The Questing Beast: A Q&A with RED Quest Designers Pawel Sasko and Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz

+
If you ever have another interview, I have a question that ties in-to question #5.

Did the writers and quest designers more often find themselves cutting game-play and combat to keep the game balanced, or cutting narrative?
 
Great put together questions and great anwers.. many thanks to every involved in this.. great time reading this..
P.S. I only miss one (or two) questions and their opinion about the political side of the game - mainly Reason of State quest (and Djikstra's/Radovid's character), but anyway, great work :)
 
Good read, nice work Riven :thumbup:

I would like to know quest specific stories they want to add which don't fit it the lore?
Which fantasy settings don't belong in Witcher lore?
I think what they had in mind was something like this :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnoDqGTrcYA

No, but seriously, I think what they meant was that Geralt wouldn't ever kill civilians, someone defenseless or be a soldier, a mercenary, or a bounty hunter (although they kinda did push it with Whoreson Junior and Radovid, but I guess they justified it with 'Geralt's personal reasons'). Something along those lines
 
Loved the interview, and I am really looking forward to Blood and Wine, I haven't even touched on Hearts of Stone yet, but the game is so massive I want to do a NG+ Death March run of the whole game + expansion content all in one go after a few months hiatus to relive this incredible journey again.

I love getting an insider view of the quests and reading about story/gameplay balances. As a fan, there's always going to be some quest storyline I wish went another way, or that I want more details or a better resolution on, but in truth that yearning for closure and details just proves what a fantastic job the quest designers did in the first place. If any quest or story was just poorly written or designed I wouldn't care, it wouldn't stick with me as much or leave me desiring more of it. So major kudos to the writing staff and I hope to be just as blown away and impressed by the two expansions (and that secret wrapping-up-all-loose ends third expansion you all are keeping hush-hush *wink* )
 
If you ever have another interview with them please ask them about open world games main story pacing. Do they understand they narrative must suffer in the open world game? Ask them about quest design in a way that there's too much traveling involved in many quests. Markers was just too far away and many times you can even forgot what you were doing because of that. Also about fetch quests... I feel there was just too many sidequests. I cared about first 5 women i meet that were hungry and stuff, but after a while it just becomes boring. I wanna do quests with characters that main character really cares about (like yen or triss), not with random npcs. Ofc there must be some quests like that, but there are much more quests like that than even main ones, which is just wrong prioritizing. They went for quantity and quality, but in that quantity you just lose the sense of caring after a while. After meating 20th grieving mother you couldn't care less about her anymore, especially if you're on some kind of urgency regarding the main quest (again pacing in open world games...). And please try to bring their attention to soundtrack (which was awesome) and if they can to connect it better in quests. Even in main quest, even in cutscenes of the main quests soundtrack was mostly connected to environment. That way music was almost the same if you're just wondering around town or if you're doing main quest, which is awful imo (there were exceptions, but it wasn't done nearly as good as in witcher 2). You had many great questions, but I think you could criticize them some more, because i feel they welcome it and perhaps they would correct those things in future games. Cheers.
 
Last edited:
I cared about first 5 women i meet that were hungry and stuff,
After meating 20th grieving mother you couldn't care less about her anymore,

Are we discussing the same game here? Where were all these hungry women and grieving mothers?

And that reads more like "giving them a list of your complaints" than asking about things you're interested in hearing the answers to. A little one way, don't you think?
 
There are a lot of sidequests with the same or similar subjects, you can't deny that. And yes they always tried to make it unique, but like I said the mere amount of sidequests is counterproductive. I would much rather have 5 sidequests that are long as 20 than 20 sidequests that are long as 5 should be. I just can't care that much for random npcs and they are the most common thing you meet in game.

I'm just wondering if they understand problems their game has and I would like to know their opinions on these problems (they're problems for me anyways).
 
Last edited:
If you ever have another interview with them please ask them about open world games main story pacing.
Thank you for your interest. I've seen criticisms similar to yours before, and I'm fairly certain the REDs have seen them as well. For this Q&A, I attempted to ask both general and more critical questions.

I can't tell for certain if there will be another interview, and I'll make no promises in that direction, nor regarding answers to your concerns about the game. However, I'll at least keep them in mind.
 
Good interview but unfortunately it avoids or sugarcoats inconvenient questions. Was there an agreement in advance that they won't be answering those? Because there are no questions about self-censorship, declining quality of the plot as the game progresses, and general downgrade of the main game plot to a teenage level of maturity. And it's interesting what was the reason (in their opinion) of CDPR's epic comeback with Hearts of Stone expansion after the main plot failed in the main game (there was a huge topic about that some time ago).

Also, the quest designers who were answering questions are responsible for the better quests in the game. Big respect to them, they did a great job. I hope, people who designed the Reasons of State and the Wild Hunt interactions are hiding in shame...

17. On a related note, Ciri’s final confrontation with the White Frost strikes some of us as idiotic – there’s something missing . . . . Was the potential to remove altogether that mysterious encounter ever discussed?
fixed that for you
 
I just have a simple questions i have heard that the current level cap is 70 and my question is is will the level cap be raised to level 100? The only reason why i ask is because im hearing a lot of rumors going around that it the cap could be raised to 100 after the blood and wine expansion comes out.
 
Hello,

at this moment I have read the info, you have improved your inventory-system for Blood & Wine again. Supposing what I don't hope, I don't like it (again) and I want to sort my items manually: Will be this time my manually sort fixed and marked over save, quit the game and new loading again?

And I forget, sorry, can I now split an amonut of items in the inventory and join it again, as it be normally in other electronic RPGs?
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom