Witcher 3 is Set to Be the First Open World Title in the Series
Fans of the Witcher franchise have been chomping at the bit to get additional information for CD Projekt Red‘s upcoming RPG Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. While the new title is certainly crossing new boundaries for the franchise, you might find it interesting where the Witcher 3 devs are getting some of their inspiration.
In an interview with GameInformer, Witcher 3 Game Director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz cited Skyrim, Assassin’s Creed 3, and Fallout: New Vegas as a study course for their dev team. Through examining what works and what doesn’t from these top tier titles, CD Projekt Red hopes to create an open world for Witcher 3 unlike anything gamers are used to seeing.
What might surprise you about Konrad’s studies though is how he feels telling a compelling story in an open world should work, and what titles he feels missed this mark in the past. ”The lessons we learned from Skyrim is that you need to care about immersion in the game all of the time.” Konrad continued, “You can’t show that you’ve got some generic solutions or engineering stuff in the game. And Skyrim, it was generic; you could make the same quest a few times and every time [the] NPC didn’t spot that you made it for him previously. To make this immersion every quest needs to be designed this way that NPC reacts for what you are doing.”
While Konrad and team certainly made it very clear that they hold the above titles, particularly Skyrim, in a very high regard, he did challenge gamers to try to remember 5 character names from Skyrim. Konrad himself could not do so and he hopes that the Witcher 3 is better at integrating the high level of story telling that the series is known for while executing on the open world front as well.
Konrad summed up their research by saying, ”But when we combine it with our knowledge from the previous games it will be perfect RPG.”
Add in the fact that CD Projekt Red is developing the game for all high end systems and a “perfect” RPG might be a bold statement but do you think the critique of other titles is spot on? Do you think Witcher 3 will deliver on its proposed potential?
