Inteview with Marcin Iwiński
I found this interview with Marcin Iwinski, co-founder of CDProjekt and our lord and savior.
No huge news in it, but its still pretty cool, he is anwering some interesting things, Take a look.
By the way the interview in german, so a wrote an english translation for you guys
How much did The Witcher 3 suffer from illegal downloads?
I already talked about this at the time of The Witcher 2 with PCgamer , at this time we estimated the illegal copies at 5 Million (rough estimate), this time we said from the start, regardless of whether you bought it from store or from gog, it will always be DRM free and we were positively surprised, because we also tried to estimate the number of illegal downloads this time, we did it for example by comparing the number of patch downloads with the number of sales from gog, because the pirates did primarily download the gog version and not the steam version and if we compare these numbers then you will see that the number of illegal downloads has decreased, until now there are hundred thousands illegal downloads but not millions, of course I don’t have evidences, after all its just an estimation, we don’t track but we see that much more people bought the game on the first day instead of downloading it illegally compared to the Witcher 2, therefore is my conclusion very simple that our politics to treat the player fair and to offer DRM free downloads simply worked.
Why are open world games so popular right now?
I want to say at first, that I don’t believe we just do what everyone else does, we are doing something totally new by telling a real story in an open world and measured on the reaction of the players, we succeeded in creating a new quality in the genre, we put the story telling to a new level, in principle I believe what gamers want from an open world is that it reproduces the real world in some way, regardless of whether its fantasy or a sci fi setting, it’s about cancelling the limits of a computer game, being able to explore the world how you want it, it’s about freedom. I remember me on the first Witcher game, in the original version, there were always long loading times when entering a building, now in the Witcher 3 there are nearly no loading times, this makes the experience of the world a lot better and more seamless and ultimately I believe with this we can arouse the emotions of the player better and so we can tell our story better, of course that is just our approach other people may see this totally different, but the core is this playable freedom.
Is the world of the Witcher 3 european fantasy?
Look, when I play games, I hate to see things that look artificial, for example when I see a castle and the whole construction is bullshit, then this rips me out of the game, because of this, this kind of immersion is very important for us, all the castles in the game are all modeled after real buildings, from Poland, from Germany or from England, because of this they look so realistic, equally we want that Skellige captures the look of northern countries, the environment and the people who live there. In my opinion, this makes the game more believable and ultimately we can tell our story better this way, this is the particular reason. If you look at the American market, the game also works there, the game is really successful there, it’s at the top of the charts, because we offer something authentic and the game isn’t too complicated, its much more easy to lose yourself in this world. In the Witcher 2 this was a real problem, the learning curve was really steep, you died often, the game forgave only less errors, now you can just choose the story mode, you got a prologue which tells the player everything important, thats important for the American market, german and polish gamers are different, they love the challenge, they say: Bring it on!, they can choose the highest difficulty, but it also important there to put them carefully into the game, apart from that I really believe that its about making the game authentic.
Should the color pallet address the American market?
No, not that I knew. We have, in our studio, a huge board, on it we gave every part of the world his own unique color pallet, that they look all very authentic, the color pallet is inspired by famous paintings or photographs, our goal was that we could say that this certain color pallet resembles this certain region, because of this we put this board in the middle of the studio, so that everyone could see it, that everyone knows that this certain color pallet belongs to Skellige, this is how the northern region looks like and this is how Velen looks like, inspired by Slavic villages and this pallet belongs to Novigrad which is kind of an medieval Amsterdam and yes that’s all.
Part 2
Will consoles be more important, than the computer, for the Witcher in the future?
Oh my goodness, what people get excited about, I think we really made a good game, we come from a country which is strongly dominated by the PC, many people in our studio play on PC, I myself play on an iMac with Bootcamp, a big part of our sales is on PC, but why shouldn’t we allow people in other parts of the world, to play the game on console, why exclude those markets? I play on high settings on the PC and the game with me looks even better than on the PS4 and someday I will get a new PC and play it again on 4K, we will always offer this added value to the PC community and we are working right now on even more goodies for them. You also shouldn’t forget the average PC gamers have isn’t far away from the PS4, at least at the moment, in a few years this will be advanced and 4K will be the new standard, this will look gigantic and of course we will support it. For us the console will always be the lowest common denominator, we come from the PC development and it will be like that but the consoles allow us to address a much bigger audience. This is also good for our PC fans, because of this we can develop a much more extensive game, we couldn’t finance this with only the PC sales, than it would be much shorter.
How is the proportion of PC- and consolesales?
I can tell you a house number, we recently announced that we sold 4 million copies in the first 2 weeks, nvidia later published the sales of gog , those were roughly around 1,3-1,4 million, this means the PC makes 1/3 of the overall sales and with the time, this number will grow, because of discounts on the PC, in short I think the PC is in great condition, the console generation just started and the pC is shortly before 4K. This whole discussion is absurd, it’s about giving the player the game he wants, why should we isolate gamers just because they want to play on console and doesn’t have the money to buy a good PC? We strive to give the PC fans a really good version.
How did you experience the whole downgrade-debate?
To be honest, it touched us a, we were hurt a bit, but if the people see it like this, then we have to accept that they are right, because of this we tried in our patches and updates to rework things, and I think that we could convince those who thought that there is something going wrong, with facts and improvements. We showed them that we are still working on the game and that the PC version is after all the version with the best graphics, and it will beccome even more enhanced, because of this we are sorry if we disappointed players, but we are sure that they still enjoyed the game.
Will there be an enhanced version?
Just take a look on how we support the game, it’s right now already an enhanced version and this progress will go on, as we already said from the start, we will support the game for a long time, at least 2 years I think and at some point we will maybe offer it as an enhanced package, but for the moment will bring the patches to all the platforms as fast as we can. I think the modern technology allows us to give the player every day a small bit of enhancement
I found this interview with Marcin Iwinski, co-founder of CDProjekt and our lord and savior.
No huge news in it, but its still pretty cool, he is anwering some interesting things, Take a look.
By the way the interview in german, so a wrote an english translation for you guys
How much did The Witcher 3 suffer from illegal downloads?
I already talked about this at the time of The Witcher 2 with PCgamer , at this time we estimated the illegal copies at 5 Million (rough estimate), this time we said from the start, regardless of whether you bought it from store or from gog, it will always be DRM free and we were positively surprised, because we also tried to estimate the number of illegal downloads this time, we did it for example by comparing the number of patch downloads with the number of sales from gog, because the pirates did primarily download the gog version and not the steam version and if we compare these numbers then you will see that the number of illegal downloads has decreased, until now there are hundred thousands illegal downloads but not millions, of course I don’t have evidences, after all its just an estimation, we don’t track but we see that much more people bought the game on the first day instead of downloading it illegally compared to the Witcher 2, therefore is my conclusion very simple that our politics to treat the player fair and to offer DRM free downloads simply worked.
Why are open world games so popular right now?
I want to say at first, that I don’t believe we just do what everyone else does, we are doing something totally new by telling a real story in an open world and measured on the reaction of the players, we succeeded in creating a new quality in the genre, we put the story telling to a new level, in principle I believe what gamers want from an open world is that it reproduces the real world in some way, regardless of whether its fantasy or a sci fi setting, it’s about cancelling the limits of a computer game, being able to explore the world how you want it, it’s about freedom. I remember me on the first Witcher game, in the original version, there were always long loading times when entering a building, now in the Witcher 3 there are nearly no loading times, this makes the experience of the world a lot better and more seamless and ultimately I believe with this we can arouse the emotions of the player better and so we can tell our story better, of course that is just our approach other people may see this totally different, but the core is this playable freedom.
Is the world of the Witcher 3 european fantasy?
Look, when I play games, I hate to see things that look artificial, for example when I see a castle and the whole construction is bullshit, then this rips me out of the game, because of this, this kind of immersion is very important for us, all the castles in the game are all modeled after real buildings, from Poland, from Germany or from England, because of this they look so realistic, equally we want that Skellige captures the look of northern countries, the environment and the people who live there. In my opinion, this makes the game more believable and ultimately we can tell our story better this way, this is the particular reason. If you look at the American market, the game also works there, the game is really successful there, it’s at the top of the charts, because we offer something authentic and the game isn’t too complicated, its much more easy to lose yourself in this world. In the Witcher 2 this was a real problem, the learning curve was really steep, you died often, the game forgave only less errors, now you can just choose the story mode, you got a prologue which tells the player everything important, thats important for the American market, german and polish gamers are different, they love the challenge, they say: Bring it on!, they can choose the highest difficulty, but it also important there to put them carefully into the game, apart from that I really believe that its about making the game authentic.
Should the color pallet address the American market?
No, not that I knew. We have, in our studio, a huge board, on it we gave every part of the world his own unique color pallet, that they look all very authentic, the color pallet is inspired by famous paintings or photographs, our goal was that we could say that this certain color pallet resembles this certain region, because of this we put this board in the middle of the studio, so that everyone could see it, that everyone knows that this certain color pallet belongs to Skellige, this is how the northern region looks like and this is how Velen looks like, inspired by Slavic villages and this pallet belongs to Novigrad which is kind of an medieval Amsterdam and yes that’s all.
Part 2
Will consoles be more important, than the computer, for the Witcher in the future?
Oh my goodness, what people get excited about, I think we really made a good game, we come from a country which is strongly dominated by the PC, many people in our studio play on PC, I myself play on an iMac with Bootcamp, a big part of our sales is on PC, but why shouldn’t we allow people in other parts of the world, to play the game on console, why exclude those markets? I play on high settings on the PC and the game with me looks even better than on the PS4 and someday I will get a new PC and play it again on 4K, we will always offer this added value to the PC community and we are working right now on even more goodies for them. You also shouldn’t forget the average PC gamers have isn’t far away from the PS4, at least at the moment, in a few years this will be advanced and 4K will be the new standard, this will look gigantic and of course we will support it. For us the console will always be the lowest common denominator, we come from the PC development and it will be like that but the consoles allow us to address a much bigger audience. This is also good for our PC fans, because of this we can develop a much more extensive game, we couldn’t finance this with only the PC sales, than it would be much shorter.
How is the proportion of PC- and consolesales?
I can tell you a house number, we recently announced that we sold 4 million copies in the first 2 weeks, nvidia later published the sales of gog , those were roughly around 1,3-1,4 million, this means the PC makes 1/3 of the overall sales and with the time, this number will grow, because of discounts on the PC, in short I think the PC is in great condition, the console generation just started and the pC is shortly before 4K. This whole discussion is absurd, it’s about giving the player the game he wants, why should we isolate gamers just because they want to play on console and doesn’t have the money to buy a good PC? We strive to give the PC fans a really good version.
How did you experience the whole downgrade-debate?
To be honest, it touched us a, we were hurt a bit, but if the people see it like this, then we have to accept that they are right, because of this we tried in our patches and updates to rework things, and I think that we could convince those who thought that there is something going wrong, with facts and improvements. We showed them that we are still working on the game and that the PC version is after all the version with the best graphics, and it will beccome even more enhanced, because of this we are sorry if we disappointed players, but we are sure that they still enjoyed the game.
Will there be an enhanced version?
Just take a look on how we support the game, it’s right now already an enhanced version and this progress will go on, as we already said from the start, we will support the game for a long time, at least 2 years I think and at some point we will maybe offer it as an enhanced package, but for the moment will bring the patches to all the platforms as fast as we can. I think the modern technology allows us to give the player every day a small bit of enhancement
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