Developer Treyarch has officially revealed some major details about Call of Duty: Black Ops III today, including the game's first trailer, which you can watch below.
Black Ops III is being developed for next-gen consoles and PC and is set for a November 6, 2015 release date.
Developer Treyarch has officially revealed some major details about Call of Duty: Black Ops III today, including that its multiplayer mode will have Titanfall-style wall running, and "Specialist" characters that have unique weapons and abilities.
Wall running will work much like it does Titanfall. You need to approach at an angle to get your wall run going, and leaping between walls resets your energy meter, which you can also use to powerslide and thrust jump high in the air.
Another completely new addition to how you get around in Call of Duty multiplayer is swimming. There are water areas on certain maps, and you can dive in with your gun pointed ahead and working at all times.
Perhaps the biggest addition to multiplayer are the nine Specialist characters, each of which can bring either a special ability or weapon into a match. So far, we've seen four Specialists:
Ruin -- A fearless infantry soldier with a "gravity spikes" weapon that creates an area of effect attack, and the "Overdrive" ability, which gives him a burst of speed.
Seraph -- A member of a crime syndicate with the "Annihilator" weapon, a high-caliber revolver, and the Combat Focus ability, which triggers a bonus multiplier towards Scorestreaks.
Outrider -- She has a compound bow called "Sparrow" and a "Vision Pulse" ability that pings the surrounding area and tags the location of all enemies.
Reaper -- An experimental War Robot with a "Scythe," an arm that transforms into a mini-gun, and the "Glitch" ability, which allows it to flashback to a previous position.
So far we've seen three multiplayer maps:
Combine: A vertical farming and sustainability research facility in the remote Egyptian Sahara.
Hunted: A big game hunting lodge situated beneath a waterfall in the lush mountains of Ethiopia.
Stronghold: A high-tech Swiss chateau in the frozen, mountainous Alps.
Treyarch also revealed Gunsmith, an all-new weapon customization system that will let you add up to five attachments to a weapon and create and apply custom paint jobs.
As was revealed last week via leaked marketing materials, Black Ops III's campaign will support four-player co-op, and Treyarch will return to the Zombies mode it introduced to the series in Call of Duty: World at War, though it didn't have more details to share about that just yet.
Black Ops III is being developed for next-gen consoles and PC and is set for a November 6, 2015 release date.
Treyarch has finally given us our first good look Call of Duty: Black Ops III today, and it took the opportunity to reveal the game's minimum PC system requirements.
You'll need at least an Intel Core i3-530 or AMD Phenom II X4 810 at least for a CPU, and a Nvidia GTX 470 or an ATI Radeon HD 6970 at least for a GPU. You'll also need at least 6GB of RAM.
By comparison, the game is only a little more demanding than Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's minimum system requirements, which requires a slightly older GPU.
Treyarch told GameSpot that it's putting a greater emphasis on good PC performance and stability this time around, which is why it's confident in revealing the minimum system requirements earlier in the development cycle.
You can find the full minimum PC system requirements for the game below.
Treyarch has revealed a ton of new information about Call of Duty: Black Ops III today, which you can read more about in GameSpot's full preview.
Operating System: Windows 7 64-Bit / Windows 8 64-Bit / Windows 8.1 64-Bit
The future of Call of Duty is a much discussed topic. What will they do next year? How will next year's studio build on last year's effort? How will they keep the series fresh? When will players finally tire of the Call of Duty formula? These questions are asked in message boards and on discussion shows, but also inside the walls of developer Treyarch. Now in their tenth year of developing Call of Duty games, the folks at Treyarch have had a hand on the wheel of this series for some time now, and have confronted these questions again and again. This year, with Call of Duty: Black Ops III, they have an eye not just on the future of Call of Duty, but on the future of humanity itself.
In Black Ops II, Treyarch took the Cold War setting of Black Ops and paired it with a drone-dominated future, linking the two with overarching themes of enthusiasm and trepidation about the use of cutting-edge technology in military and espionage operations. This core conflict returns in Black Ops III, extrapolated years beyond Black Ops II into a future where human augmentation has replaced drone technology as the freaky tech du jour. Humanoid battle robots are now commonplace, but the real power--and threat--lies with human soldiers who boast robotic replacement parts and neural networking implants. Strong as the dickens and smart as the data they can instantly access, these soldiers have mental and physical capabilities that provide the driving force for Black Ops III's campaign.
In the pre-taped gameplay demo I saw during a recent visit to the Treyarch studios, the player character arrived in a train station in Cairo that served as a makeshift outpost for the allies he or she was there to contact. Black Ops III is the first CoD game that allows the player to choose the gender of the campaign protagonist, and while there is separate voice acting for both male and female characters, the script is roughly the same. According to Jason Blundell, the campaign director for Black Ops III, they took inspiration from the character of Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series; a strong character can be a strong character without the world around them bending to accommodate their gender.
The train station entry scene used one of my favorite gaming tropes, the on-rails transit sequence that establishes the scene before the player can really even move. After exiting the train, the player proceeded to seek out an informant to help them get to the bottom of a massive intelligence leak that originated at a CIA facility. The echoes of Edward Snowden resounded around the room as the developers spoke about the thing that made this kind of leak even more compromising for a futuristic soldier: the direct neural interface.
The DNI is basically a computer and sensor network implanted in the soldier that allows them access to data and communications, lets them hack into computer tech, and even helps them regulate their own biological functions. Having your password leaked means a lot more when your ability to walk is on the line. In the Black Ops III campaign, the abilities associated with the DNI (and any robo-parts you might have) are called cyber cores and cyber rigs. You'll be able to choose which of these abilities to acquire, similar to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's exo suit modifications. It didn't seem like the upgrade tree would be a broad as in, say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution; I got the impression that you'd be able to use most of the abilities in the course of the campaign, rather than choosing specific paths. There are some limitations to your loadout, however, and these make it valuable to coordinate your cyber choices with your teammates. Your human teammates.
Yes, Black Ops III has four-player online campaign co-op throughout the entire campaign (and two-player splitscreen local co-op). During the campaign demo, we saw two skirmishes, the second of which was designed to show off the larger environments that the studio designed in order to accommodate their co-op structure. In this scene, the players sallied forth from a formidable mobile wall dropped into place by a friendly helicopter. A broad concrete area stretched out ahead of them, barely recognizable as a street thanks to enemy fortifications and ruined vehicles. The goal was to use a handheld launcher to shoot explosive charges into the columns below the street and then detonate them to collapse the whole area. Of course, the charges were also effective against softer targets.
Ready to blow.
But targeting the supports and holding off the enemy attack took a bit more than just a big gun. Using the DNI to scan the area revealed the target areas and tagged any enemies spotted by the player or the player's squad. This location data is shared passively to your allies because all your DNIs are connected. Linking the player's eyes into a (potentially corruptible) network opens wide the possibility for messing with the player's perception, and Treyarch is proud of their history of messing with players' minds. There were strong hints that what you see might not always be what is actually going on, and while there won't be branching story decisions like those in Black Ops II, they did describe the storytelling as "layered," teasing that there might be more to discover on subsequent playthroughs.
This playthrough showed off a few more abilities, including hacking a flying drone and turning its machine guns against those who deployed it. A cloaking device automatically activates when using this ability is triggered, so you can use it mid-battle without scurrying into a corner first. And then there were the terror bees, technically known as fireflies, which are a cloud of flying nano-robots that swarm enemies and, when upgraded, can set them on fire. Drone hacking and flaming terror bees join a list of about 40 upgradeable abilities that players will be able to use in the campaign.
The other campaign skirmish took place during an assault on the train station and started with a nasty new drone that looks like a metal yoga ball. In a gory scripted moment, an enemy ball rolled up to an ally of mine and deployed sharp metal blades that skewered the poor guy right in front of my face. Yes, it was gross, and yes, these balls are available as scorestreak rewards in multiplayer.
While shooting these drones and the bipedal warrior bots that marched into the shattered atrium, the player showed off some tricks of the new traversal system. I was curious to see what Treyarch would do the high-energy exo suit mobility system from Advanced Warfare, and I was glad to see they had their own take on those invigorating movement mechanics. But while Advanced Warfare was largely focused on quick, darting motions for speedy incursion and evasion, Black Ops III is more interested in fluidity, and in letting you have your gun out as much as possible.
Instead of a double jump, or a jump-and-midair-dash, Black Ops III has a thrust jump. It can boost you to a higher ledge or extend your jump distance, and it operates on an analog energy meter instead of firing at a specific burst intensity. So leap straight up and tap the jump button to hover in the air with small puffs of energy. Use the same feathering technique to extend your jump with mid-air hops, or burn the whole meter to glide in a long, floating arc. The booster is omnidirectional as well, preserving the diversity of movement offered in AW, but it doesn't function when your feet are on the ground. For ground-based mobility, there's the power slide, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Activated by holding the crouch button for a moment (say goodbye to dolphin diving), this move triggers a slide in the direction you are facing. But once you're sliding, you are free to aim wherever you like, making this not only a powerful evasive maneuver, but also a potent offensive tactic. Landing your jump directly into a slide, or sliding past a door while aiming in are just a few of the effective applications we found while playing multiplayer.
Over the course of a few hours, I got to play a dozen or so rounds of Black Ops III multiplayer. Getting the hang of the traversal system didn't take very long, as recent experience with Advanced Warfare, the Halo 5: Guardians beta, and Titanfall had prepared me for more movement trickery in my first-person shooters. The latter reference applies particularly to the wall run, which is fueled by the same energy bar as the thrust jump and power slide. Like in Titanfall, you need to approach at an angle to get your wall run going, and leaping between walls resets your energy meter. Black Ops III throws in a new twist, allowing you to change directions mid-run just by turning around and tapping the jump button. Also, there are water areas on certain maps, and you can swim, with your gun pointed ahead at all times.
This is one of the core goals of Black Ops III multiplayer, allowing you to keep your gun up and be ready to fire as much as possible. A new mantling system streamlines movement by allowing you to clamber over obstacles you encounter while moving in any direction (yes, including backwards) with the tap of a button, and keeping your gun up all the while. The more your gun is up, Treyarch's thinking goes, the more likely you'll be prepared for combat when it comes and the less likely you'll feel like there was nothing you could've done to avoid being killing. And if you can have your gun up in more situations, that expands the combat possibilities in a non-trivial way.
He's not your chap.
The biggest change to multiplayer comes with the introduction of specialists. In addition to choosing a loadout you've designed in Treyarch's signature pick-ten system, you must now choose from one of nine specialist characters. These are individual soldiers with names and callsigns and back stories that are linked to the fiction of the Black Ops III universe. More crucially, each has a unique weapon and a unique ability that can be deployed during combat. You pick your specialist, you choose the weapon OR the ability (not both), and then you're ready for combat.
Maybe you'll pick Seraph, a woman from the Chinese cartels who can whip out a one-shot kill pistol called the Annihilator or boost the rate at which she earns progress towards scorestreaks for a short time. Or perhaps you'll go with Outrider, an archer from the Brazilian favelas who gibs her enemies with explosive arrows or activates a radar pulse that highlights any nearby enemies with red silhouettes. If you're playing a Capture the Flag match, an American soldier named Ruin might be your choice for his ability to trigger temporary movement acceleration, or you might just enjoy ground pounding anyone in the area to death with his leaping gravity spike attack.
And then there's Reaper, the robot who looks like a cross between a terminator and a geth. Its arm can transform into a deadly minigun, but it's its ability to warp to where it was six seconds prior that is the most disruptive of all the specialists we saw (only four out the nine). Understanding and predicting your opponents' positions is absolutely crucial in multiplayer combat, and with Glitch, Reaper can be in front of you one second and then behind or above you the next. Run into a crowded room, drop C4, and then Glitch away. Leap into pool, then Glitch back out and shoot the enemy that followed you in. The potential for psyching out opponents and gaining a positional advantage is huge.
That's Ruin. He ruins things.
Use of specialist weapons and abilities is limited, though, as they are controlled by an energy meter. This meter is always filling up and does not reset upon death, like scorestreaks, so specialist powers are something all players will be able to use, regardless of skill. More skilled players, however, will be able to use them more frequently, as XP-earning actions will help the meter fill faster. Speaking of XP, in addition to the traditional global XP and weapon XP, each specialist character earns XP and has a progression pathway that will unlock stuff, but what exactly that stuff is wasn't divulged at this time.
But there was a lot of information shared in this first look at Black Ops III, and we're expecting more to come at E3, where the game will be playable on the show floor. Treyarch has confirmed there will be a zombies mode, complete with a weird-as-heck story line and a full XP progression system, but they played coy about further details. They also talked about gunsmith, their new weapon customization system which boasts multiple cosmetic variants for common attachments, as well as three fully paintable surfaces on each gun. How will they keep their weapons from being plastered in butts and swear words? Only time will tell. And while PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 versions of the game are confirmed, what is in store for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 players? Perhaps another studio is working on a scaled-down version of the game, or maybe this is the year CoD leaves behind the last generation.
The novelty of the specialists and the smoothness of the traversal system were the highlights for me during my play time. I'm eager to see what other specialists bring to the table, and how they mix with the abilities and weapons we've already seen. Though at first the specialist system seemed an odd addition, after a few matches they felt like just another element of a deadly battlefield. Scorestreak rewards have basically functioned as special powers for years, and having something that powerful that you can reliably use is an appreciated bonus for someone who doesn't often chain together long streaks. Adding new things while preserving the core experience is the perennial challenge for the Call of Duty franchise, one that Treyarch is taking head on in the lead up to the November 6th release of Black Ops III.
Bandai Namco has released a trailer for another Tekken 7 fighter who's a completely new addition to the fighting game series.
Gigas, as you can see in the trailer below, is a hulking monstrosity, with tubes bolted on to his body. He looks a lot like the Batman villain Bane, especially as he appear in the Batman Arkham games. Gigas will be a playable fighter in Japanese arcades starting April 28.
Tekken 7 was announced last year. The game, which is powered by Epic's Unreal Engine 4, is already in Japanese arcades, but Bandai Namco has yet to announce when the game will hit other platforms in other territories.
With PlayStation Now released and in the full swing of things, you're probably curious what games are actually on it. As a cloud-based streaming service designed to give you access to a large number of PS3 games, PlayStation Now actually has quite an extensive selection to choose from. So here's a full-on list of every single game you can find on PS Now!
Elite: Dangerous is getting a major update called Powerplay, which will add faction gameplay to the space simulator, developer Frontier Developments has announced.
Each faction, or "Power," is an organization that controls a section of human-occupied space. Each is led by a different figurehead, and comes with a different biography, political leaning, and faction-specific perks.
"When Powerplay launches, you'll be able to ally yourself with any one of a number of galactic Powers, earning valuable perks, reputation bonuses and credits for your allegiance," Frontier Developments said. "As a trusted ally of your chosen Power, you will be able to guide their strategy, take on special objectives to advance your shared cause, and dominate human space. Your choices and actions will have a direct and visible impact on the balance of galactic power."
Players who prefer combat might want to join aggressive Powers with combat missions, while players who prefer trading could join a Power looking to expand its trade monopoly. Players who prefer to fly alone don't have to join any faction and remain free agent.
Frontier Developments said the initial selection of factions will rise to a maximum of twenty, but that players will eventually have a hand in creating new powers, as minor local forces establish a foothold in a handful of systems.
You can read about the update in much greater detail here.
Like the previous Wings update, the Powerplay update will be free when it's released next month.
Konami did not provide any kind of explanation for why P.T. is being removed, or what it's removal might mean for the future of Silent Hills. The decision to pull the PlayStation 4 game from the PlayStation Store comes amid a reported power struggle between Konami and developer Hideo Kojima.
Last month, Kojima's name was removed from the P.T./Silent Hills website.
Kojima is working on Silent Hills with Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro and The Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus. But not much else is known about the project.
Silent Hills was originally revealed at Gamescom 2014 as horror game P.T., which was launched as a free PS4 demo on the PlayStation Store with almost no explanation as to what it was. Kojima later said that he wanted to make Silent Hills so scary that it will "make you sh*t your pants." He even joked at the time that the limited edition for Silent Hills would come with a fresh pair of pants.
This week we brought you a full slate of exclusive The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt interviews, gameplay, and details. Now we're giving you a chance to look back on all the video features editors Danny O'Dwyer and Andrew Bauman put together.
But we're not done quite yet. If you want to go even more in-depth, here are the full transcripts of our developer interviews:
This video highlights the history of the action-RPG franchise and how Wild Hunt's prologue will attempt to welcome newcomers. Iff you want to jump right into combat gameplay, check out this breakout on what combat is like in pubs and on horseback.
In this interview we discuss why a choice that sounds good can be terrible, how leveling works in the Witcher, and why Gwent replaced Dice Poker.
GameSpot: Perhaps the biggest change that we've noticed between The Witcher 2 and Wild Hunt is how the quests are carried out. Obviously the main quest is still a major focus, but there seems to be so much more going on in the wider world.
How have you guys balanced the main quest with all of this extra stuff that's going on?
As with the previous games, we are very focused on the story line. On the story of Geralt, of Ciri, and Yennefer. At start of production, that was our main focus. But as we've developed the game we have designed side quest lines that were connected very strongly to the main story line.
As you progress through the main story, you can continue on and ignore the story lines of local places or important characters that you meet. You choice, between ignoring those or participating in them, can cause some consequences in the world as well.
And you will have choices throughout those quests. It was also very important for us, as with the previous games, to give players a variety of choices so that you feel like you're playing an established character with Geralt. But there's some degree of freedom in how Geralt behaves. What choices does he make, and how does he impact this world?
We also tried to avoid the black and white division of choices, just like in the previous games. For us it's more like you are in a tough situation and you have to manage somehow. You have to decide what Geralt would do in this situation if you were in his shoes.
Choosing the lesser of evils.
Exactly. The lesser of evils. Sometimes you will even feel that, "Okay, none of these solutions are good. What should I do?"
In one of the sidequests I played, there's a dwarf whose forge was burnt down. I hunted this guy down, the guy who committed it, and he's drunk. I put a spell on him and brought him back. And I thought, "Yeah, now the dwarf's going to give him a punch or something." But he had him hanged! I'm like "Holy shit!"
I wouldn't have done that if I knew that would happen.
Yeah. when we design quests and story lines, we always try to keep everything in the context of the world. Basically in this situation, this dwarf was inhabiting a village that was conquered by the Nilfgaard Empire, and they believe themselves to be very just. But their laws can be perceived as cruel by some. For burning someone's property, especially a dwarf that works for the Guardians, it's basically perceived as sabotage. Like military sabotage.
So, if you analyze it like this, this shouldn't be so surprising. But if you look at it from the human perspective, like you did, it might seem downright evil.
You talked about how the side quests don't feel like side quests. For instance Keira was helping me in the underground dungeon in one of the early-on quests. Then it finished, but she's like "Oh, can you help me with something?"
I could have just walked out, but I decided to help her. And when I helped her with this small riddle, it opened up a whole other quest.
Actually the thing you mentioned is another whole line of quests. It's not just a single quest. It's basically the story line of this character. Unraveling it can have consequences for the world. It can basically impact what will happen later on in the main story line. These side quests are intertwined with the main story line very strongly.
How many of those side quests are there in comparison to the ones in the main story?
I can roughly tell you the number of story lines. I think it's about 8 or 10, and each one of those has 3 side quests. Something like that.
Aside from that we have also normal side quests, which are totally not connected to the main story line.
When you complete the main quest, can you go back to some of those longer side branches, or will not doing them hurt you a lot for the main quest? How does all that work?
Okay, so we have the main story line and very important story branches. These branches end as you progress with the main story line, but there are also side quests, big side quests, that are not dependent on the main story line at all. Once you end the game you can continue playing those.
If you do not complete these side branches it also has an impact on the main story line. That's why you can't go back and change them, because then you would cheat the game.
For example, you mentioned this quest with a sorceress. If you ignore this side quests line, you will learn what happened to the sorceress in the main story line later. If it already happened to her, you can't go back and change that.
But, obviously, you can play the game again and change what would have happened if you had play differently.
Do all of them have impact on the main quest, or do some of them not really matter?
Branches connected to the main story line do have impact. Some of them have very, very big impact on the main story line and on the endings themselves.
We have three alternate endings and about 36 or more combinations of ending states for the world. The branches impact those very heavily.
Whenever you wander into a village, and there seem to be lots and lots of villages, there are these notice boards. When you read them, you find signs like, "You shouldn't cook cats because it's unlucky!" Then there was a little quest. There are quite a lot of these more traditional side quests.
The notice boards you mentioned, they have a lot of fluff, but they also have totally optional quests that you can do. They are not connected to the main story line, although they do impact the world and how the world perceives Geralt. For example, if you decide to take on a Witcher Contract in some village, the villagers might react differently to Geralt later on depending on what he did in this contract.
There are also some side quests that are basically stories in themselves. I think they're interesting for the players, and they give you some fresh view on some topics of the Witcher World. It's good that we have things that are not strongly connected to the main story line so you can have this needed breath before you go back.
It feels almost like in the books where Geralt wanders into a town and doesn't really know what's going to happen. You can just get lost on this little side adventure that happens, and then you can go back on your main mission.
Yeah. We also have side quests that aren't just contracts that you take from the notice board or from a quest giver. There are also some encounters and quests that happen, basically, as you pass them. You have this feeling that things happen around Geralt while he travels through this living, breathing world.
One thing that kind of shook me a bit when I was playing Wild Hunt was after I'd picked up some contracts. I decide I'd just go crazy and disappear into the big open world. I found a town and I went to the notice board, and there was this really interesting quest about a ghost that was appearing in the forest somewhere. I went to my quest log and it said, "You want to be Level 33." At that point I was only around level five, so it kind of felt like World of Warcraft.
Can you talk about that leveling system or the types of different difficulties. Are you expecting people to come back to old areas all the time?
Yes, that's something we wanted to achieve and what our gameplay team wanted to achieve when they were balancing the game. We have chosen some quests from different hubs that are balanced for high levels, so you have stuff to do after you get to those high levels. We were tempted to balance it in a way that you simply go through from level to level and they are all even, but we felt that something was getting lost in between.
I know it might seem irritating, maybe, or it might feel weird when you're at level five or six and then encounter a level 32 quest, but I think this is something that players will come back to later on in the game. If they play that long, of course. [laughs] I think this is something to do in the endgame.
It's not an MMO obviously, but you can play after the credits. After you finish the main story line, we wanted players to have stuff to do. We didn't want you to feel like, "Yeah, okay, I finished everything. Everything was so easy that I can one-shot everything now."
And we don't want you to have this feeling that you have to complete all the side content before you engage in the main story line. In some games, you feel that you some side quests that will no longer be available or that the game will end. For me, when I play some games, I wait to play the main story line. I do all the side quests that I can, then I come back and I'm like, "Okay, what was that all about?" We wanted to avoid that very strongly because the main story line is very important for us.
It's interesting because a problem for some people with a game like Oblivion that the characters and enemies leveled with you. So it felt like you were never really successful for being strong.
Yes, we wanted to avoid this as well. For us, the perfect example of good approach to levels scaling, or lack of it so to speak, is Gothic. In Gothic you had these areas where the world was open. You could go there, but basically there were orcs, or an ogre, or stuff like that would whoop your ass.
You felt satisfaction once you leveled up. Once you got this strong character, you joined some factions, and found some better equipment, you felt satisfaction. "Hey, I can beat this orc now. I struggled two hours to even approach him before, and now I can beat him." I think this is satisfying for the players, and I hope we did it properly.
Talk to me about Gwent. Gwent seems like somebody at CD Projekt3 went crazy and made their own version of Hearthstone but twice as big.
Gwent was present in the Witcher books, and this is something we always wanted to have in the games. But we always thought that a card game would be too complicated. We wouldn't be able to do it. For this game a few of the developers said, "The dice game was cool. We could easily do that again." But Poker Dice is random, at least for me. It doesn't give you the feeling that you have any progress as you play through the game because it's so random. Even if you have these quests with stronger opponents, you could only do so much with the AI because it's chance-based.
But with Gwent, we felt that we could introduce something much more interesting to the players. Basically you can gather these cards in the world, you can buy them, you can win them from players. You have this constant feeling that you're making progress. You collect these cards like in other collectible card games. You have quest links related to it. You have these huge tournaments.
I know that many players, especially fans of the previous games, are angry at us because we didn't include Dice Poker. But Gwent was such a demanding minigame to develop that we couldn't afford to have this and Dice Poker both in the game.
One of the things that I love in the dialogue options of the Witcher Games is the ability to intimidate somebody and use his skill in conversations or use a sign to trick them.
Is there ever a situation where you can say "Okay, look, if I beat you in Gwent you'll have to do what I want."
Without spoiling anything I will just say "yeah."
Talk to us about some of the miniquests that happen in the world. When I was playing through, things started to appear on the map like question marks and points of interest. Some of those were things like beasts' nests that you might need to destroy. What other types of things are there?
We have abundant villages that are overrun by monsters or bandits that you have to slay, and later on villagers and merchants come back to these towns. So you get new goods that you can obtain. We have hidden treasures that you have to find and that can provide you with epic loot so to speak. We have strong monsters that basically are guarding treasures. We have people, and sometimes merchants, that are imprisoned by bandits. If you free them you can get access to better items.
We have these monster nests like you said. Basically destroying monster nests yields you different kinds of rewards. Aside from experience points you also get special mutagens for Geralt and alchemy ingredients.
I think we have some others as well, like hidden contraband and stuff like that.
So one of the early missions you do is slaying a griffin, and it's a multi-quest line where you have different elements to it that eventually culminates in this big fight. With the rest of the big monster engagements, are these things that you'll run into in the world, or are they mostly involved in the main quest line?
Actually, we have quite a few monster hunts that you can find in the world, and the griffin hunt was part of the main story line. But a lot of them are basically side quests. Each of them has it's own unique monster and it's own unique story and approach to the monster. Geralt has to find a way to beat those monsters or lure them out, like with the griffin.
There are a few different ways that you can find those quests. You can find contracts on monsters on the notice boards or you can encounter those monsters as you explore the world. And you can also find places where those monsters attack and continue to hunt from those points. It's very open.
How many of those are there in the world that you can find? And arethey all different types of monsters, or are there something like several griffin ones?
I think we have two griffins, but mostly it's different monsters. We tried to pick unique monsters that we, and you hunt for those so it doesn't feel like a repeatable action.
Another new element in Wild Hunt is that you have a lot more options in terms of transport. Geralt's horse, that's named Roach. But there also boats. Do these factor into quests at all? Are there any times where you swim under water to try and find an island or get in a race while riding Roach?
I mean we try to include all different gameplay elements into each quest to keep players interested. And as we got these new transportation tools, we tried to incorporate them into the quests as well. You will have horse races. We don't have boat races, but there are some quests that involve sailing a boat. There are quests that will make you dive under water and find stuff like hidden caves.
I remember diving under water and finding loot, so the idea of underwater caves are very interesting. I found one random cave that was full of these horrible beasts that had a pot of human bones or something. I just saw that out of the corner of my eye. It wasn't a quest and it wasn't a minigame; it was just a thing that was there.
We tried to do everything we could for players to feel this awesome sense of exploration. We didn't want players to feel, "Okay, there are the quests, and you can go on the quest path. But don't go on the sidesquests because there is nothing there." No, we wanted to make everything feel like a living, breathing world that's rich with things to find. Basically, someplace interesting to explore.
I felt like there were lots of different types of quests going on. What is one of your favorite quests in the game?
Okay, I have two favorites, but it's very hard to talk about them without spoiling anything. One of them takes place in Kaer Morhen, but it's not the prologue. It involves other Witchers. That's the only thing I'm going to say.
The other one involves Geralt and Ciri. It's basically their time together. That's everything I'm going to say. I just love it.
Another element that's new in this game is that you actually play as Ciri.
Yes. Ciri is mostly involved in the main story. The sections that you play Ciri are basically closed off. You can't explore the open world as Ciri. You didn't see all her abilities yet, but she develops as you play the game. She gets stronger later on in the game.
One of the elements that's very interesting about the prologue part is that, for anyone who hasn't played Witcher 2, there's basically a part where you have a discussion that fills in what happened to you in The Witcher 2. It's very clever.
Yeah, we introduced this because we believe that people who played the previous games, on Xbox for example, should also have an option to somehow fill in these choices. If you're not interested in what happened in the previous games, if you're new to the series and it would be overwhelming, you can just choose not to have these choices once you start the game.
Aside from that we also have the normal "import your saved game" option for PC. If you kept your save game from the Witcher 2, you can import it into your game on the PC. Then you don't have those choices because, basically, we took the choices from your saved game.
We learned that Geralt's beard was growing as we played the game as well. Is there anything else that happens throughout the game?
With his beard? [laughs]
Not specifically with his beard, but is there anything else that's persistent throughout the world?
No, I think the beard is actually the only thing we took that far.
It's good hair technology, so why not expand it to as many places as possible.
We added the option to change the hairstyles for Geralt, but it would prove difficult, technically, to make all hair grow back. So, we only did it with the beard.
In this interview we discuss creating an open world that lets you walk anywhere without loading and the game's dark humor.
GameSpot: You've had a lot of environments to art, it seems like in this game. Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a pretty vast game.
Jonas Mattsson: Yeah. It was a huge task, absolutely. Especially coming from The Witcher 2, and moving on to something as big as this. It was really quite a challenge to create. We had to change the way we did things as well, because you're working on a much bigger scale. There were points you had to sit down and think about how you're going to solve some things, because in an open world, you can't really control where the player goes.
In The Witcher 2, you had total control over where the player went, and that meant you could spend as much time making really finite detail in the world because you know everyone's going to see it.
But from what we played yesterday, it seems like that detail is still there. How did you manage to figure that one out?
We found solutions. Say we have a forest. How is a forest supposed to look? You can place a tree and you can be done, but it won't really be a forest. You need to connect it to the ground. So you add the little bushes underneath, a little grass, some flowers. And this is the same kind of thinking we use in the game's architecture: how to connect it with the landscape. You apply it on a large scale, and everyone knows the rules and logic behind it. That's how you end up with a really natural looking environment that has that detail about an open world scale.
With some of the villages you in the game you'll find houses built on hills at somewhat awkward angles. But it actually makes it look more realistic. As if the builder was construtcing around the landscape. And then the kids are playing up on top of the hill; I even children playing in little mud streams that happened because of the way the land fell and where the water drained.
It's almost a Grand Theft Auto 5 level of specificity with the game world but in a rural setting. I don't think that's something we're really used to.
I think sometimes in game development, people make the mistake of creating the village first then the landscape. But your example shows that we put the landscape first. Then you build the village based on the layout of the land. It's like somebody came by in the world and said, "I'm making my house here. There's a hill nearby. Maybe I'll put some bee hives or something up there. Make it into a bee keeping area," depending on what the village does.
It was really important to not dig out the landscape. If you make some nice rolling hills, you keep that intact. You keep the view as epic as possible without destroying it.
Tell us a little bit about the make up of the world. Is it one large open world you can walk from one point to the end? Or is it instance-based? Where's there's one area to the east, and then there's a larger area to the west. There's parts in the north, and Novigrad is its own big thing.
Can you just wander around your own, or do you need to fast travel to different parts?
You can wander around on your own, definitely. We have the main land, which is basically Novigrad and No Man's Land where you were playing. You have the big city in the north, the metropolitan are, and then as you move to the south, you come to this war torn, ravaged area,
That's one huge open world. For story purposes, we do have some places like the Prologue Area, as we call it. The introductory area. It's a smaller open world created to make sure that the player understands the rules of the game and get to grips with the controls and so on. It's a mini open world, and once they've mastered how it plays, we just unleash them into the full open world.
Of course, in addition to that, we also have a group of islands off the coast. Way off the coast, actually. You have to fast travel to go between that because the distance is also very large. To travel on a boat, it would take too long, so it wouldn't really make sense for the player.
And the same is the case for The Witcher's forge up north as well?
Exactly. Kaer Morhen. That's a separate small level as well there. But on the full open world, there's no loading time. You can travel and roam around as you wish.
There was a quest marker I found inside of a bar, but even when I went inside, it didn't shut me off with a loading screen. It was almost like World Of Warcraft where you just wander in, and then say to yourself, "Oh, I'm in a pub."
So there there's no loading time at all?
No, there's no loading times. Only when you actually start the game, when die and load the game, or when you fast travel. That fast travel loading time depends on how far you have to travel of course. If you just fast travel a little bit, it's a really short loading time.
One of the goals we had was to keep the experience as fluid as possible. When you play, you don't want to have the loading screen because it takes you out of the game a bit. We wanted to make sure that it was as smooth as possible, one big experience. For us, that was really important. I think we achieved that because, as you said, just going in and out of a building, there's no loading time. Nothing. It's just creates this really nice experience.
Tell us a bit about the different types of environments. Obviously, this is an open world, and one of the cool things about an open world is finding the different types of flora or fauna. Finding different types of tundra, and experience weather conditions and what not. Tell us about this sort of variety of areas that you'll find in Wild Hunt.
Around Novigrad, you have more rolling hills. Farm land. It's quite nice, quite picturesque. But if you move further south, it becomes more swamp-like. It has more dangerous atmosphere.
As you go along, you have different trees as well. For instance, in the rolling hills, you have smaller bushes and little groups of trees. It's all very nice. We took a lot of time to research the look and feel of the little areas within these regions. If you go to the Skellige Islands, which is this Nordic influenced environment, you'll find it full of tall cliffs very much like Ireland and Scotland. A very epic setpiece with more pine forests. More rugged. More harsh winds that shaped the landscape and its people.
It's really important that the people are a reflection of the landscape in terms of accents, how they dress, and how they behave. It all comes together when you create a region. Is this a hunter's village in Skellige? How do they behave? What are they talking about? How does the village look and where's the village placed? You want to create an identity for a village when you create it.
When creating this world, did you always want to keep it so that there was so much going on? A thing that lots of other open world games do is that they have these big, sparse areas in between villages. But in Wild Hunt, everything is quite close together. It's big, but there's a lot going on.
Well we wouldn't want the player to be bored, of course. But it's also important to give the villages the space they need. When you create a village, you do have a bit of empty space for farms that support the village by growing food and so on. When start to construct that way, you find that there's a village here close to a quarry. And then there's a village here close to the river. And then there are neighbors that travel between the two and interact with one another.
It also depends on the landscape. No Man's Land, before the big war happened, it used to be quite friendly for farming and cultivating. Whereas in Skellige, it's much more wild. It's harder to tame the landscape. As a result, you have fewer villages and harsher people. Only the strongest survive there, and it's kind of the opposite on the mainland.
That played in mind when we were creating this. We didn't want to have a circus attraction to have everything going on all the time. But we wanted to create an experience like: you ride on your horse, you stop, and you see something's over there. You want to go there. You want to explore and see what you can find there. Maybe you come across a village on the way. Maybe there's a monster hunting quest. Things just happen, and this is what we wanted to have with the game when you explore the open world.
From the first trailer, people seemed to have an appreciation for just how beautiful the game is. Obviously, it looks fantastic on PC from what we've seen. Can you speak too the environmental effects in Wild Hunt? For instance, I was playing at one stage and a blustery storm came in and it started to thrash the trees around, and Geralt's hair was going all over the place.
We have this full, dynamic day and night cycle. We have lots of different types of weather, and that depends on where you are. So in the mainland, you don't get snow. But on Skellige, you get quite heavy snow. There's more fog and it's colder. It was important to us to have these varied atmospheres, depending on where you are.
It's important to note that this is not just a cosmetic effect. It has an effect on the game's community. When it rains, they'll look for shelter. When it's night time, people pack up their things from the market square and go home.
Also some monsters are affected by the weather. When you go monster hunting, depending on the monster, you have to pay attention to what time of day it is.
Another aspect of The Witcher games is, of course, the world of the Witchers. There's magic and the idea of realms within the world. Like in one of the books where a magician has created this massive, fake landscape that's all contained within a tower. It's almost like Oculus Rift.
Magical realms are an important part of The Witcher, so can you speak to some of the magical areas that you might go in to in the game?
I don't really want to spoil the story, but there are certain places in the world that you will come across as quite unnatural and odd looking. It's really cool because you play the game, and sometimes you come across something completely different. It kind of throws you off, a real "Wow!" moment.
But that's one of my favorite parts of the game, and again, I don't want to spoil it. I want the player to discover it for themselves.
So much of The Witcher is about the little things. Little settlements, villages, and people having their own little communities and farms and all that. And then you see Novigrad, and it's just a massive, bustling metropolis with lots of people walking around.
Can you tell us about the challenges of making a place like Novigrad?
We didn't want to create a game that was just landscapes and villages. We wanted to have one really big city. And actually, we have two. The smaller one is called Oxenfurt. But the bigger one, Novigrad, we really wanted to do that seamless transaction between landscape and huge city. There's so many people there, and there's so much to do. There's a bar, there's thugs, there are quests.
Constructing it was, of course, a challenge, as you might have expected. But we also wanted to create different districts. As you travel through the city, you feel like it has a certain history. But we wanted to create variation as well, and to have different types of people living in different parts of the city. It took a lot of work and it has so many layers in to it. It's almost like a puzzle fits together perfectly, both above ground and below ground.
I don't want to spoil too much in terms of quests and story, but it's amazing how many layers there are to the city. At first glance, you see everything on the surface. It looks fantastic. But there's so much below to explore, and it's really cool.
I know there are bars and brothels and stuff. But are there lots of buildings you can go in, or are there quests that happen just within the confines of Novigrad?
Yeah, absolutely. So many quests happen in Novigrad and there are lots of buildings you can go in and explore. Of course, you can't explore every building. That would be too much, I think. But there's a lot to discover.
Just go in to a house, see the people that live there. Are they poor, rich, et cetera? It's very different from the rest of the open world, and I think that's nice, to have. After you're on your own, Skellige and you've done some monster hunting quests deep in the forest. After you kill the monsters, and you get your payment, you might think to yourself, "I could do with a little bit of civilization now."
Fast travel to Novigrad, go into a tavern, play some card games, go brawling or whatever, or do some mini quests there. I think it's a perfect balance between the wild of the Wild Hunt, and the metropolitan city life. It creates a nice balance.
You've obviously created many different environments within this game. What's a personal favorite of yours.
I have several. One for instance is the war alley in Skellige. It's this huge open valley with a river coming down from the mountain side. It's quite warm so you get these heat particles rising up. The bears gather there. You can see really far. It has a history of war and there are some ruins. It's very beautiful.
Every time I'm on Skellige testing something, I try to get some time just to look at it because it's so beautiful and dangerous.
I think another part is the swampy area in No Man's Land. You're not sure what you can find there. There's danger on every corner. It's beautiful and mysterious.
And of course, Novigrad. Being up on top of the city using the road that leads up to one of the huge temples. You can stop there and look over the harbor. You see almost the whole city, and it's beautiful when you have the sun coming in. You see the rooftops and everything. It's just, "Wow."
One of the most interesting things about The Witcher are the crazy stories that happen to you in-game. The ones you just want to tell people about. What's been your craziest story that's happened, without going into too many spoilers. What's one of your favorite quests?
I have no idea. [laughs] That'd be spoiling the story, right?
For me, sometimes you play a quest and it has funny dialogue that just gets to you. There's a flashback when you play as Ciri, and she's sitting close to a campfire talking. There's a dialogue option from one of the guys talking about, I think it's a blister on his ass or something like that? [laughs]
The dialog just makes you go, "What?" And I just have to laugh at it.
There's a lot of dark humor.
Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of quite cynical, dark humor. Dry humor as well. It fits me perfectly. There are so many moments like that in the game to pick from. It's really tough, actually. Like the frying pan lady in the prologue, the way she just talks and talks and talks. It reminds me of my grandma. Like when you call your grandma, she just talks and talks, and I'm like "Yes, yes, okay, Grandma. It's your frying pan. I know. It's your frying pan. Okay." [laughs]
The humor behind it, how it's written and the voice acting, is just so good. Actually, if I have to pick one moment, it's the frying pan lady.
Here's our full interview conducted by GameSpot editor Danny O'Dwyer with Marcin Iwinski, the co-founder of the company behind The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
In this interview we discuss the creation and history of developer CD Projekt, how the first Witcher game got started, and how to turn a culture of pirating games into a culture of buying them.
GameSpot: We'll talk about the Witcher 3 eventually, but you're actually a founding member of CD Projekt, right. How did CD Projekt come to be? In 1994 you weren't making video games, right?
I met the cofounder Michal Kicinski back in high school, and our passion was to play games. We were skipping school to play games. I had some contacts in the US, and there was a huge BBS. We were on the local forums and the international forums. At a certain point through these contacts I realized that there was a new thing called a CD ROM. From that, I think you can make a sophisticated guess about the origin of our company name, CD Projekt.
We were probably the first people in Poland to import games on CD ROM. Initially we didn't really do it for any business reason, we just wanted to play games. We were super excited and hyped. What games was it back then? 7th Guest. Mad Dog McCree. Who Shot Johnny Rock? That kind of stuff.
I still think 7th Guest was pretty good considering today's graphics. It was a major breakthrough at the time because with floppies, you only had 1.4 megabytes per disk. They were constantly failing, had no audio tracks, limited capacity. You had to fit your game on the media and not really make the game you wanted to make.
Or make a game with 12 disks.
Exactly. Then after you buy the game, maybe a few of the floppies don't work. CDs were a major game-changer. Initially I started importing them, getting friends to send me one or two copies. I still remember buying a CD ROM reader. I think it was only 1x speed and cost around $500. It was ridiculously expensive. I was the only guy in the neighborhood who had a CD ROM reader, so I was the king of the hill, so to speak.
After a while we thought, "Maybe there's some business we could do with this." I was importing one, two units per title. Michal was selling them on the local computer exchange. This took off enormously because people were craving new stuff. We had just emerged from socialism; people were starting to travel and to be interested in new things. Especially with technology, and finally there was access to the technology because the market was booming in a very early and brutally capitalistic way. There was a massive import market for everything. Every week people were going to West Germany, to Berlin, bringing stuff in and selling it on the computer game market. There was a cry for that.
Before, people were isolated. But suddenly you could get your hands on exciting stuff.
What did people play before that?
They were playing games, but there was practically no legal gaming market in Poland. No stores selling games. No copyright law. And if there's no copyright law, then playing copied games is not illegal. There were no Polish versions. The market itself was very niche, and it was very nerdy. Either you had your PC, you knew how to put it together, and you were an expert, or you had friends who had friends. Then you would exchange all these games on the computer exchange market. That's also part of my past. I was going there and swapping games with friends.
Were these open-air markets?
They were open-air markets. The historical one in Warsaw where I was learning the ropes was downtown near where the Westin Hotel is. It was in a school courtyard, and this school is still there. Back then, every single bigger city had this kind of market. Warsaw was the major hub for all the new stuff that was coming in, and it was spreading around Poland.
It was like a flea market? But it was also like an entrepeneurialship incubator because people could try things. When I think back to that gaming scene, a lot of the people who had their own stalls, or who were bringing in the first Commodores, Amigas, PCs, graphic cards, or floppy disks. Now those people are the presidents or VPs of the biggest IT and gaming businesses in Poland. They learned their trade there. They realized what they like and what they don't like. From there they had a chance to build a valuable business because there was nothing else in the market. Nothing. There were no companies.
When we started CD Projekt in '94 and for the next, I would say, three to four years, there was only even one retail chain selling games.
Just independent stores?
Yeah. Mom and pop stores. The first wholesaler I remember was a guy who'd come in with a red Volkswagen Passat. That was his truck, and he brought the stuff to ten or eleven tiny little stores.
It must have been hard to even have those type of stores in a market that was so used to just copying and pirating.
These were really small hobby stores selling hardware and software. I think the biggest change came around '94. When people started selling software initially, I think the consumers were like, "Hey! Why should I buy something original when I can have it for free?" I think that was still a big deal when we started our company. We wanted to provide affordable prices to Polish consumers, and we brought over fully-localized games with high quality localizations. CD Projekt was known for the highest quality Polish localizations, so much so that pirates started pirating our releases.
We had a, sort of, red seal of quality that let people know what we put out was the professional Polish version. Then pirates would try to put that same seal on games they had pirated but that we weren't even publishing, because it was increasing their sales.
Starting in about '97 and going for the next two or three years we introduced a series of important innovations. With Polish localizations, quite often we'd end up with famous Polish actors. We added a lot of physical goodies to the games. Baldur's Gate had a big D&D book and a map with a seal. The game was on five CDs. It had a thick manual. We were showing people that buying games made sense and had value.
Initially, you had to serve this value in a very physical and touchable way. And I still think that's important today. If you look at the boxes of our Witcher titles there's a lot of stuff inside. I think serving the collector in every gamer is very important. Collecting has an appeal. Instead of just getting one disk, you could just go for digital, and this has changed the market. But right now, it's a very healthy market. People are buying games. Just like they are buying books, and just like they're going to the movies.
Was it predominantly a PC market? You mentioned the Amiga, which seemed massive at the time anywhere east of Germany.
It was. The heyday of Amiga was pretty much when there was no corporate law and the market was closed. Amiga was selling a lot of hardware, but there was never an Amiga software market.
But the Commodore...
Yes. The Commodore started dying before our market normalized. But I had a couple of Amigas. It's still, really, my best machine I ever bought. What did I have? I had the 600, then I had the big one. The 1200. There was a chip inside that was constantly breaking. I was spending a fortune on them. Always breaking. If you were connecting something, it wasn't plug-and-play. You'd connect something, it would fry the chip, and the whole computer would stop working.
The market was predominantly PC. As you can imagine back in the day, nobody really bothered to build a console presence here. We sort of missed the early console era. Consoles here really started with the PlayStation 2.
The Birth of GOG
Is the market still predominantly PC?
No. It's less now. Obviously, part of that has been our push on consoles, excluding Nintendo which has been nonexistent here since I can remember. We have them, but people don't know what they are. It's not selling.
Consoles are roughly 50% of our sales. It's still very different compared to Western countries where consoles are dominant on the retail side. On digital, PC is definitely stronger.
There are so many exciting propositions for people to play on consoles. But you have to remember that, for PC, we've managed keep our price points low. Games were approximately 50% cheaper than, let's say, in Germany. They were localized, so there was no huge risk of great export.
It made perfect sense. A very similar model was introduced in Russia where PC games were much cheaper than Western countries. The economy of the scale, and the size of the market, made it a perfect, logical business proposition for the publishers. It was a similar situation in Poland and it helped the market grow. Then, when people got more wealthy, they started buying consoles and console software, which is pretty much the same price as it is in Western Europe.
If you look at it today, the average wage in Poland is probably three or two-and-a-half times lower than in Germany. It's affordable. But if you look back ten years ago it was, I don't know, maybe six to ten times lower. Back then, buying a console game was a very, very pricey proposition, hence the low adoption. Generally, back in '84, I'd say people were not able to afford consoles and console games. That's the main reason.
How did you pick which games to bring over and localize?
It's simple. The reason we started the whole distribution thing was because we wanted to play these new games. That was our main motivation. So we picked our favorites. Baldur's Gate, the Fallouts, the Diablos. I played Diablo with my wife back in the day. We'd finish work, and then we'd play games.
I actually found one of the first ads we had. It was a really tiny one. Just a simple black font that said something like "Games, Utilities, Education." And then, "CD Projekt: best prices and wider selection," or some general blah, blah like that. But the best part was the listed office hours, where were 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Because we had to close at four to play. [laughs] We were playing like crazy.
We were playing the games, we were following all the news, and we were checking games out. At a certain point we started visiting the trade shows. The first was ECTS in the UK. I still remember the first time we were there was when they were showing the PlayStation, and we were just standing there just dumbfounded. We were watching Ridge Racer, and we couldn't believe how cool it was.
These places were the opportunities to see what was happening, what were the trends, and what were the cool games.
A quick side story about how we started distributing for Blizzard. We don't run a distribution business anymore, we sold it off last year. But anyway, we saw Warcraft II in the corner of a booth at ECTS running on one computer. At that time Blizzard was owned by Davidson & Associates. Michal and I were walking around looking for games, we saw Warcraft, and we said, "Wow, that's a really cool strategy game. We've got to have it."
After a few months, we finally signed an agreement with them. And I still remember that we imported 600 copies of the game.
How long did they last?
It sold like that. And then it was Diablo, then Diablo II we localized fully in Polish. And then it went on, and on, and on.
How many games do you think you distributed during that period?
Way more than 1,000. We sold tens of millions of units of legal games, which I think is great. Another thing that really took off that was Michal's idea to fight the powers. It wasn't about the competition with other guys on the market or other publishers. That was always important, but the main competition for everybody doing the legal business were the flea markets. We'd localize a game and release it. Then 48 hours later there were pirated CDs of the games we just released. After we put a lot of money into localization and marketing.
That's when we started with the added physical goodies, the bonus programs. The Polish market was huge even in '97 and '98, but they were people who had never played a legal game. To them, gaming meant copying from a friend. We needed to give them a reason to buy.
We introduced a budget range which was a fraction of the price, even cheaper than the pirated game. It was initially called the Low Price and then we called it Extra Classic. These were the back catalog titles. Fully localized to Polish and packaged with a small manual. For a very nice-looking DVD box you were paying 19.90 and pirates were charging 20, which is roughly five bucks, give or take.
Then it took off incredibly well, and we were selling a couple million units of the classics. It was a great revenue maker, but it was also a great way to develop the market. Imagine going to a store, you've never bought a game, and you see a title for four bucks. You think, "That looks nice. They offer customer service. I'll give it a try." Then you play it, it works, and everything's great, so you buy another one. Then maybe you go up to mid-price, and then maybe you go up to full price. Step by step, bit by bit.
It's interesting you talk about pushing physical media and how you packaged that for people. Essentially what you ended up doing with GOG.com was taking classic games and giving them to people, but it had nothing to do with the physical aspect.
That's exactly what it was. We were thinking, "What can we add in the digital market space?" And we thought we could remaster these classics, bring them back to life, and offer them to people in a hassle-free delivery mode. This has taken off incredibly well.
When we are making the first draft of a plan for GOG, I had a problem. How would I estimate sales on GOG? I took the sales of Polish extra classics, every title. I divided them by four and I said, "Okay, it shouldn't be worse." So at least I had some comparison.
At a certain point, in the UK they had a series called Sold Out. That was a similar concept, and it was working really well in the UK. Now it's pretty much nonexistent. I'm not sure they're even still in business. The reason for that is that is retailers focused more on the high-margin, expensive products. And all this stuff moved to digital. In Poland, something similar is happening. But I think Sold Out in the UK had a big role in propagating legal gaming among the mass market. That's really important, especially in Eastern Europe and Poland; people just didn't know why they should buy software. Software was something free that you got from a friend.
The answers were that you collect it, that it works. You have a manual, and you have support. You spend so much time with these games that it's good to reward the developer. Of course that wasn't anyone's first thought. They didn't stand in front of the rack at a game store thinking, "I want t give back to the developer. I'm a good person." They thought, "Hey, this is cheap. I'll buy that."
Then after two or three or four games...
Exactly. Then there is a shelf. And then there is a collection. That's how it begins. We like to collect things. I like to collect things.
What was the impetus behind GOG then? Were you trying to break out of the Polish market? Did you see that the Internet sales were becoming higher at that stage?
We definitely were, and always are, looking for new ways to do things. We really appreciated what Steam did, but we thought that there is a market for all this stuff. We were thinking about digital for quite some time.
Our dream was always to make our own game. We started with Witcher 1. We didn't start before because we were really excited when we started, but we only had maybe $1,000 or $2,000 of capital and Michal's old computer. It wasn't really a very comfortable, well-funded position to start game development from. And it probably would've ended after a couple of weeks.
Then we were going to the foreign shows. Obviously, ECTS the first two years. Then we started going to other shows and we saw how big the market was. We thought we could take some of the things abroad that had worked very well in Eastern Europe. That's the concept behind GOG. We added to that the DRM-free factor because that's how we always wanted to play our games. And it clicked extremely well.
How is GOG doing now? I remember when it first launched, GOG was the home of classic titles, but then Steam started to do that as well. Publishers started putting up their back catalogs on there as well.
Steam became, in a way, the PC digital store. The Windows store.
I think GOG has taken a very specific space for people who value the freedom of their software and the way they use it. They really want to feel the ownership of their games. We appeal to these people really well. Of course, the vast majority of our offering are classics, but we started out in indie games and we're starting to have new stock.
Very soon we'll be launching some closed betas on the site. We will be launching the GOG Galaxy, which is another change for us. But it's our way of adding value. I think we always ask ourselves whether we can deliver something additional that's meaningful for the games. I think, so far, we are very successful with that.
Creating The Witcher
You say the impetus to start the company, or at least what you wanted to do eventually, was to create your own video game. How did it end up being the Witcher?
It was a lot of luck and I think some good karma or whatever you want to call it.
We were distributing for Interplay. I keep saying it, but the first fully localized breakthrough title for us was Baldur's Gate. We contracted for 3,000 units, and we thought if we couldn't make it happen, we'd go out of business on day one. It was such a huge investment back in the day for us. It would take six months to localize, and then we'd implement everything ourselves. That's the way we signed the agreement with Interplay because the commitment for them, financially it was so small that it didn't make sense for them to put in any development resources. We fully understood that so we assumed the risk ourselves.
I was personally supervising the localization. My father was a documentary movie producer so he helped me with the actors, and with the studio and everything. Then I handled the implementation with my friend who's a programmer. Michal was doing the marketing and sales. And by the time we got to day one, we had orders for 18,000 units. In a market where a total game was selling one to 2,000. Nobody could believe that. In the first year or year and-a-half we sold 50,000 units. This really opened the market.
I'm talking about Baldur's Gate for a reason. Then for GOG, Baldur's Gate was a major thing when we launched D&D. The traffic doubled or tripled on GOG.
The story with The Witcher actually started with Baldur's Gate. We were visiting the offices of Interplay just before the company started folding. It was in Irvine. At the time they still had The Matrix in development. I don't know when exactly when it was, but Shiny was still in Laguna Beach. They showed us the legendary Interplay offices. We met with the guys behind Fallout and we even met Feargus Urquhart, who's running Obsidian. It was like all these dreams coming true.
Then we went to Shiny. I still remember Dave Perry talking about The Matrix for two hours. Not showing us one, single screenshot but still getting us really excited. Then they showed us Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance. I'm not sure if you remember this game. This was one of the first console-only games from Interplay. We felt like we had a strong PC market and that we could sell a few hundred units of this Baldur's Gate game. It was looking really great. It was more action, like an action-RPG. But it was super cool.
We asked them, and they told us they weren't planning a PC version. But at the end of the evening, they asked us if we'd like to make a port. That gave us something to think about.
We went back to Poland and we called our friends at Interplay and asked if we wanted a dev kit. We actually flew to London and smuggled the dev kit back in the back. And we probably still have this dev kit somewhere.
We carried it back and we started working on the conversion of Dark Alliance. But a month or two months in, Interplay called us and said, "Hey, the financial situation here is really bad. We'll be closing Interplay Europe. Our advice is don't sign it. Don't do anything. Stop the work. Keep the dev kit, whatever. Nobody will pay you and they will not release the game."
But the spark had already started so we started looking at what we could do. We found out that there is a chance to actually buy the gaming rights to the Witcher and we jumped on it. If you look right now at the Witcher it's kind of obvious for a lot of people what it is. Back in the day it was super famous both locally, and most famous in Europe. Sapkowski, the author, for us he's like Tolkien. It was a no-brainer. It was an opportunity. We jumped on it. But if you're looking at the way we've built the game and the brand of the Witcher, we had to come up with an English name. We were starting pretty much from scratch, because the brand wasn't known.
What this has given us is, first of all, a lot of confidence and an amazing world where we could just tell the story. The story's fully ours in every single part from one to three. We had this world with all this history with seven books. Right now it's eight, because he just released a new one, a prequel. That was a very important foundation for the whole company. For CD Projekt, the guys who developed gaming in Poland as a cool thing. We're known for high quality work, for high quality localization, for looking after the gamers. And now we're working on the coolest Polish brand. It was much easier for us to get people to come and work on the project. All in all, it just took an incredible amount of luck.
Essentially what you were doing for so many years was taking English-speaking games and then bringing them into Poland. What you ended up doing was taking this storied franchise...
After you work for a long time on somebody else's stuff, you develop a, I don't want to say a complex, but it's like, "I'd like to have something of my own." Initially, when we started releasing games here, people just let us do whatever we wanted. We could come up with really cool ideas and just make them work. The more organized the market became, the more they took our toys away. They started doing things themselves.
At a certain point the role became: Ship the stock to the store. That's not really what Michal and I signed up for when we started the company. The Witcher was really a place where we could unleash all of our creativity and show that we could do things differently. I think we proved it.
How did you get the rights to the Witcher at that time?
There was some game that was developed, but it wasn't finished. So we just made a deal with the author.
Did you approach him?
Yes, we approached him. We heard that the rights were probably available, and it was a fairly quick deal. I'm not what he thought about it, but a lot of people both in the industry and outside were like, "Okay. Some other guys, they are going to try to do Witcher." Then after a short five years of blood, sweat, and tears the first Witcher was released.
You have a massive amount of creative license with the franchise. The author seemed to be okay with your guys just taking a story and running with it.
We wanted to have creative freedom. So we bought out that part of the world, and we had full creative freedom. I think a lot of people could or would betray it in one way or another, take a shortcut. I think the fact that we have this freedom created sort of a paranoia. We thought, okay, we have these Eastern European fans who really know every single piece in the game. For example, I think it was Triss, she had her neck always covered in every single book. But in the Witcher 1 before one of the patches she had sort of a V-neck. We were just killed for that in the forums.
From the very beginning we were planning the game for worldwide release, but we put even more effort into make sure that we stayed true to the heritage of the book. For us, it's a national treasure. We want to give it justice and at the same time make this game interesting for a wider audience. The whole ambiguity, the lack of distinction between good and evil. The shades of gray which is probably not very popular.
After some time I came to find out about George R.R. Martin's books, A Song of Ice and Fire. I was actually surprised by the similarities. Of course, they are different worlds and different settings. But they are both pretty much a contemporary world dressed up with a medieval fantasy theme that appeals to a more mature audience. That was also one of our very early decisions, that it would be a game for a mature audience, because there were almost no games for a mature RPG audience. I'm talking about RPGs back in there, almost like …
Was it successful on your end? Financially successful?
It was financially very successful, but consider one thing. We were actually raising the bar for sales every single year we were in development. Initially we though we'd finish the game in two years. I still remember the first design document, it was so thick. But, in the end, the first Witcher game probably used just one-third of what was in there in terms of the systems we had time to incorporate. We didn't realize what it really meant to transfer a vision to reality in a game. It's a problem with every single developer. It's usually too deep and then you have to cut. It's too huge. That's probably our problem. The games are big.
Looking at the Witcher from this perspective, we had to make a lot of very hard decisions during the development process. I still remember when we were cutting content. We cut The Witcher two or three times and people were crying. We started development with five people; we finished with 18. With the initial scope of what we planned, we probably would have needed 250. But then we never would have been able to afford to finish it.
The ambition initially was gigantic. We pretty much just said, "We have no bloody clue how to do this." But we were finding out along the way. We had licensed Bioware's Aurora engine, again kind of the ghost of Baldur's Gate showing up. I remember we went over to Edmonton to meet with Ryan and Greg and we showed them the game. They thought, "Hey, we can help these guys. We can invite them to our booth at E3. It was our first E3, and we had a tiny little corner. I'm still very grateful to both of them for this opportunity, because it really helped us to put the game in front of journalists from all around the world.
One evening we were sitting in a pub with, I think it was Greg. I said, "Greg, we have 15 people. If we had five more we could finish the game." Then he said a phrase, I still remember it, he said, "Marcin. You only see the tip of the iceberg." I said it was like that. We finished the game exactly as they did with the Baldur's Gate plan. Around 80 people on board in '85.
Are you proud of that when you think back now?
Yeah. I'm really proud. Especially that we delivered the game we wanted to deliver. We financed it ourselves until it was about 70% ready, and then we really needed a partner. Don't forget that we were running a distribution operation. Our background was predominantly business and probably less gaming. We're passionate about games. We knew games inside and out, but we also knew how to sign deals, how to make agreements.
When the publishers started coming and looking at the game it was just crazy. We got tons of advice from researchers. "Change this, change that." Blah, blah, blah. "Maybe the hero could be an elven female." We couldn't believe it. If our situation had been different, we'd be running out of money. Quite often there is a decision where a developer says, "We have to sign this deal or we close the studio." They would have to change their main character into an elven female. But then it wouldn't be Witcher anymore, and you can think of all the consequences. I think a lot of games are destroyed this way.
I'm really proud that we delivered on our vision. And that's what we've been able to do with every single game. Since Witcher 2, we've self-published. So it is much easier because we are responsible for it. We take the risk. That allows us to do stuff like in Witcher 3 with the 16 free DLC packs. Normally with a big publisher, after they've given you the money, they'd say, "If you don't charge for each of these, do you know how much money we'll lose?" That leads to some really hard discussions. With the Witcher 1, we had a lot of those discussions.
With Witcher 2, what was the thing that you took from the first game and then decided, we want to innovate it in this direction?
The Witcher 1 was just a total proving ground. First of all, we learned how to run production. How to deliver things, how to make them on time, how to calculate the time required, or at least estimate it. In games, as you know, nothing is really precise and definite.
With Witcher 2 it was about putting it all to work, and then having a console version. It was our big vision. There's a lot of people going to be suing you. We knew we could pull off PC development. So we decided to do our own technology. There were a lot of big things like that. A tried a different kind of storytelling. More smooth, more cinematic.
Despite the whole story and the hundreds of hours you can spend in it, there's no reason the game should look worse than an FPS. It should look amazing. It should suck you in. I think Witcher 3 will be a testament to that.
Of course, Witcher 3 is another new start. At its base, we wanted to make an open world. We made this decision a long time ago when we had no idea what the specs on the new consoles were going to be. But we made a bet. I think It was a good bet.
We've talked a lot about innovation today. Obviously, back in 1994 you guys were innovating in terms of the market here in Poland in incredible ways and you continue to do so in terms of game development. You guys were worried about the tip of the iceberg before, but just from the four hours or so of The Witcher 3 that we played this morning, this is a way bigger iceberg than those previous icebergs.
Yeah, it is. It is. We are becoming iceberg specialists. I think it's easier.
Are you intimidated by the scale? Obviously, the game's almost finished now, but the decision to make the game open world must have been difficult.
It's still difficult for us to estimate how big it is, and it's always much bigger than we estimate. Although we estimate much better than we used to do back in the day. At a certain point, it is scary, but we are learning. We are fast learners. I think we've taken this to the next level. We have amazingly talented people who are just able to do, well, magic.
Is the console market a big deal for you guys? When Witcher 2 came to consoles, it had the addition of all the extra content.
Don't forget that that was a year later than the PC release. So it was more a test for us more. Can we deliver commercially? It was good, but it wasn't perfect. To be honest, it's very hard to pull off a big marketing campaign, a PR campaign, and get the game into stores and show it to gamers all around the world if you don't have it on console. Obviously this market is important. I think we are very lucky that we are where we are with the next gen. This is a good time and the machines are very powerful. People are excited about them. There are actually other people in the industry who were surprised at the level of excitement that's still out there for console games. It's a great moment to bring the game to console, because it will look almost as good as on PC.
There seems to be a lot of frustration among console owners around the number of quality games that have come out. Especially open world games.
Exactly, but people want more powerful machines, and then they forget that, if you have a more powerful machine, it takes way more people and time to make great experiences. Gamers are not the ones to blame, but it is harder and it takes longer. Teams just keep growing to a larger and larger scale.
When the first Witcher came out obviously you had to sell the idea of what this was to the world, and then when you released the console versions you had to sell it to the console players. Do you think now that you have a base where people know what the Witcher is? Where you can just have Wild Hunt be a new start?
We started with the 3 but at a certain point we realized that that might be isolating to a lot of gamers who come to the store and will say, "Hmm, I haven't played the Witcher, and this is the third part. If I don't know the first two, I probably don't want to buy this." With Wild Hunt...
Is that official? Is that what you call it?
We'll use both. Witcher 3 and Wild Hunt. We cannot remove the 3 that was already there. But this game is fully playable on its own. You don't need to know anything to get into the story. You can take some decisions from the previous game. But that's optional. You don't have to. Everything will be explained; the whole setting, the whole world. This is really the message we want to put across.
Having said that, we have a huge community of faithful fan. For them, we have a lot of stuff in store. For PC you can load the saves from Witcher 2. You can take the choices at the very beginning and share your story as you would be playing the Witcher 2. Then in the game, if you know the lore, if you've played this game, you've read the books, or any of this you will have a lot of small, different flavors here and there. You will understand the exact detail.
I think it's the best of both worlds. Both the fans will appreciate it and they will go a little bit deeper. But the newcomers will also think it's cool. Maybe they will be willing to read the books or replay previous games. The whole concept with the Mask of the Wild Hunt looking like a numeral three, it's not to intimidate newcomers to the franchise. We definitely would like to welcome them with open arms.
The prologue feels very well-paced in terms of exposition, and in terms of the way in which the gameplay opens up. The way the tutorials and the battles weave together with the story was wonderful.
We come from a very hardcore PC background. Witcher 1 is kill or be killed. Witcher 2, at the beginning, had some balancing problems, especially in the initial version on the PC. With Witcher 3, we really wanted to do the tutorial right. There are a lot of games coming out, and if they are not introduced properly players will just lose interest. If you play a game and it didn't really explain how to use alchemy, magic, or whatever, that's frustrating. It will feel boring because you don't know how to play the game.
With time, we learn to design better, we learn how to improve. We do a lot of testing groups with gamers. We invite them here, we see how they play games from different countries. We really want to better understand how to make something easy to play but hard to master.
In a way, this is sort of a new start for the Witcher. When I was playing it, I thought it kind of felt more like Red Dead Redemption, or something. Just a big, open place to explore. Does it feel like a very different type of Witcher to you?
To me, one word that comes to mind is freedom. I like that. It is different than The Witcher 2 where the chapter's closed and that was it. Once a chapter was done, you couldn't undo it. Here you have the option to just run around like crazy. The weather effects, the water, the rivers, the random encounters. I love that. That was probably one of my favorite parts of games like Fallout I and II. I really loved the random encounters. Of course, it was to the very old school, but I still like to play those games. Giving people this freedom gives them a totally new experience.
Having said that there is freedom, the predominant and most important part is the story. Of course you can go around and just look at things, and do crazy things, and kill enemies and animals, and not follow the story. But that's not the full game. I think this is the best of both worlds.
When I was playing once, I just did part of a quest. And then I got into a discussion with an old lady, and some old chapels were destroyed, so I started running around. Then there was some encounter. And then somebody in-game told me about the story again. The story's really waving at you at different places in the game, and I think that's really cool. Ultimately it's about the storytelling, but in an open-world setting. No, it's not a sandbox. It's the other way around.
Are there any stories from your time with Wild Hunt, any crazy stories that have happened over the past couple of weeks?
The last couple of weeks were really crazy. I think people are working extremely hard to finish it. Right now it's way better planned, it's way better set up. The scale and the complexity of things is much bigger, but I think we are getting a very good grip on finishing the game and delivering it to the gamers through our distribution partners all around the world. There is the whole publishing logistics thing. We are just not only a developer, but we're also responsible for a game going live in every single country.
And on console and PC at the same time.
Oh, yeah. On two consoles, and on PC at the same time. With all of our publishing partners. There's a lot happening. It's good that we've taken it one step at a time. When the Witcher 1 released on PC, we had some crazy stories. Things exploding, and debris, and it was on the Aurora engine. We had written 90% of it, so it was pure magic to cook a build for four hours, and then nothing would work. Why? I don't know. Then we were hacking through code to try and fix the problems.
Now we have our own technology. That's the technology for RPGs. It's written by us, so we really know it inside out. There are fewer less surprises. The surprises come from the complexity and from the sheer scale of the world.
Are you confident about putting this out? Are you excited to have it out there finally?
I will be confident when I see the gamers enjoy it. I love it.
Tell me about the DLC plan for this. It's an interesting sort of tactic.
It's free. What we have said many times is that we do believe that the smaller bits and pieces should be free. If we ever decide to make... I really think the word "DLC" has become devalued. There are some DLCs that are good old expansions. I would prefer to call them expansions, like the Baldur's Gate expansions.
Or like Brood War.
Exactly. That was probably a whole new game. Blizzard had a different strategy, like with all the Diablo expansions. [laughs] Meaningful 10, 20, or 30 hours of game play, for me, that's for me an expansion. That's what I'm ready to pay for. If it's DLC, if it's a new hairstyle, weapons, or armor. Horse armor maybe. [laughs] This should be for free. This is our way of saying thank you to the gamers for buying our game. Also we want to encourage them, show them that we have something more in store for you. We really care when you buy our game.
Something to look forward to.
Exactly. I won't name any names, but... I haven't been playing as many games as I did in the past. But when I pay full price, 60 bucks or 60, 70 Euro, and I see that the developer, publisher, or whoever is asking for another five Euros, I think "Oh, really guys? Why? I just paid you. That's not okay." If it's free to play, that's fine. Milk me as much as you want because I didn't invest anything. Right now I think there are quite a few places getting it wrong, and it shouldn't be this way.
You shouldn't spend $60 on a game and then feel like you bought the cheap version.
Nothing should be ripped out from your game and sold on the side just for an additional dollar. It really looks good in an Excel spreadsheet, but in reality, people are smart. They see that, they comment on it. It's just not okay.
Its seems like you're doing the same thing you did with the boxes a long time ago, sticking in all this free stuff.
Of course. Because, honestly speaking, what does it cost us to make a set of armor. I don't know, several hours? Maybe one, two, three people. Considering the scale of the game and considering the investment people will be putting into the game, spending their hours. I want to make it more fun for them. I think it's kind of obvious. I would like to get such stuff for free. That's what we were doing here.
Your operation here has doubled in size in a number of years. How has that happened? Is it because you're taking all this console development? What is it about the Witcher 3 that requires all of this extra people-power. It's 300 people now in this office, isn't it?
It's actually 450. Close to 100 is GOG. Then we have the whole management staff, accounting and internal publishing. It just takes more people to make a huge, open world game in HD. Then to test it and put out 15 different language versions and whatnot. It's a really gigantic and very complex project.
Even if you look at the Witcher 1 which was PC only, it was 80 people. We had five, maybe six languages for it. After that, I think it's really scaling up project by project. And don't forget that we're doing Cyberpunk 2077 as well, so part of the staff is focused on that. We have the Witcher Battle Arena on mobile. It's a tiny group, but it's still here. It all adds up.
You also put a free card trading game into the Witcher, as well.
Yes.
Did that start out as just a mini-game and then somebody just went crazy?
Yeah. I think the design just totally clicked. We noticed that a lot of the developers, when they were testing the Witcher, instead of actually testing the Witcher they were playing Gwent. They started adding stuff, but I think that's what's really going on. People here are passionate about games. If they like something and it makes sense, we make sure that they have all the freedom to run with it.
In this interview we talk about creating the creatures that populate The Witcher 3, the new technology that went into bringing the world to life, and whether decapitated heads in the game can still talk.
You've worked on all the Witchers. You've been at CD Projekt for eight years. With improving resolutions and way higher fidelity, is it much harder to make detailed characters now than when you started?
Pawel Mielniczuk: Yeah, it's changed a lot. In the Witcher 1, the characters were really simple. We didn't care quite as much about the art direction, the polycounts, the texture resolutions; it was a really small project back then. First of all, we didn't have the experience. We finished the game with about a 60-person team. Right now, we've got 250 people working on this game. So it's an incredibly more complex and bigger production.
Everything has changed. We have the next generations of the consoles. There are much stronger PC's; in the last eight years, computers have changed a lot.
So, of course it's much more complex. Back during the Witcher 1, we started with low polycount models and then just baked some normal maps in Photoshop. One character could be done in a week or something like that. Right now, we're sculpting every detail on the character with a high polycount version, and using Z-brush. We sculpt every seam, every button, and every buckle on the character. We make a complete sculpture of the character. After that's done, which takes about two or three weeks depending on the complexity of the character, then we're able to create the low polycount version that you see in the game.
Higher computing power allows us to use more vertices. Even the complexity of the skeletons inside the characters is higher. In the Witcher 1, as far as I remember, we used only the thumb bone and rest just looked like a glove. Right now we not only have the exact skeleton of all the fingers, but we also have the bones that are pushing out knuckles here, fixing the deformation of the wrist. Lots of technical stuff.
Do you have to do that for the monsters as well?
Yes. It's even more complex with the monsters because for the characters, we have the one skeleton for each character type: for male, female, child, and so on. This whole range of characters is done on the same skeleton with the same animations. For the monsters, each one of them is custom. We go through the whole process of creating the skeletons, animations, behaviors, and artificial intelligence for every monster from beginning to end. That's way more complex and time consuming.
Does that limit the number of monsters you can put in the game?
We always start with an estimation of what we're going to need, but he game grew so much from its initial concept. I don't know the exact numbers of course, but I feel that the game is three or four times bigger than we initially planned it to be. Also, because of the bigger regions, the bigger maps you explore, you need to create of course more monsters to occupy you during the game. I remember situations like one Monday morning, near the end of the game's production, I got an email that said, "Hey, I know it's late but we need 20 more monsters."
The problem is that the monsters statistics don't scale. A monster you meet at the beginning of the game has the same statistics when meet it at the end of the game. That means you need more monsters to feel the full experience level you got during the game. When you're at level 50, you need to have some enemy that can't just be the same thing you met at the very beginning of the game. It needs to be different. And we also want to make it feel new with a different appearance, and so on.
So the griffin you made at the start of the game is relatively low level?
Yes.
That's the first monster that you meet in the game, and that battle is relatively scripted. For the rest of creatures that you find, is that mostly main quest stuff? Or do you find them just roaming the world of the Witcher.
It depends. You can also meet different monsters in the prologue. Each of the monsters is a bit different. The fight with the griffin is custom in the prologue because it's divided into parts. Also, during this fight, we're introducing Geralt's new weapon, so it's pretty important. You're experiencing how and why to use the crossbow. That's why this fight is special. But later in the game we meet different types of griffin as well.
What are the types of creatures do you battle on this sort of scale?
Hmmm. Many. [laughs]
You don't want to say too much right?
Well I can say the names, but unless you see them, you don't know much, right? [laughs]
First of all, in the Wild hunt, we introduced flying monsters, which was a big change. In the previous Witcher game we had the semi-flying monsters; it was actually a walk animation just hovering over the ground. It wasn't real flying. Now the creatures are flying in three dimensions, so they can go over the hills, over the castles. They can go away and come back to you.
The Sirens are even more complex because they are flying and diving at the same time. It's the kind of monster that can fight you under the water, on the ground, and in the air. It's pretty complex.
How many of those monsters are there? I don't know [laugh]. Many. We have big, small, and medium-sized monsters. Just a lot of them.
Is there special consideration given to the scale of each monster? The griffin feels like a boss that needs specific tactics to figure out. But if you meet a pack of four Drowners or something, that wouldn't be too different from on of the bigger monsters. It's just that it feels different because it's a pack of them rather than this one thing with a long health bar.
Every big monster and most of the small ones have special attacks or special abilities. That first griffin doesn't actually have any special abilities, it's just flying. And we have other flying monsters that you'll fight the same way. You shoot him with a crossbow or throw a grenade to bring him down to the ground, and then you just fight him.
We also have monsters that spread fire. We have monsters that hypnotize you. We have monsters that can run away or go underground. Every monster requires different tactics. When you fight a Noonwraith, you're not actually able to kill it without using Signs. You create a special region to capture her when she materializes, and only then can you fight her.
Are there lots of monsters that have never appeared in previous Witcher games?
Yes, there are a lot. Monsters from The Witcher 2 were redesigned and remodeled with new behaviors. We have monsters that appeared both in The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2, but also lots of new monsters.
But as we all know, the truest monster is man himself. The Witcher 3 has no shortage of dirty looking people and young looking people and old looking people. There's an incredible amount of variety in terms of the human characters. In the villages, everyone's wearing different clothes; there are kids with different hair colors and different faces. It must be incredibly taxing to try and include such breadth of diversity.
That was actually the biggest challenge. As I mentioned before, the game was growing constantly, so the demand not only for monsters but also for human characters was growing constantly. It was good luck that, at the very beginning of the game's production, we invented the component system for character creation. We said, "We won't be able to just create hundreds of different human models and spread them across the world." We decided to just create the components for them. We made different torsos, arms, legs, shoes, equipment, helmets, hair, and hundreds of hats. Then we were able to mix and match them.
Because of that we were able to scale the system. When the demand for new characters grew, or whenever the quest designers wanted to add some special-looking characters, we were able to do that. That was a good choice.
How did you do the facial animations? It's a game that has lots of dialogue-heavy cut-scenes, but you have lots of unique characters and facial animations.
We couldn't use motion capture because the game is just too big. We have thousands of lines of dialogue, and we translated them into several languages. So that was just impossible. We could have done motion capture for the English facial lip syncing and then just added subtitles, but we didn't want to do that. We created the lip animations from scratch for the characters. But the system was very flexible; it would take three to four days to create a completely new face that has the same motion capability as any other character.
There's no difference between the main characters, secondary characters, and crowd characters. They all represent the same quality. It needed tweaks for the 3D software engine to make it work, but it worked well overall.
After you decapitate somebody does the head still have the ability to animate?
No, unfortunately not. We have situation like that, but only in a cut-scene. It's controlled.
Is it becoming increasingly difficult to make these types of games on current-gen systems and PCs? It seems to that the difficulty has scaled, but the technology has scaled with it. If making a character used to take a day and now it takes two weeks, that must make your job way harder.
Yeah. The demand keeps going up for better graphics, for a natural living world. But it's the open world, that's the thing that's incredibly difficult to make work. You have to be able to see everything out to the horizon, all the land, the people working there, and the houses hundred of meters or half a kilometer away. There are a lot of assets that need to process at the same time. We need nice-looking particles like dust, clouds, and the sky system. We need hair waving in the wind to add life to everything. And the grass is also moving. To make the complex and believable view of the living world, it's extremely time consuming and technologically demanding.
Did you have some sort of crazy new technology for the hair and the fur and stuff?
Yeah, that's a bunch of different technologies. We use a different system for the trees, different one for the grass, different one for the hair of the characters. We have our own system for hair animation and also for dynamic animation as it interacts with the wind. That's our own internal technology driving the low poly hair. We also have the Nvidia fur implemented the game, so when you're playing on PC, you can switch the Nvidia fur option on, you have the realistic hair simulation. That also took us a lot of time to process.
No, it's not. We are using Nvidia effects technology and Nvidia Fur. Nvidia media helped us a lot in implementing the software for us. While we were creating the hair, they also helped us. Whenever we needed some new tools or some new feature for the system, they provided it to us. It was really a nice cooperation.
Out of all the creatures that you created, which is your favorite?
Tough question. There are so many of them. We have the three Witchers that have exceptional design, but I'll treat them as a main character. They are not truly monsters because they have voices and you spend a lot of time with them.
Picking from the common monsters, I think my favorite is the Grave Hag. It also appears in the Witcher 1, but it was completely redesigned for Wild hunt. I love it. It's like an old, twisted witch whose mind has been completely mixed up by black magic. It looks great. For example, I especially like one version of this monster, she's carrying a small corpse on her back. It's a poor man she ate or killed, or maybe it's her husband. She's carrying this corpse, and talking to him. It's great, so original.
What is it like creating this rich world with all of these different monsters but knowing it's an open world where people might play the entire game and never see 50% of your work?
Well, they can play twice, right? [laughs] That's the fun, that everybody has a different journey through the game. Everyone gets a different ending. Everybody learns different facts that are going on during the game. I don't know. That's fun, that's freedom.
Are you looking forward to having it finished and out there for people to finally see and play?
Of course! I was pretty impressed with how the game looks, actually. I've been working on it since the very beginning, but you cannot know every aspect of the game until you play it, until it's finished. When everything's there. I knew the plot, more or less. I knew some of the endings. I made all the characters and sea monsters, but I didn't have the opportunity to experience everything working together. That's something I was pretty surprised by, really. It's a great game.
CD Projekt used to take in English games and translate them for Polish audiences. Now the company is creating a Polish franchise and exporting it to the rest of the world. Are you proud to tell your family that you're working on The Witcher? Is that something they know about and something that they care about?
Of course, that's a big deal actually. The game is way more complex and bigger than any movie can ever be. I feel it's a part of Polish culture that we're promoting outside our country, so that's a big deal for me.
Valve CEO Gabe Newell said that if the new Steam program that allows users to sell mods instead of just giving them away for free turns out to be bad for gamers, the company will ditch the idea.
"Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers," Newell said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread. "If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I'm more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven."
Newell also took a question from Nexus, a free modding community that's been very concerned about Steam's paid mods feature. Newell guaranteed that Valve isn't asking developers to protect paid mods and make them available only through Steam, and that in general it's against the company's philosophy to tell developers they can't do something, like give mods away for free on Nexus. He added that Valve would also be happy to work with Nexus to better support the community.
"The goal [of paid mods] is to increase the total investment the community makes in extending its games," he said. "We thought we were missing some plumbing that was hampering that."
Valve's new modding program launched on Thursday only with Skyrim (other supported titles will be announced in the coming weeks), but it's already caused a great deal of controversy. Many players are saying that Valve is greedy for allowing modders to sell work that was previously free, and one mod's been removed after claims that it contained the work of another modder.
Newell didn't seem concerned about cases like that becoming too common. "This is a straight-forward problem," he said. "Between ours and the community's policing, I'm confident that the authors will have control over their creations, not someone trying to rip them off."
As for the current revenue split on paid Skyrim mods, which gives the creator of the mod only a 25 percent share of sales, Newell said: "The pay-outs are set by the owner of the game that is being modded. As I said elsewhere, if we are censoring, it's dumb, ineffective, and will stop."
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