The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Preview
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With a focus on the game's three dozen different endings, open-world concept, and "legendary" monsters, PC Gamer has wrangled up a new preview of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that features commentary from lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, and writer Jakub Szamalek on the aforementioned topics and others. An excerpt:
(We have to plan how to cover this big open world with content, which is not easy, because as you know there are some problems with that in openworld games,) Mateusz says. (We want to give worthwhile content to the players in the open world. We have to think about how to avoid repetitive quests, we have to think about how to fill this huge landscape with quests that you will notice and take part in, we have to make the main storyline easy to come back to if you delve into the sidequests, which might be difficult for some players.)
Various activities fill the world outside of the main story, including monster-hunting quests where Geralt plies his trade. Far from the typical open-world filler of recycled character models, these creatures require tracking and hunting down, and each has a backstory. (They involve hunting legendary creatures,) Mateusz says. (They should be tougher to beat than normal opponents. Each encounter contains a unique creature and each of those hunts is unique. They're not repeatable, in the sense that they each have their own plot. You can expect each settlement will have at least one of them, if not more.)
Such '˜legendary' creatures can add mythic depth to open-world games, like Skyrim's legendary dragons or Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare's Bigfoot and Chupacabra hunts, where finding them is as much a challenge as killing them. In some cases the idea is to evoke medieval urban legends with the hunts such tales were the source of several creature ideas for CD Projekt Red's artists. (There were hundreds of Slavic monsters invented in medieval times, and they're all connected to some weird things that couldn't be explained,) says lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk. He cites the Leshen the disturbing humanoid tree spirit shown off at E3 as an example of this inspiration. (The name was quite unique, and we're trying to apply some kind of visual style to how cool the name is. It sounds cool in Polish. I'm not sure if it sounds cool in English.)
