When GameInformer talked with Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, they juiced out some tasty morsels about what to expect from Geralt of Rivia in the third title. That, and Konrad’s true feelings about Skyrim. While everyone over at CD Projekt Red was playing Skyrim at some point, Tomaszkiewicz saw flaws in the popular role playing game and wanted to advance upon it.
"The lessons we learned from Skyrim is that you need to care about immersion in the game all of the time."
"You can't show that you've got some generic solutions or engineering stuff in the game. And Skyrim, it was generic; you could make the same quest a few times and every time [the] NPC didn't spot that you made it for him previously. To make this immersion every quest needs to be designed this way that NPC reacts for what you are doing.
"The second thing, thinking about Skyrim, is that they don't got very good characters," he added. "I tried to remember five characters from Skyrim and name them from my memory, and I can't, because this storyline is very generic and exploring the world is cool but they missed it."
So in a nut shell, he loves the open world model but dislikes the lack of memorable NPCs. I played through Witcher 2 and Skyrim – he has a point. I only remember Lydia and that's only because she was ‘special.’ The Witcher has more memorable characters because it is more linear. If Witcher 3 can be open world and NOT lose the memorable characters, there is something truly awesome on the horizon.
Like any game designer should, CD Projekt Red is looking at their past games, the RPGs from other studios, and asking the big question ‘how can we make this better?’ Konrad even added, "But when we combine it with our knowledge from the previous games it will be perfect RPG." Now saying you’re going to make the perfect RPG is a preeeeetty powerful statement. If the studio actually comes through what it’s saying… who knows?
[EuroGamer via GameInformer]
