Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz loves Dark Souls and Demon's Souls and has finished both a number of times. He likes how "you are stronger because you as the player learn how to control your character and how to play to kill these monsters". You stop thinking about how to do something and feel the fight instead. "And this is a really great thing," he believes.
"We tried in The Witcher 2 to make this high difficulty level but it was a mistake," he admitted, "because we tried to mix two different games." The Witcher fans wanted a traditional RPG with a story, not a challenge based on their dexterity.
"Dark Souls influenced me very much because I love games like this, but I understand after The Witcher 2 that we should less experiment on stuff like this but more focus on the things which people love in our games," he said.
The learning curve in The Witcher 3 will be "proper", then - not like the much lamented learning curve in The Witcher 2. There will be difficulty levels in The Witcher 3, but unlike The Witcher 2, Normal won't feel like Hard. "It wasn't a good decision," Tomaszkiewicz added. "Right now we're changing it and I believe that everyone will go in this world very smooth and we will not get problems like it was in The Witcher 2."
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES and no...
The fact that the team loves FromSoft's fucking masterpiece brings so much joy to me. It's one of the tightest designed games I've played, well, ever! However, I'm not as happy at the fact that they might not be taking so many tips and ideas from Dark Souls. It doesn't have to be the combat. It could be with the presentation. The way the environments can tell a story of its own, location of equipment matter, or lore exposition in item descriptions. FromSoft know their shit. They're extremely talented and I think RED could benefit from learning something from them.
Though I'll be seriously disappointed if they don't take any hints regarding the combat. Witcher 2 had real nice kinaesthetics and sound design. It was just the combat design that was really shoddy. In fact, it took Dark Souls to open my eyes to how, unfortunately, broken it is. Some cues can be learned and implemented in TW3 in order to improve the overall quality. Like I said, Dark Souls is an incredible game, so well designed it's not even funny. But the greatest strength is its flawless combat. Well near flawless but I don't think any other game has ever come so close to melee fighting perfection as DS has. So hopefully RED will look at patterns, letting the player express himself through a complex ludic language and preferably also looking at how to create a flow in combat, to make sure combat doesn't just degenerate into a button masher.
Here's to hoping. Still, I'm confident in their ability. When I first played Witcher 2, I thought THAT game had fantastic combat so they're doing something right. I'm hoping they're fusing the best of both world to create something unique and their own. And I'm sure they'll succeed in just that. Because they're RED and they probably kicked O&S asses with a shitty dagger, naked and without any poise. Like a bouse!!
Oh and also...
"The consequences in our games are not immediate," said Szamalek, "so when you do something you learn about what happened because of that later on, so that you cannot simply reload and try a different option. We definitely want players to take responsibility and feel responsible for what they do in the game."
I saw this first hand in a demo, when Geralt sided with a faction only to witness an unforeseen and significant twist later on. I'd have picked differently had I known. Will people wanting to pick a very deliberate line through the hazy-grey morals of The Witcher 3 feel this is unfair?
"You're correct that some players like to control everything," lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz (Konrad's brother) responded, "but because some things are unexpected you feel like this world isn't just a schematic. It's not a mechanical world where you only choose obvious things and you are always in control. People who live in it have their own motivations; factions go their own ways and things change. That is more realistic. It's just the approach we chose in our game."
They get it. They totally get it. This is one of the big reasons why I hate that they wanted to apologize for saying the truth regarding Skyrim. Skyrim is decent enough to warrant a purchase if you're into that kind of thing, but it's pretty garbage. And one of the reasons it's garbage is because it doesn't force you to take responsibility for your actions. Gameplay obligations are a must in this medium. For example, in Whiterun, you couldn't kill the Jarl. Bullshit. Absolutely horrid design. In Morrowind, you could kill anyone and everyone, if YOU WANTED TO. But if you chose to do that, then don't start crying about how you broke the game. YOU did that. Take responsibility. Don't be a genocidal maniac!
Limiting the player's autonomy is never the answer. And this shit doesn't just apply to RPGs. As a game designer, you need to foster player responsibility and try to incorporate that into the dynamic storytelling. I'm really glad RED realizes this. I can't fucking wait for Witcher 3 to completely fuck me up after I made, what I thought at the time, to be the best decision in a particular quest. Ooooh man. I'm gonna get lost in that game!