Cyberpunk story more accessible than Witcher's - Dev

The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red is working to establish a "smoother learning curve" with regard to the story in its new Cyberpunk game, developers at the Polish studio told Gamasutra in an interview published today. The Witcher and its sequel were based on a series of novels from Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, and looking back, company cofounder Marcin Iwinski admitted not enough was done to introduce players to the novels' various storylines.

"In The Witcher 1, for example, we were throwing people in the middle of the story, and we assumed that players would know what is happening! But a lot of players told us that they didn't really understand this relationship or that relationship," Iwinski said. "With our future games, we want the player to be able to get more context, and we need to introduce the game and its characters to people more properly."

CD Projekt Red managing director Adam Badowski said that after development had wrapped on The Witcher 2, the studio took time to devise ideas about how to effectively introduce players to source material in future games.

"We spent days discussing a general postmortem after we finished The Witcher 2," Badowski said. "What we learned from the Witcher series is that we need to attract people with a smoother learning curve when it comes to the storyline."

Iwinski explained that the job of making an accessible story for Cyberpunk is similar to what is achieved on HBO's show Game of Thrones. He explained that while this series strikes content found in George R.R. Martin's books, it keeps what is essential to telling an engaging story.

"And that's what we want to capture. In [Cyberpunk], we want to create a story that is very profound, but the novice players should be introduced to [the world] better than they were in The Witcher 2," Iwinski said.