The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Interview

The Witcher 2 senior producer Tomasz Gop has been busy answering quite a few questions about the RPG sequel lately, with the most recent batch appearing over at Bit-tech. The usual sampling:
BT: You've said there are 16 endings for the new game - how different are they? Are they all very different or are a lot of them almost identical, just with minor differences?

CDP: The endings in The Witcher 2.I usually call them the 16 states in which you can leave the world behind you, so it's not like just 16 different cutscenes at the end. It's more about changing the world that you're in, or the NPCs that are alive or dead. The story of the huge societies that are in the world, because there's lots of politics involved, so it's like those are the states of the world.

Some of the changes are bigger, some are smaller, but I'm sure you'll be able to understand all of them and know why things happened this way. It's not like choose one of the 16 numbers at the end and there you have it. Some of the endings get cut out or cut off at the beginning or close to the beginning of the game, for example. It's not just all about the last act; it takes the whole game into account. There are more factors that affect the world than in the first game, because in The Witcher 1 it was mostly about alliances, but here, alliances are just one of the factors that influences how the story branches.