The prologue and the streamlining that we create for the new user is the second aspect, also really important. The quest goals are clear and readable but the player who knows the world won’t look at them.
Noone can accuse us of dumbing down the game.
The game is exactly the same, grass drawing distance is identical everywhere.
To sum it up there are not many differences between PC, PS4 and Xbox One, they rather fix certain problems than change the configuration
Thanks for this honest words, maybe the most honest words coming from CDPR I've read in months. But I also got very sad when I read this interview.
It was the uniqueness, the niche appeal, and the PC-centered approach of W1 and W2 which made those games so great imo. Streamlining the formula and opening it to the mass console market will most likely lead to an inferior product at its very core no matter how much they talk about features and improvements. And to be honest, those bits about graphics on PC sound a whole lot different to what they "promised" us a few months back aka "the PC version will look MUCH better than the console version" and stuff along that line. Apparently that was very much exaggerated.
Don't get me wrong. I still hope W3 will be an awesome game and I don't really care that much about graphics. But I do care about that "mass market" appeal and the compromises that were made to achieve that. They might tell me that I can deactivate quest markers and such but that doesn't change how quests are structured. The hands-on previews pretty much proved that most (all?) quests didn't require much real thinking or "old RPG discoverness". Just enable your godlike Witcher senses and you have your solution. Dumbing quest design down by its finest imo. If that is only one aspect of "streamlining the game for the mass appeal" I fear of what might follow that we haven't heard of so far.
It's pretty sad to see that CDPR seem to follow the "typcial" franchise development. You make a unique and innovative, but small and more niche game that aquires a really enthusiastic community, then you make a bigger and better sequel for basically the same audience and then, when you've reached a certain size threshold, you decide that the third game must have mass appeal. Your former core community (and customership) isn't the prime democracy anymore but just one part of it. You want the bigger oak tree that is beyond that, the mass market AAA gamer who wants vanilla mainstream mass market formulas like "open world", "fast rewards", "simple quests that don't require much effort or thinking", "accessible gameplay" and yes - maybe you need them to justify your size. But you cannot neglect that you've given something up in the process, that you betrayed or at least disappointed your former core community to a certain extend by spreading too far and too thin. That's sadly inevitable in such a process somehow and somewhere.
In the end there is a difference between a GOTY and a cult classic. One is "just" a great game loved or at least liked by many, the other is among the all time favorites of some people. I fear W3 will never belong to the latter category but very likely belong to the former one. Forgive me, but for me, as an old-school PC gamer, a cRPG enthusiast and a die-hard Witcher fan this is bad news.
