The Xbox 360 adaptation of one of the greatest PC games of 2011 finally came out, and we talked to the developers at CDProjekt RED to get their thoughts on bringing their dark, violent fantasy over to console.
Catch up on your Witcher 2 needs with everything you need to know about the game and/or my full review to get up to speed, or just continue on to read the answers sent in all the way from Poland by lead combat designer Maciej Szczesnik.
Did you worry that console RPG players would not accept how easily Geralt can be killed if they don’t plan ahead and play smart?
No, we didn’t. The game difficulty is one of The Witcher 2’s key features and I don’t think that console players differ from PC gamers when it comes to experiencing the game. I mean nobody likes to see the game over screen, but we didn’t want to make an infantile game. There is a lot of satisfaction when you get past the difficult moments in The Witcher 2. What’s interesting is that most people find those moments not so challenging after they figure out how to properly prepare for the fight. So just remember to use your head!
Our game is not a hack n’ slash game. The combat is really tactical and you cannot rush in to a horde of enemies and think that you will survive.
I think players appreciate that we give them something not all games have to offer – a fast paced combat with a vast array of tactical options. And you feel really good after you achieved something that, at first, felt impossible.
Are there any other perceived differences in audience between PC and Xbox that you thought about as you were creating the Enhanced Edition?
First of all, you have to know who the target of our game is. We seek out mature people who want ambitious entertainment. By mature we don’t even mean someone who is used to the usual “sex, nudity, alcohol, drugs” slogans on game boxes. Those elements are easy to spot on screenshots and gameplay videos. The real maturity of The Witcher is the type of moral choices you have to make.
What I want to stress is that we aim at a specific group of players: demanding gamers, who want something more than a button-mashing experience in front of a TV. And these people can be found on both Xbox and PCs. I don’t know the demographics of each platform; I believe they differ – the average Xboxer is different from the average PC gamer. But The Witcher was never for the average player. It is a game series for demanding grown-ups.
So we didn’t feel that any game content had to be changed during our adaptation process – nothing was censored, nothing removed. We did even the opposite – we added new content: 4 hours of new quests, 35 minutes of cinematics and much more… This makes the game even more immersive, and all the loose ends of the story are wrapped up. This allows us to make the whole story even better than before.
Difficult, unapologetic games have seemingly been making a comeback in recent years – Demon’s/Dark Souls, Super Meat Boy, etc. Do you see a trend there?
Maybe a trend is a strong word, but gamers seem to miss difficult games. The titles you mentioned are swimming against the prevailing current. If we lose all difficulty in games, they will be only an interactive movie and not challenges. It is a fact that games are easier than they used to be; e.g., Bioshock Infinite announced that its hardest setting will be called “1999 mode” – to show how games were played back then.
For us the word “game” implies that you might lose – no pain, no gain. And you get real satisfaction when you overcome the difficulty. In my opinion, games are all about beating the challenge. If it’s too easy, it becomes simply boring and unattractive. On the other side of the equation are the too-hard games, which frustrate the player. We want to deliver challenging encounters but without too much punishment for players.
One tip for all those who might get lost in the game – really play the tutorial we added, this makes your transition to the game easier and you won’t get killed so many times. The tutorial is something new we added after the initial release and makes the learning curve less steep.
Was including the adult content (nudity, sex) in the game any more of a struggle for the Xbox release, or was that battle already fought for the U.S. release of the original?
As already said – nothing was censored. We get the same mature RPG with sex scenes, distinguishing us from other games.
What’s worth mentioning is that the sex in our game isn’t there to be a cheap trick, but is added as an integrated part of the plot and serves our storytelling purposes. The fantasy world we take you to is dim, but if you think of it, it’s not the monsters or magic that make that atmosphere. It’s the people and their actions concerning things you find in real life – sex, power, money, greed. The world is dark because of the things the player finds around him.
[Next up: Fan feedback, sacred cows, and next-gen hardware.]
Are there any changes between the original release and the Enhanced Edition that made you question what the heck made you do it the original way in the first place? (As a player, I’m looking at the junk category of the inventory.)
Well, we prefer to add stuff in the Enhanced Edition than remove it. We listed 100 improvements made to the game mechanics and the reason they were added in the Enhanced Edition. We listened to the fan feedback. We gathered a lot of opinions from our audience and then found some things worth implementing. That’s how the upgrades in The Enhanced Edition were made.
Did a member of the development team ever push for changing something that the studio felt like would have went too far in changing the core of the game?
One difficult decision was to abandon the point & click controls [from the first Witcher game] and switch completely to third-person perspective mechanics. Some people didn’t want this change. That was a brave decision as it required changing pretty much everything in the game. We had a working solution for every aspect of The Witcher; we have made a successful game with our point & click controls. But we wanted to deliver a far more dynamic experience, so we had to change everything. So I think we have a lot of crazy ideas, sometimes some of them are a bit hardcore, but we always manage to choose those suitable for our theme and our game. We know our audience very well and we always try to make them happy in the first place. So to sum up – if an idea improves our game, it will never be crazy enough or difficult enough for us to not implement it.
What were the “sacred cows” – bedrock, core principles of the game – that were never under discussion for altering in patches or for the Enhanced Edition?
I think the core of the game is the type of choices the player faces. That is, morally ambiguous ones that are not absolutely good or evil. And the consequences of these should be not based on any statistic, but have real impact on the game world. These aspects are our trademark, and they will always stand. This is the core that implies other Witcher characteristics. The maturity of the game is the result of this principle.
If you had a major, mainstream U.S. publisher calling the shots in porting the game to console, what would it have looked like?
We don’t know. We work with a major U.S. publisher [Warner Bros. Interactive – ED] and they didn’t change our artistic vision at all. When we started to work on the series we defined our audience as this niche, which wants mature entertainment and our game will always be for those people. We won’t change that. Sure we want as many people as possible to play our game, but I don’t think we’ll abandon our rules and ideals.
Was there ever a point where you thought, “Oh no, the Xbox is never going to be able to run the game at the quality we demand?”
Maybe it wasn’t that extreme, but we did put a lot of effort in making the Xbox version meet our standards. We demanded a lot from ourselves and I think this went well. So we squeezed out as much as we could from the 360. What you get is a unique experience and one of the best looking games on this platform.
What technical hurdles that currently constrain developers like CDProjekt RED are going to go away in the next console generation?
It’s too early to talk about this, because we know nothing about the next generation of consoles. What seems obvious is that they’ll have a more powerful hardware and this gives us a lot of options. But as I said, let’s wait for more info about those consoles, because right now we are really just speculating even about their release.
Will there still be a meaningful distinction between console and PC development in the next console generation?
As before – I don’t have the slightest idea, because we don’t know anything about the next Xbox and PlayStation. So I cannot answer this question. I can hope that the development for multiple platforms will be easier for us...