secretly, since I am kind of narcissistic sometimes, I always intended to make Lykaon look even more impressive than the original Witcher 2 and I was always giggling like a little girl when people told me exactly that. But The Witcher 3 was an entirely different beast. If this was not the Next Gen we heard so much about, then nothing was.

My usual day at CD Projekt RED looked like this: I entered the company in the morning, bought something to drink, went upstairs to The Witcher development team and there I started the PC and worked for a little bit. Soon after, always at the same time, Peter, a Senior Level Designer, yelled a most beautiful sound: Slimak! Slimak, Polish for “snail”, was one of the many people who came to the company to deliver food. After simultaneously eating breakfast and working for around half an hour, the quest guys would get called to the so-called “Stand Up”, where we would talk about what we did yesterday and what we intend to do today, we’d talk about problems and news. After that, with a break for lunch, I would work on quests until the evening (and sometimes beyond that). It was a very nice environment to work. To me, everyone (and I mean everyone) seemed like they are working on the best game ever and you felt that. Whether it was story guys, concept artists or AI programmers, they were all motivated to make The Witcher 3 the masterpiece of the trilogy.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was that there was a flat hierarchy. You could talk to anyone, give constructive criticism and sometimes I got ideas or comments for quests from people who had absolutely nothing to do with quest design. Since I already wrote around 100 quests for Lykaon, I really started to love how it was done at CD Projekt RED. Once you wrote a new quest idea, it got reviewed. If the quest did good, you would get comments on how to improve it, questions about the story and structure and eventually approval to implement the quest. After implementation, the quest would be reviewed again. If it did good, the story writers would take over, shape the quest’s story and write the dialogues. After they had written the story, the quest would be… you know the drill. And even after that, many different people play and review the quest, so that in the end, only the best of the best end up in The Witcher 3.

I tried to stick to the simple philosophy I loved about The Witcher games: No matter how small a quest is, it always has to be something extraordinary, something believable, something that players would remember and sometimes something emotional.

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The Future

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After my time at CD Projekt RED, I am certain that Game Design is the thing I want to do for a living. I met great people and friends, and I learned a lot.

Right after returning to Lykaon, I noticed that I would have to change a lot. Some stories or dialogues suddenly seemed unbelievable, some quests were just not fun and the graphics weren’t that amazing any more.

I revised most of the existing foliage or even created some new models and textures. There’s also a completely new lighting, weather effects and most noticeable, Lykaon is twice as big now, while the performance is much better. There’s a completely new area players can explore in the finished version. Since the level design is almost finished now, I will start finalizing the story, which started as “werewolves are awesome” and is now much more complicated and, at least I hope so, much more captivating. I hope that I will be able to surprise some players. I also got help from some very talented people now. One helps me with implementing the music, and I found great artists, whose works are simply amazing. Before me still lies the biggest challenge: Full voice acting. It is going to be a lot of work and I am still searching the most important person, Geralt, but I hope that I will be able to find someone.

Since a picture says more than words, I prepared some new ones so you can see the state of Lykaon as it is right now.



http://cdpred.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/BLOGareamini.jpg

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Thanks for reading!

Philipp “Benzenzimmern” Weber

Quelle: Lykaon – A quest completed | CD Projekt RED's Official Blog
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[LordCrash]

Seeing Red: The story of CD Projekt

How the studio behind The Witcher went from a Polish car park to open world glory.

By Robert Purchese Published Thursday, 7 November 2013



I travel to Warsaw in Poland to visit CD Projekt, celebrated house of The Witcher, and there's one thing I discover that I can't stop telling people: The Witcher 2 was very nearly canned, and the entire company almost collapsed.

It was 2009, two years after the first The Witcher, and the global economic crisis had CD Projekt on its knees. The money from the first game had been burned trying to clear up the mess of The Witcher: White Wolf, the console game that never was. Elsewhere, the publishing-distribution business CD Projekt was founded on had become a black hole, sucking money away, and GOG was barely big enough to sustain itself.

It was the scariest moment in Marcin Iwinski's 20-year career. "The company is my baby, is my first baby," he tells me. "Then there is my daughter and then my son. And I realised that I might lose it."

Rather than hit the ground running after The Witcher, CD Projekt was about to fall flat on its face. "It was looking pretty grim back then. It was very edgy. We had probably a year where we were scraping money to make the payroll at the end of the month."

It's not what I expected, and not what I see before me now: Iwinski in a plush, dimpled leather chair in the middle of a trendy office, all exposed brickwork and glass walls and ventilation shafts, where some 200 people now work. There's a motion capture studio, a dazzlingly bright red toilet, suits of armour, swords, awards and a brand new vegetarian canteen. And all around me, an army is making The Witcher 3, a game so prestigious Microsoft boasted about it during the Xbox One conference at E3.

All this nearly... wasn't? "This was a few months of horror," Iwinski says. "And I don't know what happened, but at a certain point I realised that if this doesn't work I'll just do something else - maybe I'll restart the company. And overnight the stress just went away and I had new power to do things.

"I don't know why this happens, it sounds extremely Buddhist, but there was something to it: as long as I was attached I was paralysed. This is very much the approach we have to things: people can make mistakes, OK, but we have to learn from them and we cannot repeat them."

Iwinski would go on to help CD Projekt through a complicated but lifesaving reverse takeover which listed the company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. And three months later investors were lining up. "It's totally against the logic but that's how it works."

This Polish Rocky of game development had rebounded off the ropes and was punching above its weight again. In only two games and a console port, CD Projekt rose from gutsy nobody into world beating somebody. But once upon a time there was nothing. There was just a boy called Marcin Iwinski living in the Eastern European "jungle", as he calls it, of Poland.

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He loved games - and he still does - but when he was a boy it was almost impossible to buy them. The shadow of Soviet Russia and Socialism loomed large. You couldn't buy those exciting computers Westerners were playing games on, not in Poland, and for most people, travelling beyond East Germany was a fantasy. But not for Marcin Iwinski's father, who produced film documentaries. He could travel, so Marcin Iwinski got a computer, and the Spectrum Sinclair had him at "10 PRINT 'Hello'".

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The computer markets of Poland.

But he hungered for games, and there were no shops that sold them. Fortunately Polish copyright law didn't exist either, so computer markets sprang up in major cities at weekends, where games and computer bits would change hands for money. "It wasn't really legal," he shrugs, but there was no alternative so people turned a blind eye.

When he wrote a broken-English letter to a Greek man, whose address he'd found in the swap section of an imported Your Sinclair machine, he took his first steps towards his future career. He asked for games to be copied onto a blank tape and two weeks later he got them. "And I'm super happy. I arrive at the computer market over the weekend and I was a superstar. I brought new releases no one had before," he says. "I still remember one of the games was Target Renegade. It was an excellent game."

Then, two very important things happened. The first was Iwinski failing to qualify for a computer course he desperately wanted to take in high school, because this landed him in mathematical physics slap bang next to his future business partner of many years, Michal Kicinski, who was selling Atari games at the time. They hit it off immediately, "playing a lot of games, skipping school regularly".

The second very important thing was CD-ROM. "People who were not a part of this don't remember how revolutionary it was. I mean what is Blu-ray?" scoffs Iwinski. "[CD] was 400-something floppy discs on one CD; it was a total game changer."


The CD Projekt mobile, their first car, lasted many years.

They imported games from small wholesalers in America to sell on in Poland - and to play before everyone else - games like Mad Dog McCree and 7th Guest. A business was born. "We went to the Tax Office and we knocked on the doors and said, 'Hey we want to start a company, what do you have to do?'"

The aptly named CD Projekt ("tseh-duh proiy-ekt", roll the r") was formed in spring 1994. Marcin Iwinski was 20 years old. The two young men had $2000 and a computer to their name, and their first office was a room in a friend's flat, rented for free. It was up so many flights of stairs that people would arrive for meetings drenched in sweat: "They were like huh huh huh [panting] - where the hell are you?!"

"Funnily enough," Iwinski adds, "especially in Poland, I was many times asked, 'Oh, so you were a pirate - your roots are from the computer games market?' I say, 'Hey, for starters it wasn't illegal and second, look at a lot of the presidents or the founders or the key shareholders of IT companies in Poland now: who are these guys?' These are the guys learning the ropes at the computer markets as well."

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Not only was there no where else to come from, but those computer markets provided an important foundation for a core set of values that would serve CD Projekt for years to come. As it prepares The Witcher 3, there's a lot of love for CD Projekt - but it's not blind adoration. It's appreciation of how CD Projekt goes about its business. Here's a company championing no DRM while others insist upon it; here's a company gifting additional content while others charge for it; here's a company respecting an audience rather than milking it. And it's all because of how the company grew up.


"We were dressing up at the time because we were super-young and we wanted people to think that we're more serious," says Iwinski, left.

"Our main competition here in Poland was always pirates," says Iwinski. The national stadium in Warsaw - a place rebuilt after the devastation of World War 2, and rebuilt again recently - was home to Eastern Europe's largest flea market, and was Poland's largest exporter of counterfeit goods, game and music. "And," he grins, "you could buy a grenade launcher as well." You could pick up a pirated £15 computer game for £3, roughly 48 hours after release. "Kind of tough competition," he shrugs, not that there was anything he could do to stop it.

But what if he could convince people to buy a legitimate copy instead? He had an idea. "We made the biggest bet back in the day: we signed Baldur's Gate."

He knew it would be popular in Poland because it was a great game and he would localise it, something no one else was doing, so all the people who learned Russian at school rather than English - as it was back then - would be able to understand the game's hefty amount of text.

Best of all, Baldur's Gate being on five CDs meant even pirates charging £3 a CD would flinch.

It cost £30,000 to licence 3000 copies from Interplay, and localisation cost the same again. Then there was marketing, physical production and the nice touch of hiring famed Polish actors to voice some of the game's roles - another way of boosting popularity. "Back in the day it was a lot of money," he winces. "The whole company was relying on it."

Baldur's Gate cost £30 when it came out, which was expensive for Poland - CD Projekt usually charged £15. But inside the box was all the added value a pirate wouldn't provide: a parchment map sealed with wax, a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook, sourced locally, and an audio CD. The cheapest pirates could sell the five-disc game was £15. Iwinski was hoping people prepared to pay that much would be prepared to spend even more for something special.


Look how big those boxes are! That's a van-load of CD Projekt's Baldur's Gate. No wonder Iwinski needed a warehouse. And a van with big speakers...

They were. Three months before release, orders way exceeded expectations. 5000 became 6000 became 7000 became 8000. "There wasn't even one retail chain in Poland handling games at the time, so it was orders from wholesalers, little shops here and there, computer markets. We had to take an external warehouse to handle it, because in our warehouse/office we could fit, tops, 5000 units.
"And on day one we ship 18,000 units." It was a success that opened doors for CD Projekt around the world, and business took off. And it was a lesson well learned in the power of value.

Today, GOG no more tries to prevent online piracy than CD Projekt tried to prevent computer market piracy all those years ago. But GOG adds value to games by doing all the hard work, by finding and remastering games, by offering technical support, by bundling manuals, soundtracks, guides, and by striking a good deal. And there are no strings attached. "Our core value is DRM-free and we will not sacrifice that."

Adds Iwinski: "People have really silly ideas, and pirates are successful because they just do it right. It works, it's freedom, and OK it's free on top of that, but people want to pay for games and Steam has proven that, we have proven that. The real driver of success was listening to what gamers want, what they already do, and offering them this."

Five years after launch, GOG has 2 million visitors each month, and annual turnover has only just stopped doubling. And all that money, and all the money from a successfully relaunched online distribution business, referred to as CD Projekt Blue, gets pumped back into the main event: CD Projekt Red, the game maker.

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"The idea was there from the very beginning," Iwinski says of making games. He tried when he was younger but discovered by the Amiga days that he was, he laughs, a "shit of a programmer. But we really wanted to have our own game."

Baldur's Gate had gone part of the way there, and at the same time the "super adventure" of distribution-publishing in Poland was wearing thin. The excitement of blazing a trail had ebbed away as hassle crept in from newly created shop chains on one side and publishers on the other. Iwinski and Kicinski looked in the mirror and asked themselves, "Hey, do we really want to be just a simple box shifter?"

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That's the original CD Projekt Red team. Can you spot Adam Badowski in the top left? He's standing next to Geralt. Ha!

The nudge they needed was provided by famed games people Feargus Urquhart (Obsidian) and Dave Perry (Gaikai), who were at Interplay at the time. They wanted CD Projekt to take Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance to Poland, but it was a console game and Poland only did PC games. It wouldn't sell. "Well, why don't you convert it?" Interplay asked. "Yeah!" our Polish entrepreneurs responded. "We'll try."

The person they thought could handle the project was Sebastian Zielinski, Poland's star developer at the time, a man responsible for a Wolfenstein rip-off called Mortyr 2093-1944 - a game slammed everywhere but Poland, where it was very popular indeed. He led the project but it was the second employee after him, a movie storyboard artist called Adam Badowski, who was the real catch. He is the studio head of CD Projekt Red today.

A PlayStation 2 dev kit was smuggled from Interplay's offices in London over to Poland, and work on Dark Alliance PC begun. But then the phone rang, and it was Interplay and the Dark Alliance deal falling apart. "But we already caught the virus," says Iwinski. They wanted to make a game, but what could they make?

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There is no bigger fantasy licence in Poland, a country steeped in medieval history, than Wiedzmin ("veedj-min"), or The Witcher as we know it (actually an English translation created by CD Projekt). The books are written by Andrzej Sapkowski, a man with little love for video games, but with a fantasy so wonderful he's regarded as a Polish Tolkien. "That's what he means to us," stresses Iwinski. "He's just in a different league than anybody else. If you say 'Sapkowski' it means top class - there is nobody else."

Such is his prestige that Iwinski hadn't even considered it likely he'd be able to sign the rights. But there they were, ripe for ripping from hands of a Polish mobile gaming company that wasn't doing anything with them. "We got in touch with [Sapkowski] and we ask: 'We heard that the game is really not happening and maybe we could talk?'" Sapkowski, a writer not a businessman, didn't seem to know what was going on. "You find out," was his answer. So they did. They told him the mobile game wasn't being made. "OK, make me an offer," he replied. So they did. "It wasn't a huge amount of money," recalls Iwinski, but it worked. "We got the rights and that's when the real difficulty started, because we had to make a game and we had no real idea of how to do it."

First things first: form a studio. Sebastian Zielinski's team became CD Projekt Red, and were based 120 km south of CD Projekt in Warsaw in a town called Lódz ("Wooj"). Quite the commute, and the reason Iwinski and Kicinski couldn't visit very often. But under the tutelage of this Polish expert, CD Projekt Red created a demo in a year. "It was a piece of crap," chuckles Adam Badowski. "We tried to convince Marcin and Michal not to go on the first business trip with the demo, but they decided..."

... to show it to a dozen publishers all around Europe on the most expensive and powerful laptop money could buy. "After two weeks of meetings we get two emails saying, in a very nice British way, 'It's not so good.' So pretty much: 'Boys, go home.' We were shattered. We were like, 'Oh my god we suck.'"

Sebastien Zielinski lasted about as long as that first Witcher demo. "One day I arrived with one of the guys at our Lódz office - we told [Zielinski] before that we will be moving it to Warsaw and closing it down, and he said 'OK I'm not interested'. We offered every single person a job and all of them took it. We took a huge taxi, we loaded the equipment and on the same day we moved it to Warsaw. And we put them in the warehouse." They've remained there to this day.

Michal Kicinski took over development and BioWare helped out with an engine (Aurora). Iwinski was friendly with Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, and BioWare even went a step further, offering E3 stand space to the game if the demo was any good. It was, so BioWare did - and The Witcher couldn't help but be noticed in the stampede for Jade Empire in 2004. In a twist of fate, that was also when BioWare announced Dragon Age, a series The Witcher will go head to head with next year - only this time as an equal.


That's Adam Badowski at his messy desk after relocating to Warsaw.

The Witcher 1, the game CD Projekt Red initially predicted would take 15 people to make, would end up taking 100 people five years to make, and cost an unprecedented 20 million Polish Zloty (the equivalent of around £12-£16 million in today's money, Iwinski believes). More importantly, adds Iwinski, "That was all the money we had. Plus some."

Poland had no game developers to fill the team with, and CD Projekt Red had no international pull to entice people from overseas, so bankers and doctors and people from all walks of life with a passion for games and trying something new were converted instead. But like CD Projekt Red, they didn't know what they were doing - they were learning on the job.

Ideas spiralled out of control as the team tried to build something as complicated as Baldur's Gate and as epic as The Witcher fantasy. The game was cut two or three times but still they ended up with 100 hours of gameplay. "This just shows that probably, if we wouldn't have cut it..." 'What,' I interject, 'it would be bigger than Skyrim?' "No," he laughs, getting the reference, "probably more likely we would have been out of business."

Atari emerged as the publisher with the best deal (though Codemasters and Koch were in the running) and CD Projekt Red dug deep. "For half-a-year we were working 12-hour days every day, all weekends, all the time," remembers lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk. And Adam Badowski was sleeping under his desk. "Really! For three days, in the same clothes. Stinky times," he chuckles.

"The game was a total mess," continues Mielniczuk, "and just at the very end it all came together. Actually it was amazing, because nobody was expecting that we will actually create a game from all the pieces scattered around." But from a standing start, from nothing, CD Projekt Red had. And in the autumn of 2007, The Witcher 1 was released.

"If you're a fan of compellingly realised environments, commendably realistic social interactions and full-blooded fantasy storytelling then pull up a pew," we wrote at the time, "since The Witcher has a lot to offer."

It wasn't a masterpiece but it showed potential, and it was received warmly enough both critically and commercially (it's sold more than 2 million copies today) to warrant a sequel. And this time CD Projekt Red could hit the ground running.

After the Enhanced Edition of Witcher 1 (offered as a free patch for existing owners, as with The Witcher 2), work started on two projects at once: The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3.

The Witcher 3 was a background project to build an engine that would work with consoles, because BioWare's Aurora engine didn't, and consoles were a place CD Projekt Red always wanted to be. The plan was to move onto it after The Witcher 2.

The Witcher 2 would be built on Aurora again for PC, but it only got as far as a tech demo which, in those early days, Adam Badowski thinks "looked amazing". Brilliantly, this leaked, and can be watched in this article (below). "We had a lot of leaks!" Badowski laughs.
The Witcher 2 on Aurora only got that far because at that point along came the big bad Witcher: White Wolf, which huffed and puffed and blew those plans down.

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White Wolf was to be a console conversion of The Witcher 1, and it was Atari's idea. Iwinski saw the logic in getting the brand established on console ahead of future games, so after initial reluctance he agreed - a mistake, but how could he know that then?
CD Projekt Red didn't have the internal capacity to handle White Wolf development as well, so an impressive pitch won French studio Widescreen Games the job. CD Projekt Red wanted control, so Atari paid CD Projekt Red to get the game made.

After five months there were problems, and CD Projekt donated a dozen developers to the French studio to help out. Then more problems, and Iwinski began to suspect Widescreen's heart wasn't in it beyond being paid for reaching milestones. Adam Badowski had to fly down to help the studio crunch to produce an important vertical slice of the game for an Atari conference in Lyon, and it went down a storm, to cheers of "bravo!". But two weeks later there was another problem, and Widescreen wanted to push White Wolf back four to five months.

Enough.

"I'm not mentioning all the tensions, all the hours of stupid discussions on the phone, 'you are guilty', etc. The thing is, what we realised was they had no idea how to make it." More money was being spent on Widescreen Games each month than on CD Projekt Red in Poland. It was time for crisis talks, and to assess how bad the situation was.

"After five days of digging we sat down in a café in Lyon in the evening, we were probably five or six people, and said, 'What do you think?'" The answers grew increasingly worrying, one suggesting Widescreen would need another 30 people and an extra year of development to finish White Wolf. Then someone said. "Hey, let's cancel it and make another game! It will be easier than working with them." Eyes lit up. "The day after we told Atari we have to pull the plug."

Atari wasn't happy, and it was none other than big Phil Harrison (once of Sony, now of Microsoft, with an Atari interlude) who flew to France to hear both sides of the story. Iwinski remembers the meeting. "We were sitting on one side of the table, Widescreen Games on the other, and Phil," he says with emphasis, "in the middle. And we started fighting - they started blaming us and we started blaming them."

A stern Harrison took Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski aside, into a separate room. "And he said a very British thing like," and he imitates the accent, "'We are in real shit here.' We were like, 'Yes Phil, we're sorry, we screwed up.'

"I was ashamed at the time. We burned a lot of money - our money - and then the next time I was in touch with Phil he told me that he is very very sorry but they have to send us a Bridge notice and we'll have to repay them the money that they gave us."

Iwinski flew to New York to negotiate and ended up signing over North American rights to The Witcher 2 years before the game had been made. "This would be repaying the debts for White Wolf," Atari had declared.

In May 2009, CD Projekt Red confirmed that work on The Witcher: White Wolf had been suspended. In reality, everything had been thrown in the bin - nothing was reused. "We wasted so much time," laments Iwinski today.

***
​

On the back foot, CD Projekt Red scrapped The Witcher 3 and used the engine it had created to make The Witcher 2 instead. Only, the engine wasn't finished, so the first part of The Witcher 2 development was done blind, with nothing to prototype or test on. And then the global economic crisis brought CD Projekt to its knees, the scariest moment of Marcin Iwinski's career.

What's so impressive about this period of intense pressure is that Iwinski refused, even then, to take the easy way out and sign a quick deal with a publisher, jeopardising the thing he cherishes most: creative control. The Witcher 1 took six months to sign to Atari because the contract wasn't right. Other new studios would have buckled, but Iwinski kept his head. Today, The Witcher 3 is funded entirely by CD Projekt. "We self-publish, practically."

The Witcher 2 took half the time to build that its predecessor did, despite being every bit as ambitious and with an engine to build as well. An entire location called The Valley of the Flowers had to be cut, even though it had "an amazing story plot". "It's not a girly place," Adam Badowski quickly adds, "it's a land of elves." And elves in The Witcher universe are as dirty and mean as everything else. The game's third act was also cut short because the team ran out of time.

But what was eventually released in May 2011 marked a huge improvement over The Witcher 1, and The Witcher 2 propelled CD Projekt Red into the big league. "There's simply no competitor that can touch it in terms of poise, characterisation and storytelling," we wrote at the time, "or the way in which it treats you not as a player - someone to be pandered to and pleased - but as an adult, free to make your own mistakes and suffer a plot in which not everyone gets what they deserve."

Better yet, it was achieved on the studio's own Red Engine, which would finally realise the company's console ambitions a year later on Xbox 360 (the studio didn't have the know-how to tackle PS3 or the capacity to do both), with the Enhanced Edition of Witcher 2 - a technical triumph, given what the studio managed to cram in.

***
​

Spring 2012, and soon another difficult decision loomed: "What are we going to do with next-gen?" And that was a while before anyone really knew what the consoles would be.

"But pretty fast we came to the conclusion that we want to make an open world game, a huge game, and what people expect from a game released by CD Projekt Red is an RPG with a great story that will also blow them away in terms of quality and graphics. And old-gen just didn't fit into that," says Iwinski. "We'd have to sacrifice so much and make a different game - probably more Witcher 2.5. It was a no go.

http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/ar...l5qIjciNnk5.png/EG11/resize/300x-1/quality/70
A key piece of The Witcher 3 artwork. I know who that hooded person is.

"Back in the day it was a very brave decision, because a lot of the studios would be like, 'No!' Looking at it from a pure commercial view, it would be best to release it on all five platforms, but we wouldn't be able to make that game. It would be a different game; it wouldn't be this game."

So CD Projekt Red aimed high again, taking on multi-platform development for the first time and attempting an open world of a size that shouldn't be underestimated. The chunks of the game we've seen so far, however promising, are small portions meant to represent the whole - there's still loads to do. How much? "I dunno!" blurts Badowski. "It's a simple question, a very general one, at the same time we have the production docs, everything, but the game isn't finished 90 per cent, it's not finished at all. But the whole storyline is set and implemented. Hard to say."

Around me the team is pushing towards "a very important deadline", a new section of gameplay, which will be shown to press first and then to the public. The plan is this year, although that's not in any way nailed down.

When will The Witcher 3 be released? It's a big secret, although I wouldn't expect it before the second half of 2014.

Whenever it comes, The Witcher 3 will mark the end of an era for CD Projekt, the end of more than a decade of using Andrzej Sapkowksi's world (what comes next, besides Cyberpunk, no one seems to know). It should cement CD Projekt Red as a big boy of game development, and The Witcher years will be remembered as a climb to greatness and a stepping into the limelight. But that light can be as unflinchingly harsh as it can dazzlingly bright, and no longer an underdog, CD Projekt Red will begin to feel the pressure of expectation.

But those days can wait, because next year Marcin Iwinski will be 40 years old, and it will be 20 years since his CD Projekt adventure began. He dared in those car parks all those years ago, and today he has achieved so much. He sits before me in a blue hoodie and jeans, a relaxed smile on his stubbly face, surrounded by a company not only continuing to set an example for Poland, but now the wider world.

http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/ar...MG_2610.JPG.jpg/EG11/resize/300x-1/quality/70
Marcin Iwinski as I see him today.

"I feel very proud," he reflects. "The biggest success is that we've found and partnered with the most talented people. I want to say we've formed a family.

"Of course there are hard moments, as there are everywhere, but it's a very unique atmosphere. As long as it's here and we have the passion for games, and people are crazy talking about what they play, what they've seen or what comic they read, and not just pushing to deliver numbers on a daily basis, this will make sense.

"It's all about games and gaming."


Quelle: Seeing Red: The story of CD Projekt • Articles • PC • Eurogamer.net

 

[LordCrash]

Marcin Iwinski: «Easy to play — Hard to master» is what we are after in Witcher 3»

11. November 2013, by Ivan Kozlovskih

I’m fairly convinced that Witcher 3 is going to be amazing. During the last half of the year we’ve talked to developers three times, discussing not only the new Witcher, but also another ambitious RPG that’s been developed in CD Project RED for two years already. We’ve seen Witcher 3 with our own eyes, and it DID have all the promised fixes, improvements and the open world. No doubt — CDP does everything the right way, and our latest talk with CEO Marcin Iwinski is just another proof of that.



So, first of all, when I’ve entered the demo and saw the older Geralt, I immediately drew comparisons between your game and Metal Gear Solid series… Have you played it, by the way?

Yes, I’ve played some of the Metal Gear Solid back in the days. But I don’t think we’re looking at it this way. It’s more a development of the Geralt himself and he’s obviously getting older as the story progresses. The Witcher 3 is going to be a closure of the trilogy so we wanted to show more experienced, more mature and seasoned Geralt. Comparing to human age he’s pretty old, but we also wanted to show the burden that he’s carrying and I think it’s very visible from him.

As for Metal Gear Solid and other games — definitely there’s a lot of inspiration and I think that a lot of it is subconscious, because people at the team are gamers, they have different tastes, they play a lot of different games, and I think subliminally they just put it into concept and then it influences their creation.

There were news about you opening a new studio in Krakow. So how is it doing? How big is it?

The studio is over twenty people and it consists of experienced RPG creators who made games like Two Worlds and Two Worlds II. At a certain point we were contacted by this group of people from Krakow, some of them working at Reality Pump, some of them have already left the company, and they said «Guys, we’d love to join the studio, we love what you’re doing, but you know, we’d really like to work in Krakow». We did suggest to move their studio to Warsaw, but it seems that it was important for them to set up in Krakow.

What is really great is that the team is really experienced. It's not so common, because there are not so many RPG oriented studios in the world and we’re lucky to have one more group, and a great one, in our country, so we didn’t think too long before opening the studio. Right now one of our producers is spending a lot of time there: they call us on a regular basis, set up streams of what they are doing and we strongly believe they’ll deliver some kick-ass stuff.



So it was more about the people, who would like to join you, and wasn't a necessary business decision?

No, no. It wasn’t a business decision like «Hey, we should expand», nothing like that. What we’re doing is very much about passion. When you come for a job interview, we will expect a candidate to set us on fire, in a way. Whether it’s marketing or finance or game development, we want to see your passion, and then we’ll obviously ask what games are you playing, why you like them and things like that. And if it’s a development position we’ll be checking how deep is your love for games. Our job is about employing the most passionate people to create great games, and people from Krakow without a doubt have a lot of passion. I think it’s a good match.

To tell the truth when I first read the news about the opening of a new studio, my first thought was that you didn’t have enough resources to finish Cyberpunk or The Witcher 3 because both are obviously massive projects. Still, maybe you can name a feature or two that grew out of control and became more complex than you’ve originally intended?

It’s funny because only here in Russia I have a lot of questions like «What features you didn’t include in the game?» A lot of people are asking about it and I can’t give them an answer because producing the game is a balancing act, and it’s by far not about features, but more about the final feel of the game. «There’s this feature, there’s that feature» — I think gamers don’t really care, they basically just want to enjoy the game. Details? I don’t know… We wanted to have faster boats and we didn’t make it, but it wouldn’t make much difference, I don’t think so.

Ultimately, there’s simply a huge open world nobody has ever done before. The game is more than 35x bigger than the world of The Witcher 2 and it's populated, the world is living and breathing. The last thing we want to do is to bore the gamer. When you have such a huge space to travel, you really expect something things to happen around you. Maybe it’s not like the real world, but come on, it’s a computer game and you are here to have fun, not to be bored. So we’re definitely expanding our resources to work on the game: as it’s an open world, we generally need to create more assets. But ultimately we could’ve finished The Witcher 3 without opening the Krakow studio. They’re helping in, but they’re working on their own thing first of all. I won’t say it was lack of resources that convinced us to set up Krakow studio, but more importantly their passion for RPG games and their invaluable knowledge of how to make them.

You always emphasize the size of The Witcher 3 and I guess the Cyberpunk should be about the same scale. In the future you’ll be striving to make bigger and more mature games?

There’s always question «What is more?» Like, if we make a game five times longer than usual will gamers enjoy it? I think it’s all about the story, the characters, their development and how you go through it, so definitely we’ll be experimenting with new ways to tell a story. Cyberpunk definitely will be offering a lot of new ideas. But we’re working on that really hard already in The Witcher 3. The game engages the player much better. We really wanted to improve on what we did in The Witcher 2 in terms of the initial immersion for a gamer, though. In Russia, in Poland, in Germany gamers are different, we are more hardcore. If it’s a hard game it only motivates us. But if you look at Western Europe and especially US, which is a very important market, if a gamer feels that the immersion is steep, the game is hard and you die a lot at the beginning, people will most likely drop the game and say that it wasn't good enough. We don’t want that to happen. «Easy to play — Hard to master» is what we are after. And I draw a lot of comparisons between games and TV series — for example Game of Thrones…

​

I’ve heard a lot about it...

Good! Definitely watch it. I strongly recommend it, because it's based on books from George Martin.

So, I drew some comparisons between themes, and the maturity of the world, complexity of the story. I remember when I was reading this book and thought «Damn, it would be really hard to make a good TV show out of it». Then the TV show came out and I was stunned: from the very beginning they've played it right. It was different from the book but at the same time the medium is captured extremely well. The same is with the game, its ideas — you sit down for a moment, you start playing and then can't put it down hours straight, like with a book. We would like our games to become something like this.

Now let’s say you stopped playing a game, and you are busy for two weeks and then when you come back to it, you already can't remember what is it exactly you were doing there. And how would TV series deal with something like that? You see this «Previously on Game of Thrones» sequence, for example, and you refresh recent events of the series in your memory and can easily watch it afterwards. In a game, after a long break, you often find yourself in a situation when you don't remember what are you doing in a particular location or who are these characters in front of you. I've dropped out of Skyrim after playing it for 20 hours or something, and then I had a very hard time coming back. These are quite simple things and in theory are very intuitive. In practice they rarely are, though. That's why I think it's important not to break the immersion. We’re all about making a game you can play the way you like it while not letting the narrative lose the pace.

So when both games, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, are done, are you going to focus on a next big RPG or maybe something different?

I can tell you one thing for sure: we’ll be doing story-driven mature RPG and this is what we think we’re pretty good at. It’s really very early to say and we’ll see when the time comes, but right now we really want to focus fully on The Witcher 3 and take all of our skills to a next level, so that we can really deliver a multiplatform story-driven RPG in an open world. That’s the main goal. After that we’ll probably set a new goal that is even higher to achieve!

​

When you work with something for a long time you probably learn all its strengths and weaknesses. You’ve been working with big RPG titles for a while now. What are the common troubles with modern RPG?

Okay, it’s very simple: it’s closing the project! Closing it with a high quality bar and high playability value for a gamer at the same time. There is always a possibility that we will close the project and then some things will not work. In Eastern Europe that is a big problem with a lot of games, to be honest. They’re unfinished, buggy or sometimes not working at all. All the elements must be perfected and at the same time you should finish it on time without exceeding the budget, and this is some hardcore shit. I remember there was some research from NASA in terms of difficulty of different industries. So the first and most difficult one was what NASA is doing: sending people to the Moon or Mars. The second place belongs to video games.

The problem is that all of the elements are constantly moving: the technology is changing, there are new platforms — Mac, mobile, etc. They’re connected and on top of that you’re making a non-linear game where all the elements have already moved again. So the question when you're closing a project is usually «Where to stop?» These are the things gamers usually don’t think about. And they’re right, they’re paying their hard-earned money to have fun. If it’s so hard to properly finish the game, then you shouldn’t sell it in the first place.

So we’re always focused on finishing the game, polishing it to the highest possible level and then supporting it after release. You have to do it all the time, especially on PC, where there are a lot of issues with compatibility and things like that. We really believe that we should support the game heavily, you know, release enhanced editions, updates, free small DLC, etc.

​

Do you think that games heavily relying on realism have a future? Not combat simulation games like ArmA but very complex games that would, for example, simulate a life in a metropolis where you could enter every building and talk to every citizen? Would it make sense to try to recreate our life with such precision in a computer game?

Yeah, this question is always opened, isn't it. If it’s boring simulator — I would totally not be interested. There has to be something more to it. A lot of people play games to relax, so the main question should be whether it's relaxing or entertaining you?

And again, our profession is to tell great stories. Whether I’m watching TV or reading books I generally want to have a bit of fun with that or I want the medium to make me think about certain things. Maybe something important that you don't think about every day in your usual life. If it’s a part of the game — it’s cool. If it’s just a simple simulator you have to ask yourself what is the goal? Of course, there are games like SimCity, for example, where there is a kind of economic model and management system and there’s always a certain goal. That works well. Everything could work as long there’s a certain group of gamers that finds it cool. As for us — we’re all about story.


Quelle: Marcin Iwinski: «Easy to play — Hard to master» is what we are after in Witcher 3» // Interviews in English — GameStar.ru

 

[LordCrash]

The Witcher 3: What is a next-gen RPG?
That and loads, loads more.

By Robert Purchese Published Thursday, 28 November 2013

I flew to Poland to visit CD Projekt Red, home of The Witcher, recently. I've told the studio's story but that wasn't all I found out. I interviewed at least half-a-dozen people, all from different areas of The Witcher 3 team, about the new game they are making. Here's a rather large dump of all the stuff I found out.

I've tried to clump things together under headings to make finding the information that much easier.

A new generation of RPGs



The Witcher 3 will only be released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One - next-gen hardware. It won't be constrained by needing to work on PS3 and Xbox 360. That, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski told me, would result in The Witcher 2.5. "It would be a different game," he said. "It wouldn't be this game." So what makes The Witcher 3 a next-gen RPG?

"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," writer Jakub Szamalek told me.

"This is really cool for us because the Witcher, from the books, is not a very talkative guy, and there's a lot that he does by frowning, or the face or by just turning away and so on. And we couldn't use that very much in The Witcher 1, which had a rudimentary gesture and mimic system; and The Witcher 2 was an improvement from there but it still didn't allow us much freedom in that respect; whereas The Witcher 3 will have a lot of these new tools."

The result should be the ability to "elicit a wider array of emotions" from players than in previous games, he said.

"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."

The Witcher 3 will look better than previous instalments, too, of course.

"It didn't change that much in terms of poly-count or size of texture," lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk told me - "it's like 30 per cent bigger than The Witcher 2, but it's nothing actually. Already there were in The Witcher 2 so many polygons on the character that you couldn't see the edges, so nobody cares about the polygons.

"The biggest change from the technical aspect of those characters, and that also impacted how we create them, is that there's a lot of things moving on the characters right now. We've got the clothing system working properly. There were some first-approaches in The Witcher 2 but it wasn't exactly successful... So the clothing, all the dangling [things] - we try to move as many things on the character as possible."

"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."

This ties in to one of the next-gen buzzphrases: physics-based rendering.

"It's not about being physically correct," explained lead engine programmer Balázs Török, "that's something that is a misconception. People tend to think 'OK, this is how, physically, it would work'. It's not about that, it's about making it more consistent.

"We have a full day-night cycle, as we had in The Witcher 2, and in The Witcher 1, and with this it's very important that the artists don't have to make different assets for night or even check the assets in different conditions. They just make one asset and it should behave properly in all lighting conditions and in all weather conditions, because we have a new weather system which is pretty cool."

The importance of time-saving tools when building huge open-world games like The Witcher 3 cannot be understated. Jonas Mattsson told me about a forest-making tool that factors angle of terrain and likely rainfall location and then sprouts a forest. "You would get this natural-looking forest within seconds based upon the values of how rain would fall etc," he said.

Lighting, too, will react to the physical properties of an object, reflecting more realistically. All an artist need do is to pick a material and create the object - the engine computes the rest. "It's just another level of realism," said Pawel Mielniczuk. There's even next-gen fur.
"Physics-based rendering is certainly something that's making the game look much much better," concluded Jonas Mattsson. "We want to have the quality of The Witcher 2 but applied to a large scale. And it's a huge challenge."

More AI characters can be spawned now and they will move and behave more believably. Balázs Török was impressed by the big and believable crowds in Hitman: Absolution. "You didn't see puppets just standing there," he said. "More games will do things like this."
It all adds up to better immersion in a world sculpted by you. "RPG games are very similar to very good movies with good storylines which you remember after you exit from the cinema," said game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, "but with this difference: you're deciding what happens, and you are these characters and you feel what this character feels.

"I hope that's where all the next-gen RPGs will go, and give us these unique emotions we can achieve only playing the RPG games."

The new consoles



"On the PS4 it's very good to have the fast memory," said Balázs Török, "everyone is really happy about that - but the problem is the game has to function on everything.

"No we are not holding it back," he added, "it's just we are not at the stage right now to go in and optimise on each platform specifically. We want to make the game and the whole engine run on everything, with all the features and bells and whistles, and then just optimise, optimise, optimise.

"I don't see a major power difference. The memory is very different but I already said that before. Pure computation power, if you just measure that, there's no major difference."

Both new consoles are like PCs anyway, he added. It won't be until teams really delve into low-level optimisations that the true grunt of each will come out.

"The Xbox One is pretty easy to understand because not just the hardware is similar to the PC, but everything like the SDK, the API is really similar to what you would find on a PC. On PS4 this is a little bit more complicated, but I personally worked on PS3 before.

"For PS3 it was very important to have a community, to share the information in some ways, but for now it's much easier and everyone will use their PC knowledge and possible previous console knowledge to reach the limit."

Balázs Török did flag up one unusual thing about the Xbox 360 from around 2007/2008, though.

"I saw how Microsoft opened up certain parts that they hid before from developers," he said. "They opened them up, like, 'OK now you can have this back door, and it's risky but you can do this and that...' This is how developers learned a little bit more and more every step. From Microsoft it was a good way to do it to always let the developers do a little bit more."

Does he think Microsoft will do the same with Xbox One?

"I don't know because we are not at the stage where they would open up something new," he answered. "We have what we have right now, and maybe we will have some more low-level access in the future.

"It's not like they would open up new hardware or anything - there's nothing new in there. It's new ways to do something. Both companies are already using all the knowledge they have from previous products to make the API tailored to games ... so I expect that they will do something like, 'OK now you can do this; it's extremely risky - only do this if you know what you're doing! But you can do this.'

"It will happen, eventually, but right now we are preparing for it."

Kinect and Move

"We've got Kinect support but it's too early to speak about it," game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said. "For sure we got some specific features for Xbox One and PS4. I can't spoil much but yes we are thinking about it."

"We had a lot of discussions with platform holders about it," studio head Adam Badowski chimed in. "The feeling is simple: there are games for Move and Kinect, and there are games for standard controllers, and The Witcher [3] is definitely for standard controllers.
"We have some plans [for Kinect] but it's too early to talk about it."

What about the DualShock 4 touchpad? "It's interesting," Badowski answered, "it helps, especially in the UI."

Tomaszkiewicz also confirmed that there will be SmartGlass support in the Xbox One version of The Witcher 3. "Yes," he said, "we are planning some stuff for it, but again it's too early to really say much about it."

4K is also something that's on the table for PC, but there are UI compatibility issues to take into account. "We're trying to organise it," Badowski said.

Sex and maturity



With added realism will come added controversy when games get violent and when games get sexy. The Witcher 2 had nudity and sex scenes, and The Witcher 3 will as well.

"We got the same approach that we got in the second Witcher," said Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. "We don't want to make fakes, we want to show stuff like it is in real life. The most important for us is to achieve the huge immersion of the player in the game. Players who are playing our game are adult players, and they are waiting for the game which is real. If we fake these sex cut-scenes it will break immersion in the game.

"In the second Witcher it wasn't problem," he added, "it was very nice, and I didn't hear any complaints about it. If you compare with the first Witcher, where we've got the sex cards, there was a lot of different opinions."

"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."

The studio's mantra is to make 18-plus games that will cover topics not suitable for younger audiences. "This is something we are very very clear about," he said. The problem is that adult games are treated differently than adult books or films, and as a former novelist he would know.

"So even though we're trying to tell a story for adults, we are sometimes criticised for being too brutal or putting too much eroticism in our games, whereas books or movies that are addressed to the same audience, and go much further than we do, do not get the same sort of criticism. We are looked upon in a slightly different way.

"Gamers do want to treat it seriously," he said, "and do want to have certain difficult topics covered in games, and they don't want games to shy away from difficult issues."

That does not mean parading women around in their underpants, lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk said. "Triss in The Witcher 2: she was sexy. We show her in [sex] scenes but her usual outfit was quite covered - you saw just the head and the fingers.

"The whole shape of the character of course must be quite attractive, but we don't try to show a lot of nudity on the characters. That's why we have all those sex scenes.

"Like in real life," he added. "You see a girl on the street: usually she's not naked, doesn't wear a bikini in the middle of the street. When you invite her to your apartment maybe you will see it, right? So this approach."

A sorceress like Triss must be attractive, incidentally, because that's how they're described in Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher books.

"The look of the female characters, the sorceresses especially, it was kind of forced by the book," he explained, "because in the books it was said that they have the plastic surgeries by their magic. It was said that they were a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old with a hunch and she's really ugly, but they are using magic to make them look like twenty-year-old sex bombs.

"It was said that the sorceresses Geralt is meeting in the books, and they also appear in the game, are quite... they're pictured in the game as twenty-year-old sex bombs - most beautiful women in the world. We can't do it a different way."

A Game of Thrones

Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher books are dark and grim and brutal, and more than a bit similar to the world of A Song of Ice and Fire - better known by the HBO television adaptation A Game of Thrones. This is a happy coincidence. Whereas The Witcher 2 launched into a world only just experiencing A Game of Thrones, The Witcher 3 will launch into a world besotted with it.

"It's encouraging us to go further with what we already did," said writer Jakub Szamalek.

"They're both fantasy universes but they don't use fantasy as an excuse for using certain clichés or doing away with psychology of characters and concentrating on dragons and magic and so on. These are worlds in which people are very believable and realistic, and they have their own aims and goals," he added, "and they can be pretty ruthless."

The Witcher 2 was a largely political story, but The Witcher 3 story will be a personal one. "In The Witcher 3 there will be more about Geralt's relationships with the people close to him, both enemies and friends," explained Szamalek. "We as writers are really excited about that, because there will be certain issues that we really want to cover and make the most of."

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz hailed it as "the best storyline we've got so far". "I'm really proud of it because it closes the story of our previous games, and also it closes the story of the books. On the other hand you can play this game without any knowledge of previous games or books; it will be fun for you and you will understand everything. It's a huge achievement because I was very afraid that it will be hard to make that game."

Quests and hidden consequences



"The consequences in our games are not immediate," said Szamalek, "so when you do something you learn about what happened because of that later on, so that you cannot simply reload and try a different option. We definitely want players to take responsibility and feel responsible for what they do in the game."

I saw this first hand in a demo, when Geralt sided with a faction only to witness an unforeseen and significant twist later on. I'd have picked differently had I known. Will people wanting to pick a very deliberate line through the hazy-grey morals of The Witcher 3 feel this is unfair?

"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."

As difficult as Dark Souls?

Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz loves Dark Souls and Demon's Souls and has finished both a number of times. He likes how "you are stronger because you as the player learn how to control your character and how to play to kill these monsters". You stop thinking about how to do something and feel the fight instead. "And this is a really great thing," he believes.

"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 paid DLC, no multiplayer, maybe an Arena

"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]."

There will be some online features because of the online nature of the platforms the game will be released on, but not multiplayer. "None. At all. We had some rumours about it but that was just a misunderstanding," Badowski said.

How about an Arena mode like The Witcher 2 had? "Arena mode was a kind of an experiment, quite cool. We don't know yet," he shrugged, "and this is true. We have other plans.

"When we are saying 'we don't know' don't get me wrong: we know, it's just that the decision is not made because the market is changing, the situation is changing. The game is set in stone but all other surroundings are fully dynamic."

The Skyrim comparison



All that stuff Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said about Skyrim, about how the quests and story were "generic" - that was a "misunderstanding", he told me.

He wanted to say that he loved Skyrim but it wasn't a game about story. "This is the game about the exploring of the world, about finding the items, upgrading my character." There is a story that's "quite entertaining" but short. "They don't even try to make these characters very memorable ... It was some simple story."

He mentioned it to highlight how CD Projekt Red is doing something different - taking a different tack.

Consider Grand Theft Auto 5, he said. "It's good to compare these two games. GTA is not RPG, but if you took the storyline, which is movie-like in GTA, compare it with the world of Skyrim and the open-world game where you've got a lot of things to do - you've got character development, you can kill the monsters and so on - and add to this choices and consequences: this is what I want to achieve with The Witcher 3. That was my point.

"It wasn't my intention to say that Skyrim was a poor game," he added, "because it's not. It's a great game; it's got different advantages than The Witcher. That's all."


Quelle: The Witcher 3: What is a next-gen RPG? • Articles • Eurogamer.net

 

[LordCrash]

Sehr umfangreiches Witcher Fankit direkt von CDPR:



http://t.co/h1x2nd37BE

 

[Batze]

Eines der wohl ganz ganz wenigen Spiele die so gut wie Blind gekauft werden. Schon alleine wegen des Studios und eben des Supports der letzten Jahre, sowas muss einfach belohnt werden.
Sowas merkt man sich eben.

 

[chbdiablo]

Jemand hat "nein" gewählt

 

[LordCrash]

Jemand hat "nein" gewählt

Der Louis ist eben eher der Dark Souls Typ...

 

[chodo]

Witcher 3 verspricht wirklich, toll zu werden. Ich hoffe nur, dass CD Projekt sich nicht übernommen hat - Bethesdas Spiele wimmeln ja immer nur so vor Bugs, und das obwohl sie auf eine richtige Story verzichten, was bei W3 ja anders sein soll. Da stellt sich die Frage, wie sehr dieser Spagat (zum Release) gelingen wird.

 

[RedDragon20]

Witcher 3 verspricht wirklich, toll zu werden. Ich hoffe nur, dass CD Projekt sich nicht übernommen hat - Bethesdas Spiele wimmeln ja immer nur so vor Bugs, und das obwohl sie auf eine richtige Story verzichten, was bei W3 ja anders sein soll. Da stellt sich die Frage, wie sehr dieser Spagat (zum Release) gelingen wird.

The Elder Scrolls etwa hat zwar immer so seine Bugs, aber die sind meist eher klein. Skyrim war stets wunderbar spielbar.

Wenn die Welt von The Witcher 3 so groß werden soll, frage ich mich allerdings ebenfalls, wie man all die damit einher gehenden Probleme lösen will. Den Hexer als einfachen Botenknaben irgendwo hin schicken ist nicht. Sowas ist legitim, wenn man einen No Name-Charakter spielt, der anfangs nichts auf dem Kasten hat. Und jede Quest von Hand erstellen? Stelle ich mir ungeheuer schwierig vor, bei dem Umfang.

 

[LordCrash]

The Elder Scrolls etwa hat zwar immer so seine Bugs, aber die sind meist eher klein. Skyrim war stets wunderbar spielbar.

Wenn die Welt von The Witcher 3 so groß werden soll, frage ich mich allerdings ebenfalls, wie man all die damit einher gehenden Probleme lösen will. Den Hexer als einfachen Botenknaben irgendwo hin schicken ist nicht. Sowas ist legitim, wenn man einen No Name-Charakter spielt, der anfangs nichts auf dem Kasten hat. Und jede Quest von Hand erstellen? Stelle ich mir ungeheuer schwierig vor, bei dem Umfang.

Schwierig schon, aber nicht unlösbar. Skyrim hatte jetzt auch nicht so viele Quests, wenn man mal die ganzen völlig generischen "Töte Bandit X" und "Töte Riese Y" Quests abzieht. Und viele der anderen Quests in den TES Spielen taugen auch nicht viel und bestehen aus nicht viel mehr als aus zwei bis drei generischen Charakteren, ein paar generischen Gegnern und ein paar Zeilen Text und Dialoge.

Wenn Witcher 3 nur 30% der Quests eines Skyrims hat, die dann aber alle wirklich von Hand designt sind, sodass sie wirklich von Belang sind und Einfluss auf die Spielwelt haben und eben nicht generisch wirken, dann hat CDPR schon einen guten Job gemacht. Ich reite lieber durch einen Wald und treffe lange nichts bis ich dann auf eine richtig gute, lange und mit Herz und Verstand gemachte Quest treffe als dass ich alle 50 Meter auf eine Höhle oder Burg treffe, wo ich dann jeweils 10 generische Gegner plätten muss....

 

[OldShatterhand]

Der Louis ist eben eher der Dark Souls Typ...

Liegt viel mehr daran, dass ich die Vorgänger beide nicht kenne. Somit hab ich auch keinen Grund, mich auf den dritten zu freuen. Kann natürlich sein, dass der ein grandioses Spiel wird, war nicht als Bash gemeint.

 

[LordCrash]

Liegt viel mehr daran, dass ich die Vorgänger beide nicht kenne. Somit hab ich auch keinen Grund, mich auf den dritten zu freuen. Kann natürlich sein, dass der ein grandioses Spiel wird, war nicht als Bash gemeint.

Woran liegts, dass du die Vorgänger noch nicht gespielt hast? Sind ja beide regelmäßig für weniger als 5€ zu haben.

 

[OldShatterhand]

Wenn ich mich dunkel erinnere, lief die Demo damals bei mir mehr schlecht als recht (was aber nicht an meiner Hardware lag), die Ladezeiten waren lang und die Welt sehr linear. Das wurde wohl alles später noch verbessert, eine Enhanced Version kam ja, aber irgendwie hatte ich nicht das Bedürfnis danach. Andere Spiele hatten mehr Priorität. Ob ich das alles nochmal nachhole, weiss ich nicht. Wenn der dritte in Tests besser abschneidet als die Vorgänger, werd ich wohl doch irgendwann nicht drum herum kommen.


PS: So, hab mir nun den ersten für 3.99€ besorgt. Belegt unverschämt viel Platz, aber bei dem Preis wäre es auch wurscht, wenn das Spiel mich enttäuscht^^

 

[LordCrash]

Ja, wie "üblich" bei größeren Rollenspielen gab es zu Release den ein oder anderen Bug und die Optimierung war auch noch nicht perfekt. Mittlerweile sollten aber beide Spiele in der Enhanced Version sehr gut spielbar sein und auch das Problem mit den langen Ladezeiten gehört der Vergangenheit an, zumal heute eh fast jeder PC Spieler über 8GB Ran oder mehr verfügt....

 

[RedDragon20]

Schwierig schon, aber nicht unlösbar. Skyrim hatte jetzt auch nicht so viele Quests, wenn man mal die ganzen völlig generischen "Töte Bandit X" und "Töte Riese Y" Quests abzieht. Und viele der anderen Quests in den TES Spielen taugen auch nicht viel und bestehen aus nicht viel mehr als aus zwei bis drei generischen Charakteren, ein paar generischen Gegnern und ein paar Zeilen Text und Dialoge.

Wenn Witcher 3 nur 30% der Quests eines Skyrims hat, die dann aber alle wirklich von Hand designt sind, sodass sie wirklich von Belang sind und Einfluss auf die Spielwelt haben und eben nicht generisch wirken, dann hat CDPR schon einen guten Job gemacht. Ich reite lieber durch einen Wald und treffe lange nichts bis ich dann auf eine richtig gute, lange und mit Herz und Verstand gemachte Quest treffe als dass ich alle 50 Meter auf eine Höhle oder Burg treffe, wo ich dann jeweils 10 generische Gegner plätten muss....

Schon korrekt, was du da sagst.

 

[Kwengie]

ich weiß jetzt gar nicht, was Ihr an den Quests auszusetzen habt.
Jedenfalls queste ich sehr gerne und nehme auch die unsinnigsten Aufgaben an und wenn es sein muß, töte ich auch zehn mal hintereinander Monster, um nur die Aufgaben erfolgreich abzuschließen.
In Shootern wird ja auch sozusagen meist unrealistisch ohne Hirn geballert und es wird sich nicht aufgeregt.

Persönlich bevorzuge ich ein Rollenspiel mit hunderten von Quests als ein Rollenspiel mit fast gar keinen Quests.
Daher ist es mir egal, wie oft ein "Tötungsquest" auftaucht, aber dieser sollte entsprechend verpackt sein. Im reellen Leben wiederholt sich auch vieles und der Tagesablauf ist im gröbsten auch immer identisch, sogar monoton, wenn man es genau nimmt.

 

[LordCrash]

ich weiß jetzt gar nicht, was Ihr an den Quests auszusetzen habt.
Jedenfalls queste ich sehr gerne und nehme auch die unsinnigsten Aufgaben an und wenn es sein muß, töte ich auch zehn mal hintereinander Monster, um nur die Aufgaben erfolgreich abzuschließen.
In Shootern wird ja auch sozusagen meist unrealistisch ohne Hirn geballert und es wird sich nicht aufgeregt.

Persönlich bevorzuge ich ein Rollenspiel mit hunderten von Quests als ein Rollenspiel mit fast gar keinen Quests.
Daher ist es mir egal, wie oft ein "Tötungsquest" auftaucht, aber dieser sollte entsprechend verpackt sein. Im reellen Leben wiederholt sich auch vieles und der Tagesablauf ist im gröbsten auch immer identisch, sogar monoton, wenn man es genau nimmt.

So sind halt die Geschmäcker verschieden....die von dir beschriebenen Quests langweilen mich persönlich zu Tode.

Ich möchte in einem Spiel eine gute Zeit haben und nicht meinen langweiligen Alltag mit seinen Alltagsaufgaben nachspielen. Oder willst du auch in Spielen den täglichen Abwasch machen und putzen?

 

[Kwengie]

So sind halt die Geschmäcker verschieden....die von dir beschriebenen Quests langweilen mich persönlich zu Tode.

Ich möchte in einem Spiel eine gute Zeit haben und nicht meinen langweiligen Alltag mit seinen Alltagsaufgaben nachspielen. Oder willst du auch in Spielen den täglichen Abwasch machen und putzen?

in Battlefield 3 spiele ich schon fast "Die Sims", wenn ich mitunter an das langsame Aufstehen denke.
Ok, es mag realistisch sein, aber dann kommen solche Dinge der Selbstheilung, unbegrenzte Munition, Disablen (ein Jeep ist schon bei 86% Schrott) usw.

In zum Beispiel Diablo II hat es mich ungemein genervt, daß Du nur sehr wenige Quests hattest und darum wundert es mich, warum dieses Schnetzel-Game überhaupt ein Rollenspiel ist. Genauso gut könnte Battlefield auch ein Rollenspiel sein, da Du in eine andere Rolle schlüpfst.

Ich spiele momentan Tera: Rising und obwohl es Deiner Meinung langweilige Quests sind, habe ich gestern die Zeit vergessen und aus zwei wurden so fünf Stunden. Mich treiben in solchen Spielen das Erledigen dieser Quests an und ein Rollenspiel mit sehr wenigen Quests ist äußerst langweilig. Dieses Spiel soll mich ja auch lange unterhalten und 50,-- oder gar 60,-- € ist verdammt viel Geld.
Skyrim samt den DLCs ist sein Geld wert, wenn ich in diesem Spiel laut Steam ca. 5.000 Stunden verbracht habe.
Da weiß ich nicht mehr, wie meine Anfangsquests lauteten.

Eigentlich ist es auch irrelevant, ob in einem Quest Du die Bewohner schützen mußt, die Wachen aber zum Teil umnieten mußt oder der/ die/ das Quest heißt, töte 10 Wachen oder das Ziel die Eroberung der Burg ist. Töten mußt Du sowieso, dieser Quest ist halt anders verpackt. Und das wiederholt sich eigentlich ständig.

 

[LordCrash]

Für mich ist Diablo auch kein Rollenspiel. Imo definiert sich ein RPG zunächst einmal darüber, dass der Spieler (nachhaltige) Entscheidungen treffen kann/muss und es so selbst in der Hand hat, ob er eine böse oder gute oder neutrale Rolle in der Welt einnimmt. Ein lineares Spiel wie Diablo kann daher imo niemals ein RPG sein, ebenso kein Battlefield. Da ist ein Walking Dead weit mehr RPG als ein Diablo....

100% RPG ist es dann, wenn man zusätzlich auch noch den eigenen Charakter frei wählen kann (RPG = freier Charakter + freie Gesinnung/Entscheidungen). Ein Spiel wie Witcher, bei dem man einen festen Charakter hat, dessen weitere Entwicklung man aber "rollenspielen" kann, würde ich persönlich als Crossover aus RPG und Action-Adventure definieren...