The Witcher Q&A - Making a Fantasy Role-Playing Game for Grown-Ups
Chief designer Michal Madej discusses this upcoming fantasy role-playing game about a morally ambiguous hero.
Slaying monsters is pretty straightforward in a lot of role-playing games. You play as the good guy, and the monsters are usually completely evil. That's certainly not the case in The Witcher. In this upcoming single-player role-playing game based on the works of Polish fantasy novelist Andrzej Sapkowski, you'll play as the antihero Geralt of Rivia, a magically mutated assassin trained from birth to hunt down and slay monsters in a medieval fantasy world where there are no black-and-white decisions. Polish developer CD Projekt hopes to capture the moral ambiguity of Geralt and his world in the game, which will have you making a myriad of tough decisions that will affect the story. To learn more about the game, which is due out in September, we turned to Michał Madej, chief designer of The Witcher.
GameSpot: Aside from the March update and last year's Leipzig games convention, we haven't seen The Witcher for almost two years. Can you give us an update on where the game's currently at in development, and have there been any major changes in the past year?
Michał Madej: We learned a few lessons about development in the last two or three years. We have learned from our mistakes, but now CD Projekt Red is running like a well-oiled machine; everything goes according to the plan. We gained a lot of experience, and I can say that the game is finally what we wanted it to be.
The Witcher has essentially reached the beta phase, and everything is going well in terms of production. We have tight development schedules, and quality tests are being done both by us and by Atari's quality assurance team. We're now polishing everything and are focused on testing, testing again, and more tests.
GS: This is a very mature role-playing game, and it deals with a lot of adult themes. This is partly because it's based on a popular Polish fantasy series, but how have you approached this in the game?
MM: First of all, we established that we want to treat gamers seriously. We don't want to sell them a cheap story about some great hero saving the world. When we made this decision we didn't realize how serious a step it was going to be. We had to work out every detail that would make our story "mature." In his books, Andrzej Sapkowski never avoided harsh topics like violence or racism. We decided not to change his style, and to make The Witcher a more mature game. We want to get the attention of gamers who are interested in a deep story and the consequences that come along with making tough decisions throughout the game.
GS: How open-ended is the world in The Witcher? Will players be able to go off and explore anywhere you want at any time, or will you tightly restrict where players will go?
MM: As for the gameworld, after some discussion, we came to the conclusion that an entirely free world, as seen in games like Oblivion, wouldn't exactly suit our plans for the game. Hence our decision to somewhat limit the player's freedom, naturally in exchange for huge, original, and intriguing locations full of interesting non-player characters.
Moreover, if you look at some of the games known for their entirely free worlds, you'll find that the dynamic and smooth advancement of the plotline is sometimes difficult. That's why we've focused on creating a world with some limitations to freedom, but with huge locations, where the player will always discover something new to do or see.
A large, free-roaming world is great for massively multiplayer online games, but in single-player RPGs it's better to do something to keep players interested all the time with changes in the story, locations full of interesting NPCs and events, and so on. But, I want to say it once more: The world players will enter in The Witcher is big enough that they'll be able to spend many hours just exploring.
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The Witcher Review
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