Witcher 3 Devs Open New Studio

A pair of designers who worked on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt development team have left CD Projekt Red to open their own studio. Wickerman Games is a new independent outfit based in the UK founded by Chris Hardwick (Witcher 3 senior engine programmer) and Dan Cordell (Witcher 3 environment artist).

Wickerman's overarching goal is to "make games we want to play that nobody seems to be making."

"We are both fans of pen and paper role-playing games such as Traveller, World of Darkness, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, and the venerable Dungeons & Dragons, and wish to marry our love of these games with our passion for creating video games," the team said in a news release.

Wickerman is aiming to develop its games out in the open, very transparently. Part of this includes releasing playable prototypes and even time-lapse videos of the team at work.

"Our idea is to give you all a front row seat into the game development process," the developers said. "This will all be done on a weekly basis for free."

In terms of the games that Wickerman hopes to make, they don't have any announced projects at the moment. However, they have released the teaser art you can see above. Whatever the case, the company wants to give players as much freedom as possible, and that's not all.

"Layering simple systems on top of one another to allow for some truly emergent gameplay," the developer said is another goal it has in mind. "Choices should matter and have a dramatic effect on the outcome of the plot and as such the game world needs to be built in such a way to accommodate this."

Finally, Wickerman said it learned a lot from CD Projekt Red's player-first mantra, and hopes to carry this forward with its own games.

"If we learned anything from our time at CD Projekt Red, it's that treating your customers well really just makes life better for everyone involved," they said. "After all, it is your hard-earned cash you are parting with. As the old saying goes, 'If it ain't broke don't fix it,' so we shall also be offering content DRM free (where possible) with a substantial amount of post-release support."

Hardwick and Cordell leave behind a mighty successful game in The Witcher 3, which has sold more than 6 million copies and helped CD Projekt Red generate a profit in the latest financial period.