GRYOnline.pl interview with CDPR studio lead Adam Badowski - translation
This article has been already quoted and discussed in different places, mostly using Google Translate that usually fails hard with Polish, so I decided to translate it. Original source: http://www.gry-online.pl/S018.asp?ID=1132
We were recently flooded by delays from such big players like Rockstar, EA or Warner Brothers. You moved the release date twice last year too. The players will whine a little but in the long run it will be for the better for them. But there are still shareholders…
The circuimstances connected to Assassin’s Creed: Unity made people realize something. After moving the Watch Dogs release date earlier in the year for May Ubisoft probably didn’t want to wait with showing their next huge project to the world. Decision about releasing Unity has been made, although most probably the team itself knew that it’s too early. I think Ubisoft and other publishers learn thanks to it; they notice where the real dangers are. And usually they appear in places where the product has contact with the players who expect it to be good enough when they put it in their hands.
The projects in the industry are very complicated…Tell me, how long does it take to implement a boat? A programmer will say – 2 weeks. What if it turns out to be a month or two months? We have buffers but eventually we run out of them. There are lots of things that are easy to estimate and count, like preparing so called assets. For example you can create concept art in a predictable way, especially if you have a good team. But new idea or new gameplay features implementation is unmeasurable. Everyone has this problem, regardless of headcount. You can see it in case of big companies that have thousands of people available for a project. I think players understand it, publishers too.
And then there’s the shareholders issue you mention. They are not always familiar and understand what’s happening and how games are being made. For some of them it’s not even important.
How did the team react to the delay, considering the fact that it meant additional 3 months of intense work in a hot season? Was that a relief that the pile of duties was spread in time or they would prefer to put it all behind them?
I prefer speaking openly about the tendencies in the studio and I don’t want to hide anything here. Of course the whole team is hard at work and in a such a big group – contrary to popular belief – not many people have contact with the game in the final version, not to mention time for playing it. The team is simply busy with fixing bugs and they don’t know what the overall status of the development is. When we announced the delay internally the first reaction was a moan of disappointment. But it wasn’t a disappointment regarding all the additional months of work, many people believed that we will make it. Of course there are those who are really tired as those additional months mean additional hours spent on the project. Everyone wants to do their job the best they can but it’s not only a matter of wishes in such difficult tasks, you simply need to put a huge amount of effort in it. Furthermore the state of the game is unpredictable, The Witcher is such complicated that everyday we are facing new surprises. Even this presentation for press showed us many specific cases that are worth polishing or fixing.
How many people are working on The Witcher at the moment?
230 people.
Is this the peak moment?
Yeah, it’s the “all hands on deck” time so even if developers are not engaged in creating specific things, they become testers. They verify the game the best because they know their work in and out. Graphic guys see different things, designers different.
As the official announcement states, by delaying the game you want to “reduce bugs to a level allowing for full enjoyment of gameplay”. Will your experience with previous Witcher titles and Enhanced Editions change anything about the initial state of the game?
Of course, we’re making a multi-platform product now – including consoles that can work in offline mode – so we don’t have to download a patch to start the game. We try to find as many bugs as possible before day zero. We will also use the time from when the game gets shipped for certification to release to work on patches, but here we’re talking about slight corrections.
Don’t you think that developers started to exploit day 1 patches? Let’s take the Microsoft’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection that receives a 20GB patch on release as an example
Games change and so do players’ expectations, the latter growing constantly. PC games that I remember from many, many years ago were usually heavily unstable, fidgety, designed without a thought. Now it’s an entertainment product and consumers expect more from it. Projects are more complicated, elaborate, graphics are better, made by much bigger teams and so it all costs more money. It all means that bugs need to be fewer and development time gets extended to several years. Teams morph at one point, budgets reach limits of profitability and projects become risky. There has to be a limit set to the quantity of copies sold that will provide profitability. Industry realities and players expectations have to be considered and in one critical point the game just has to be released, not polished to infinity.
The consumer would like to receive a perfect product but I don’t think that developers would like to – speaking colloquially – scam people. It is already a world of big money and big risk, I think it’s better to deliver a solid product in good faith and then make another one than take some backbreaking steps until the company fails, which happens very often.
And don’t you think that AAA games started chasing their own tail – they must have even more content, worlds have to be bigger, everyone is counting square kilometres, quest and secrets number and compare them to other productions, and the budgets keep growing…
Many people heralded the fall of consoles to which the AAA games were attached. Many companies slipped on those predictions because consoles keep selling well. Just as the constantly critiqued Call of Duty – that I personally like a lot – keeps selling better. So nothing changes here.
The industry has to regulate itself and there’s no good recipe for this. We won’t all move to poorer countries to make games cheaper – I mostly mean developers from USA where hiring cost of specialists is very high. We are in a better situation that we are this cheaper country and we pay our employees less than in the US, this is obvious. That’s where we gain a little, thanks to that we can make bigger games. Besides, large RPGs come out rarely, we operate in a niche.
To sum it up, I wouldn’t predict the fall of AAA games. There was a lot of conversations about it 2 years ago in the context of indies but that’s another market segment.
On one hand you said that you are in a niche but on the other hand Witcher 3 is supposed to be a game directed at a mass customer
Witcher 3 is being made with 2 aspects in mind and I don’t want to be opportunistic here. We simply keep the richness of the world, the story is very elaborate, we introduced more characters, we have thousands of unique dialogue sequences that effect in hundreds of thousands(if you put the whole game together, of course) possibilities to configure the dialogues you have and expand the world, making it more believable.
This is the aspect important for RPG gamers, Witcher fans and those that follow us from the beginning. 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.
Can you turn off the hints?
Yes, and then follow the trail of a classic “RPG discoverer”. Noone can accuse us of dumbing down the game. We focused mostly on the transparency of the whole story, the world and the mechanics. We explain everything from the beginning, each character is introduced with some kind of plot. To tell the truth the story starts to rush much later, so we will have time to introduce everything at the beginning.
During one conference you said yourself that you would like to be second Bethesda, are you getting close to this goal?
We have a few openings. The Witcher 3 has to defend itself as a standalone game, we also enter a new market which is Playstation 4, therefore appearing for the first time on Sony’s platform.
We believe in this new opening and that’s why we changed the logo. You can start the adventure from the very first light, not knowing the series or the world. This is the element prepared with the mass customer in mind.
Do you have a clear way of solving the save game import issue from the previous installments on all the platforms? Are you planning anything like Dragon Age: Keep or something else?
When it comes to consoles you can continue the game and admit to certain facts but we did it differently than in Dragon Age: Keep. We used the game itself and dialogues between characters to make those choices
So it will be smoothly entwined into the gameplay?
Yeah, into the Prologue. When we reach Vyzima the player talks about his previous decisions. It’s not a table to fill but I don’t want to spoil further details at the moment. It’s worth noticing that it will be optional
Will you be able to import saves on PC? Will the solution you just described be also available to people who didn’t keep their saves?
Yes, you can use both options on PC
We haven’t covered the technical aspects of The Witcher 3 too much. I will quote your statement for Game Industry from March 2013: “PC allows for more at the moment but next-gens are catching up; it will be easier to unify the requirements in the future”. Do you think that the future has already come?
I think so, yes. You cannot develop a game for three platforms that will use all the amazing technical novelties and improvements that are unique for each device. This is a technical fact. Making an exclusive title allows to squeeze out much more from given machine.
The Witcher 3 is a rich production, we have plenty of outstanding characters, a few thousands heads[i.e. people/characters in the game I think – gregski]. Let’s add to this castles, 2 huge cities and the vast open world that needs filling. We did everything in our powers to make the game look amazing. And it’s not platform related…On PC we could raise the resolution as the hardware is stronger but we wouldn’t be able to do something new at the same time, like for example re-writing the whole rendering engine that would be able to display that amount of polygons. Maybe the game would look smoother if we had lightmapping of interiors but we wouldn’t be able to create dynamic lighting in the open world at the same time. We would eat the whole memory, even on PCs.
Platform unification exists – we have one build that gets distributed on each of them. The game is exactly the same, grass drawing distance is identical everywhere. The differences result from GPU having different parameters on each console for example, which could effect in differences in colour temperature.
And how will the PC ultra compare to consoles?
You will be able to find some small differences like Nvidia Hairworks for example but they are very demanding graphically so you must have a strong machine. It’s not a political thing to say but in the future you will be able to turn on Ubersampling that killed the Witcher 2 at release and now it will do the same, so we don’t want to unlock it now. The game looks better but has absurd requirements.
Are all models and textures the same?
Yes, there’s only one version, without it we wouldn’t be able to deliver the game on time. We would have to strip it down, build and test separately on all 3 platforms which is infeasible. To we do it all on one foundation and then distribute it to all devices.
We manage the memory differently on platforms that have less of it. Less complex models are loaded, it all depends on what happens on the screen at given moment. To sum it up there are not many differences between PC, PS4 and Xbox One, they rather fix certain problems than change the configuration
Did you watch the comments under the Witcher 3 VGA trailer where some commenters complained about the graphics quality changing for worse compared to the first materials?
Yes, of course…
Aren’t you afraind that the Watch_Dogs case will repeat itself after launch, when people compared the first trailer with the actual version of the game?
If someone watches this trailer they will notice that character models in the game look better, even Geralt is more perfect – he has better shaders for example. We added tons of details, improved the facial expressions and lip sync significantly. We have voiceovers in 7 languages so we’re not able to record the changes on actor’s faces in performance capture technology like in Call of Duty for example. It wouldn’t fit into 3 Blu-ray discs. So we used a dynamic system based on sounds, similarly to TW1 and TW2 where it came out poorly. In the Witcher 3 it’s incomparably better made, we raised the bar for the whole industry compared to games that have to use the same system(like Bioware games) and that also cannot be seen in that trailer.
What is subjective though is the quality of lighting and exposure in that trailer. We made a mistake that some of the scenes was rendered in dark and grey-ish colours. Such option was simply drawn by the engine. I think there will be places where the game will look stunning and noone will accuse us that it looks different than the first trailer. Unfortunately there will be also fragments where the game will look worse. It’s the same with GTA – when the squall comes and it’s all grey, especially in the forest, the game will come out as worse than the one from the living city illuminated by neons.
Will the game be displayed in 900p on Xbox One?
Yes, 900p upscaled to 1080 but it’s not out of the question that we will manage to improve those conditions.
The Witcher 3 on PC has quite high requirements, minimal ones are close to those recommended for GTA V
The requirements that we release are real, we don’t underrepresent them. That’s what our programmers fought for, the optimization gets better with each day.
Will we reach 30 or 60 FPS on the recommended requirements?
I think that we will display 30 FPS. We plan to work on performance till the very end, this is really important, the hardware is very diversified. The programmers really pushed us not to perform demagoguery and not deceive anyone, not pulled up the released requirements for lower specs. It’s how we wrote it, it can only get better.
Wasn’t Cyberpunk announced too early? Wasn’t that move calculated for shareholders, to show them that CDPR has bigger portfolio?
Not really. Of course it’s important to have plans and to achieve them. We wanted to present the vision of ourselves this way. This is important for the company, especially one like ours which is both – a developer and publisher. The moment we announced Cyberpunk we really got to it. After that it turned out that we need to finish the Witcher 3 and we needed help. We used our team mostly for the Witcher 3 purposes lately and after release we will focus on Cyberpunk. Of course we haven’t announced the release date so noone can accuse us of anything.
Will we get to see Cyberpunk at this year’s E3?
This year belongs to the Witcher
This article has been already quoted and discussed in different places, mostly using Google Translate that usually fails hard with Polish, so I decided to translate it. Original source: http://www.gry-online.pl/S018.asp?ID=1132
The Witcher 3 – high requirements, differences between platforms. We question Adam Badowski, CD Projekt studio Lead.
We were recently flooded by delays from such big players like Rockstar, EA or Warner Brothers. You moved the release date twice last year too. The players will whine a little but in the long run it will be for the better for them. But there are still shareholders…
The circuimstances connected to Assassin’s Creed: Unity made people realize something. After moving the Watch Dogs release date earlier in the year for May Ubisoft probably didn’t want to wait with showing their next huge project to the world. Decision about releasing Unity has been made, although most probably the team itself knew that it’s too early. I think Ubisoft and other publishers learn thanks to it; they notice where the real dangers are. And usually they appear in places where the product has contact with the players who expect it to be good enough when they put it in their hands.
The projects in the industry are very complicated…Tell me, how long does it take to implement a boat? A programmer will say – 2 weeks. What if it turns out to be a month or two months? We have buffers but eventually we run out of them. There are lots of things that are easy to estimate and count, like preparing so called assets. For example you can create concept art in a predictable way, especially if you have a good team. But new idea or new gameplay features implementation is unmeasurable. Everyone has this problem, regardless of headcount. You can see it in case of big companies that have thousands of people available for a project. I think players understand it, publishers too.
And then there’s the shareholders issue you mention. They are not always familiar and understand what’s happening and how games are being made. For some of them it’s not even important.
How did the team react to the delay, considering the fact that it meant additional 3 months of intense work in a hot season? Was that a relief that the pile of duties was spread in time or they would prefer to put it all behind them?
I prefer speaking openly about the tendencies in the studio and I don’t want to hide anything here. Of course the whole team is hard at work and in a such a big group – contrary to popular belief – not many people have contact with the game in the final version, not to mention time for playing it. The team is simply busy with fixing bugs and they don’t know what the overall status of the development is. When we announced the delay internally the first reaction was a moan of disappointment. But it wasn’t a disappointment regarding all the additional months of work, many people believed that we will make it. Of course there are those who are really tired as those additional months mean additional hours spent on the project. Everyone wants to do their job the best they can but it’s not only a matter of wishes in such difficult tasks, you simply need to put a huge amount of effort in it. Furthermore the state of the game is unpredictable, The Witcher is such complicated that everyday we are facing new surprises. Even this presentation for press showed us many specific cases that are worth polishing or fixing.
How many people are working on The Witcher at the moment?
230 people.
Is this the peak moment?
Yeah, it’s the “all hands on deck” time so even if developers are not engaged in creating specific things, they become testers. They verify the game the best because they know their work in and out. Graphic guys see different things, designers different.
As the official announcement states, by delaying the game you want to “reduce bugs to a level allowing for full enjoyment of gameplay”. Will your experience with previous Witcher titles and Enhanced Editions change anything about the initial state of the game?
Of course, we’re making a multi-platform product now – including consoles that can work in offline mode – so we don’t have to download a patch to start the game. We try to find as many bugs as possible before day zero. We will also use the time from when the game gets shipped for certification to release to work on patches, but here we’re talking about slight corrections.
Don’t you think that developers started to exploit day 1 patches? Let’s take the Microsoft’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection that receives a 20GB patch on release as an example
Games change and so do players’ expectations, the latter growing constantly. PC games that I remember from many, many years ago were usually heavily unstable, fidgety, designed without a thought. Now it’s an entertainment product and consumers expect more from it. Projects are more complicated, elaborate, graphics are better, made by much bigger teams and so it all costs more money. It all means that bugs need to be fewer and development time gets extended to several years. Teams morph at one point, budgets reach limits of profitability and projects become risky. There has to be a limit set to the quantity of copies sold that will provide profitability. Industry realities and players expectations have to be considered and in one critical point the game just has to be released, not polished to infinity.
The consumer would like to receive a perfect product but I don’t think that developers would like to – speaking colloquially – scam people. It is already a world of big money and big risk, I think it’s better to deliver a solid product in good faith and then make another one than take some backbreaking steps until the company fails, which happens very often.
And don’t you think that AAA games started chasing their own tail – they must have even more content, worlds have to be bigger, everyone is counting square kilometres, quest and secrets number and compare them to other productions, and the budgets keep growing…
Many people heralded the fall of consoles to which the AAA games were attached. Many companies slipped on those predictions because consoles keep selling well. Just as the constantly critiqued Call of Duty – that I personally like a lot – keeps selling better. So nothing changes here.
The industry has to regulate itself and there’s no good recipe for this. We won’t all move to poorer countries to make games cheaper – I mostly mean developers from USA where hiring cost of specialists is very high. We are in a better situation that we are this cheaper country and we pay our employees less than in the US, this is obvious. That’s where we gain a little, thanks to that we can make bigger games. Besides, large RPGs come out rarely, we operate in a niche.
To sum it up, I wouldn’t predict the fall of AAA games. There was a lot of conversations about it 2 years ago in the context of indies but that’s another market segment.
On one hand you said that you are in a niche but on the other hand Witcher 3 is supposed to be a game directed at a mass customer
Witcher 3 is being made with 2 aspects in mind and I don’t want to be opportunistic here. We simply keep the richness of the world, the story is very elaborate, we introduced more characters, we have thousands of unique dialogue sequences that effect in hundreds of thousands(if you put the whole game together, of course) possibilities to configure the dialogues you have and expand the world, making it more believable.
This is the aspect important for RPG gamers, Witcher fans and those that follow us from the beginning. 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.
Can you turn off the hints?
Yes, and then follow the trail of a classic “RPG discoverer”. Noone can accuse us of dumbing down the game. We focused mostly on the transparency of the whole story, the world and the mechanics. We explain everything from the beginning, each character is introduced with some kind of plot. To tell the truth the story starts to rush much later, so we will have time to introduce everything at the beginning.
During one conference you said yourself that you would like to be second Bethesda, are you getting close to this goal?
We have a few openings. The Witcher 3 has to defend itself as a standalone game, we also enter a new market which is Playstation 4, therefore appearing for the first time on Sony’s platform.
We believe in this new opening and that’s why we changed the logo. You can start the adventure from the very first light, not knowing the series or the world. This is the element prepared with the mass customer in mind.
Do you have a clear way of solving the save game import issue from the previous installments on all the platforms? Are you planning anything like Dragon Age: Keep or something else?
When it comes to consoles you can continue the game and admit to certain facts but we did it differently than in Dragon Age: Keep. We used the game itself and dialogues between characters to make those choices
So it will be smoothly entwined into the gameplay?
Yeah, into the Prologue. When we reach Vyzima the player talks about his previous decisions. It’s not a table to fill but I don’t want to spoil further details at the moment. It’s worth noticing that it will be optional
Will you be able to import saves on PC? Will the solution you just described be also available to people who didn’t keep their saves?
Yes, you can use both options on PC
We haven’t covered the technical aspects of The Witcher 3 too much. I will quote your statement for Game Industry from March 2013: “PC allows for more at the moment but next-gens are catching up; it will be easier to unify the requirements in the future”. Do you think that the future has already come?
I think so, yes. You cannot develop a game for three platforms that will use all the amazing technical novelties and improvements that are unique for each device. This is a technical fact. Making an exclusive title allows to squeeze out much more from given machine.
The Witcher 3 is a rich production, we have plenty of outstanding characters, a few thousands heads[i.e. people/characters in the game I think – gregski]. Let’s add to this castles, 2 huge cities and the vast open world that needs filling. We did everything in our powers to make the game look amazing. And it’s not platform related…On PC we could raise the resolution as the hardware is stronger but we wouldn’t be able to do something new at the same time, like for example re-writing the whole rendering engine that would be able to display that amount of polygons. Maybe the game would look smoother if we had lightmapping of interiors but we wouldn’t be able to create dynamic lighting in the open world at the same time. We would eat the whole memory, even on PCs.
Platform unification exists – we have one build that gets distributed on each of them. The game is exactly the same, grass drawing distance is identical everywhere. The differences result from GPU having different parameters on each console for example, which could effect in differences in colour temperature.
And how will the PC ultra compare to consoles?
You will be able to find some small differences like Nvidia Hairworks for example but they are very demanding graphically so you must have a strong machine. It’s not a political thing to say but in the future you will be able to turn on Ubersampling that killed the Witcher 2 at release and now it will do the same, so we don’t want to unlock it now. The game looks better but has absurd requirements.
Are all models and textures the same?
Yes, there’s only one version, without it we wouldn’t be able to deliver the game on time. We would have to strip it down, build and test separately on all 3 platforms which is infeasible. To we do it all on one foundation and then distribute it to all devices.
We manage the memory differently on platforms that have less of it. Less complex models are loaded, it all depends on what happens on the screen at given moment. To sum it up there are not many differences between PC, PS4 and Xbox One, they rather fix certain problems than change the configuration
Did you watch the comments under the Witcher 3 VGA trailer where some commenters complained about the graphics quality changing for worse compared to the first materials?
Yes, of course…
Aren’t you afraind that the Watch_Dogs case will repeat itself after launch, when people compared the first trailer with the actual version of the game?
If someone watches this trailer they will notice that character models in the game look better, even Geralt is more perfect – he has better shaders for example. We added tons of details, improved the facial expressions and lip sync significantly. We have voiceovers in 7 languages so we’re not able to record the changes on actor’s faces in performance capture technology like in Call of Duty for example. It wouldn’t fit into 3 Blu-ray discs. So we used a dynamic system based on sounds, similarly to TW1 and TW2 where it came out poorly. In the Witcher 3 it’s incomparably better made, we raised the bar for the whole industry compared to games that have to use the same system(like Bioware games) and that also cannot be seen in that trailer.
What is subjective though is the quality of lighting and exposure in that trailer. We made a mistake that some of the scenes was rendered in dark and grey-ish colours. Such option was simply drawn by the engine. I think there will be places where the game will look stunning and noone will accuse us that it looks different than the first trailer. Unfortunately there will be also fragments where the game will look worse. It’s the same with GTA – when the squall comes and it’s all grey, especially in the forest, the game will come out as worse than the one from the living city illuminated by neons.
Will the game be displayed in 900p on Xbox One?
Yes, 900p upscaled to 1080 but it’s not out of the question that we will manage to improve those conditions.
The Witcher 3 on PC has quite high requirements, minimal ones are close to those recommended for GTA V
The requirements that we release are real, we don’t underrepresent them. That’s what our programmers fought for, the optimization gets better with each day.
Will we reach 30 or 60 FPS on the recommended requirements?
I think that we will display 30 FPS. We plan to work on performance till the very end, this is really important, the hardware is very diversified. The programmers really pushed us not to perform demagoguery and not deceive anyone, not pulled up the released requirements for lower specs. It’s how we wrote it, it can only get better.
Wasn’t Cyberpunk announced too early? Wasn’t that move calculated for shareholders, to show them that CDPR has bigger portfolio?
Not really. Of course it’s important to have plans and to achieve them. We wanted to present the vision of ourselves this way. This is important for the company, especially one like ours which is both – a developer and publisher. The moment we announced Cyberpunk we really got to it. After that it turned out that we need to finish the Witcher 3 and we needed help. We used our team mostly for the Witcher 3 purposes lately and after release we will focus on Cyberpunk. Of course we haven’t announced the release date so noone can accuse us of anything.
Will we get to see Cyberpunk at this year’s E3?
This year belongs to the Witcher
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