Possible. But I never was a friend of the storytelling in Origins. For the ability to choose they sacrificied believablity and immersiveness. The world itself wasn't alive with you being just a character in it. On the opposite, each event "waited" to happen until you decided to go there. The same logic works perfectly fine in a directed, linear experience but it's pure poison in an open world game imo. Let's take a look at DA Origins. No matter if you went to the Circle or to Redcliffe first, your decision was meaningless. The mages waited to kill each other until you brought yourself visiting their circle and they just played roshambo if you decided to go to Redcliffe first. And if you went to the Cirle first the Darkspawn just waited to attack the Redcliffe castle, again, until you brought yourself to visiting the place. In other words: the free choice to proceed here was bought by sacrificing consequences.He suggests more of a Dragon Age: Origins approach which would compromise very well the whole open-world freedom with hub-based non-scaling enemies approach. I doubt that will be the case concerning traditional Witcher storytelling, but time will tell.
Maybe you can prevent that by penalizing the player for his choices all the time. Choice and proper effect on a constant leve. You didn't go to the Redliffe first in Origins? Ok, so the Darkspawn burnt down the castle and killed everybody or something along these lines. That would have been a believable narrative and a well done choice and consequence system. Problem is that it is extremely difficult to built an open world like that, incorporating all kinds of different consequences in a believable way and without alienating the mainstream audience too much (which I wouldn't mind but hey, let's stay realistic). The larger and more connected your world is the harder it is to implement such direct consequences into your game world. That's one of the core reasons why developers used relatively limited hubs for such consequence-heavy games (and Bioware even failed to do that properly WITH HUBS...). They require way less thought and effort to make that even remotely possible. And the problem gets even harder the more lifelike and less abstract your overall world is. There is a reason why post-apocalyptical settings are pretty good for such games. They offer quite a lot of empty spaces with seperated, small communites or locations that don't communicate much with each other and aren't really connected. Visiting a place in Fallout New Vegas or Fallout 3 and doing something "bad" doesn't necessarily destroy the overall immserion if you went to another place and nobody knows that you just murdered 20 people for no reason. It's kind of believable that in a world without law, without any order and without any effective communication people neither know or care that much about what you do elsewhere. But in a game set in a still working society the problem is much bigger to let consequences of your actions really stay believable. The Witcher world might be medieval-like and fantasy, but it's not a broken, post-apocalyptic world. It's a world in which most people know who Geralt is or they know at least his reputation and occupation. Everything you do must have consequences. Actually every step you take in the game should have consequences. How should one realistically cope with that in an open, limitless world in which you can do "anything at any given time" according to CDPR's own marketing while most other experienced studios already often failed to do so with small hubs? I don't know, either they find the Golden Grail of RPG gaming and we should all bow our knees in praise or they just sacrificied something else in order to give people a free open world (and free is still to be better determined here). Giving up direction and giving people options isn't bad but it usually comes at a cost and I just cannot believe that the story-telling and narrative focus of the Witcher games will stay all the same just with open world added to it. That just sounds extremely overambitious to me, sorry.
But back to BlackWolf500's suggestion: yes, that would indeed be cool. But I doubt that they have the skill, money and capabilities to make that happen on a sufficient, immersive scale...