The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Interview
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GameCyte: What was the primary motivation to optimize The Witcher, and fully relocalize it for English-speaking countries?
Maciej Szczesnik: We wanted to make this game even better. We had some suggestions from fans and press and also lots of our own ideas about how to improve The Witcher. This sort of thing often happens after the battle to hit deadlines. You work very hard for a few months in the studio, then you finally go to your home for well deserved rest, confident that you've done a great job. A normal person would go for a long, long vacation in the Bahamas, but what does a game developer do?
He sits in front of his PC, turns it on, runs the game he just made, plays a while, and thinks, (Oh my God! We should make this and that different, better, faster.) That was our situation. At first we made some patches, but we wanted to give more to those who trusted us and bought our debut game. This was the primary motivation to improve The Witcher. The goal of our studio is to make only triple-A games.
GameCyte: How did the decision first come about? Whose decision was it? Was there any particular resistance to/enthusiasm for the idea on the part of either CD Projekt or its Western publishers?
Tom Ohle: Don't get us wrong; we were very happy with The Witcher and were confident in the game we released. However, as Maciej said, we wanted to deliver the game that fans deserved. We were grateful for all of the feedback we got from fans and media (and horribly angry at the reduction in review scores brought about by the issues raised. the anger still builds up inside me sometimes, so bad I can hardly stand it!!!) .breathe, Tom, breathe.
Okay, so we had two options: just release a typical patch that would let us fix only a few of the issues, or whip a larger team together, spend some more money and make a lot of changes that would ultimately give us the best game possible. Our publishing partners have been very enthusiastic about the idea; rather than just churning out some (Game of the Year) edition, we're giving them a much more polished product that will help us reach a lot of people who never played the original.
