The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is "The Next Step for RPGs"

The Witcher series is rare in the video game world: it’s genuinely mature rather than superficially “adult”, a detailed, violent, politically intricate fantasy that doesn’t let itself down with leaden dialogue, embarrassing voice acting or emotionally overwrought storytelling. It was one of the best games of 2011, and along with Skyrim and Game of Thrones that year, it brought adult fantasy very much back into vogue.

We won’t be seeing The Witcher 3 until 2014, and we won’t see a glimpse of it in action until this year’s E3. But the Tomaszkiewicz brothers – Konrad, the game director, and Meteusz, the lead quest designer – recently spoke to IGN to shed light on the game’s vision. This is the most open-world Witcher game yet; technology has liberated it from artificial boundaries. It’s also the first Witcher game that will launch simultaneously on consoles and PC – and considering the amazing job that CD Projekt did even with the ageing Xbox 360 technology for The Witcher 2, the PS4 and Nextbox versions are a very exciting prospect.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s grand idea is to marry true open-ended role-playing with the confident, subversive storyline and writing that the series excels at. “I think this is the next step for RPGs – the combination of a strong storyline and open-world gameplay,” says Meteusz. “Previously Skyrim has shown that Bethesda are masters – they can create a full-of-life, unique world with a huge amount of events and small story quests, and as I’ve mentioned before in other interviews I admire this game very, very much - the only thing missing was a strong storyline.”

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The grand idea is to marry true open-ended role-playing with confident, subversive writing.

Unlike Skyrim, The Witcher 3 won’t do enemy scaling. It’s an open world more like that of Dark Souls, where if you wander into tempting new areas you’re likely to get your arse handed to you by whatever awful creatures live there. But there’s no artificial gating; you can hop on a horse and ride from the huge Norse-inspired city of  Novigrad to the Slavic No-Man’s Land. In the island archipelago of Skellige, you can swim or take a boat between the islands

The Witcher 2 saw the desultory anti-hero Geralt caught up in a regicide and drawn into a grand political drama. As a character, Geralt has always been uninterested in politics – he’s only ever formed alliances because he’s had to – but as a player, this rich and complex tale of betrayals, age-old vendettas and family honour was one of the most interesting aspects of the game for me.  In The Witcher 3, it’s the story of Geralt himself that will propel the game onwards.

“Geralt has changed his priorities,” says Meteusz. “He has regained his memory, so he remembers that he had a family once, he wants to find his long lost love – Yennifer, the sorceress. He doesn’t care about politics any more – even less than in previous games. There will be moments where Geralt will get involved in [political] things, but this time we have divided the plotlines of The Witcher 3 into a few categories. The first category is the basic main storyline of the character, of Geralt – looking for his Yennifer, amongst much else. This is the plot that is very personal to Geralt, and this is the main driving force for the entire game.

“A second layer of this are the plotlines of each region, so to speak –those plotlines will involve politics, but will have moments where you don’t’ have to get involved if you don’t want to. You will be able to skip some of those plotlines. The third layer is local things – like the stories of different NPCs, side-quests, monster hunting and things like that.”

Hunting monsters is a Witcher’s basic job, and it’s a more evolved part of The Witcher 3 (as the subtitle might suggest). In an open-world setting, you’ll come across terrorised villages and monster tracks, clues that can lead you towards a challenging foe. Tracking and researching creatures before hunting them will be crucial, as fighting them without knowledge of their weaknesses and behaviour will most likely end in death.

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Tracking and researching creatures before hunting them will be crucial.

“We want to get a system that will allow us to show who the Witcher is,” Konrad explains. “He is a monster slayer. He knows the responses of his enemies. Of course you can kill it the normal way, but it will be harder – but if get to know the monster you can uncover its weak spot or discover what special ability will work. If you fight an enemy with regeneration ability, it’s quite hard to kill it in the normal way, but if you hit the organ that is responsible for that ability, it will be much easier to defeat.”

“We thought what we could do to make Geralt and the player feel more like a monster hunter,” expands Meteusz. “We thought that we should incorporate an investigation part in each monster hunt– you have to gather clues about what is the monster that is troubling the village, what it is that’s hunting people around here, what are the habits of this monster, how should I fight it, how should I prepare for this encounter? We have this new mechanic that we call Witcher Senses, which is supporting this - Witcher Senses is an ability, a skill that you can use during gameplay, that helps you find different clues and track monsters. And this is something we are putting a big emphasis on in The Witcher 3.”

It sounds a bit like Tomb Raider’s Survival Instincts – although it will doubtless have different applications in the Witcher world than it did on Lara’s island. Hunting is becoming an increasingly common feature in games with a survivalist element, Far Cry 3 among them, but Konrad expects that it will be more developed in Wild Hunt. “Here it’s more developed I think because this is the main thing that Witchers do – kill monsters and take money,” he says. “This whole monster hunting event will be like a side quest – you don’t do it in the main storyline, and that’s why it will be challenging for the player. You need to think and to explore.”

Improvements to the idiosyncratic combat system have also been informed by this emphasis on hunting. The Witcher’s combat has always taken a while to get your fingers around; it’s one of the more involved simulations of sword-fighting in videogames, and the incorporation of sigil spells and crafted bombs and traps further complicates it. The Witcher 3 will have 10 to 12 of these spells, with two forms for each. For instance, Igni, the fire sigil, can be cast either as a ball of fire or as a stream of fire that homes in on foes.

“We fixed all of the things that were not perfect based on response to the second Witcher,” says Konrad. “The first of these is the responsiveness of the combat, and of course we’ve remade all the animations. Any time you want, you can cancel an attack and transfer into a dodge or other action, and all these attacks mix together to create very fluid sequences.”

“We have also changed the camera system so that you can no longer get cornered by your enemies – you can see who’s standing behind you, and seeing who’s where makes it easier to play,” adds Meteusz.  “We have changed the dodge animation, removing the roll; instead we now have pirouettes. The say the combat is more ‘intimate’ now – Geralt no longer turns his back on enemies, it’s more like duels with his opponents. Also I think the targeting is much better now than it was in The Witcher 2.”

CD Projekt Red reckons that players will take 50 hours just on the main quest – 100 hours if they delve into everything else that this rich fantasy offers up. “We want to fill the world with interesting side quests, monster hunting, events that you can encounter on the road,” says Konard. “You can travel and find interesting places with new items, new treasures…”

“For me as a player I can say for myself if I can explore the world in full and it is really rich and filled with interesting things to find, it really helps the immersion for me,” Meteusz agrees. “I feel like I am forging my own adventure, and that I play in a world that really lives, you know.”

It's still the world itself that excites me most about The Witcher 3 - with these new lands will come new histories, new insurgents and age-old resentments, new ramshackle ale-halls to gamble in and new conniving, meretricious people to meet. The Witcher 2 imbued its stone city and grimy riverside towns with such personality and intrigue that the idea of a whole open world based on the same foundations is almost difficult to imagine. A game of Skyrim's scope and possibility with The Witcher's darkly comic, provocative writing and unashamedly dense storytelling sounds fairly close to the ideal role-playing game if you ask me. It's one hell of a goal for CD Projekt Red to aspire to.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.

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