"But if we ventured back in time with all we know and have now, we could avoid all those walls we crashed into head-on. "We made up for it with passion, commitment and plain hard work - and that's why, in spite of everything, the game was a success," Kanik said. But looking back from the vantage point of 2015, it's hard for him not to wonder what The Witcher could have been if only they'd been a bit wiser.
Improvised solutions like these let the team overcome their crude tools and lack of experience, and that's why Kanik can't call their effort a failure. Scripts in Neverwinter Nights were assigned to objects, so oftentimes we would place more complex bits of logic, for instance, in a torch hanging on the wall of a building inhabited by some specific NPCs." "I can't count the number of times we had to resort to scripting unique events. "I remember thinking that the tool was pretty rigid, that it afforded designers little flexibility," he continued. Merchants would hawk their wares, guardsmen would patrol Vizima's back streets."īut the Neverwinter Nights engine still had to be clubbed into submission in some other ways, using tricks that are both laughable and ingenious. They'd leave their homes in the morning, visit the local tavern after work to unwind, then go home to their families come evening. "It wasn't easy, but ultimately we managed to produce something that truly resembled a living world, where folk had their jobs and lifestyles. "Since BioWare's engine didn't support large in-game communities, we had to create our own tools that would let us generate populations that would be satisfactory in size and follow a daily life cycle," Tomaszkiewicz said. I remember being floored when the skies opened up over a tiny village center and everyone started running for shelter, clustering under eaves and awnings while waiting for the storm to pass. One of the unique things about The Witcher, back in 2007, was the way it was brimming with life-like details. Above all, we wanted to push the envelope graphically, so we rebuilt the renderer from scratch and created our own means for displaying visuals."
On top of that, we had huge ambitions that extended well beyond the capabilities of BioWare's engine.
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Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, another CDP Game Director, explained, "It was our first title, a project we actually used to learn how to develop games. The Witcher remains a strange game, and a big part of its unusual character comes from the struggles CD Projekt endured as it battled the Neverwinter Nights engine. Kanik means his remark in good humor, but there's some truth to his harsh self-assessment. In hindsight, I honestly have to say that we were wrong." "What's more, we actually believed we had the know-how to do it.
"You have to remember that back around 2005-2007, we were really young, really inexperienced, even outright naive in that we thought we could accomplish anything," said Mateusz Kanik, Game Director.
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Later, I remember people talking about this legendary document, but that meeting was the first and only time I ever saw it."ĭespite the popularity of the original Witcher novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, the game series started on a wing and a prayer. " Michał Kiciński produced a sheet of paper and said that he had the story blueprint for a three-part saga about the witcher. "I remember a meeting that took place around the time when The Witcher was released," wrote Sebastian Stępień, Creative Director at CD Projekt Red. How much of The Witcher series' evolution was by design, and how much was improvised? It's hard to say, even for the CDP veterans who oversaw Geralt's video game odyssey from beginning to end. Yet despite the way CD Projekt Red lurched from one design to another, the series also retained an undeniably unique and consistent identity. Unlike a series like Mass Effect, where the first game's design laid a foundation for each subsequent instalment, The Witcher series completely reinvented itself at every turn.
The Witcher 3 brings to a close one of the strangest trilogies in games.