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THE WITCHER
THE WITCHER 2
THE WITCHER 3
THE WITCHER TALES

Witcher 3 News [LINKS & DISCUSSION]

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Garrison72

Garrison72

Mentor
#4,741
RivenII said:
Naught particularly new, but somewhat interesting, nonetheless: An interview (8.2.2016) by The Daily Crate with former quest designer Nikolas Kolm, on The Witcher III's quest design process, and one of his personal quests.
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Thanks for this. Black Pearl really hit a note with me too and it's a treat to read the background for it. I mean the way ends is just...damn harsh. It's sad to see Kolm had to move on. Clearly talented fellow.
 
Rawls

Rawls

Moderator
#4,742
Interview with Karolina Stachyra translated to English from polish on Reddit. Interesting read. Nothing revolutionary, but gives some insight into the writing process.

This is how you make The Witcher

Karolina Stachyra of CD Projekt RED talks how the story for the best game in the world is being made.

Jakub Ciastoń: You graduated in Polish studies from Jagiellonian University and today you are one of the people creating the story lines for the cult game, which according to many fans and industry awards is best in the world. How did you end up at CD Projekt RED?

Karolina Stachyra: By chance. It's true that I finished Polish studies and later worked at Home Army Museum in Kraków, but that wasn't my calling. I was always interested in games, I remember that when The Witcher 2 was coming out, I peeked at CD Projekt's webpage and saw a job ad. I lacked qualifications for most positions, especially when it came to programming, but my husband noticed an ad saying they are also looking for "writers". We laughed at first, but at the end of the day we decided, that it is worth applying. So i did. They called. I went to have two long interviews. During the second one I got so talkative, that I almost missed my train. I thought to myself: "Ok, this looks like an interesting place". And I got in.

Were you a big Witcher fan then?
Yes. It all began with a sickness. I was homebound and at the time also unemployed. My husband bought the first installment of The Witcher, so I wouldn't get bored. I remember that on that day I ate a breakfast, and then... I started feeling ravenous and I realized, that it is dark outside. Turns out I was playing non-stop the entire day. Immediately, breathlessly, I read all Andrzej Sapkowski's books. And that's how my adventure with fantasy, which I didn't care for very much before, began. When I was little, I liked fairy tales, but fantasy became alluring only after I encountered The Witcher.

Can you reveal how the recruitment process for the position of a writer for a game such as The Witcher looked like?
At first, like everywhere else, they performed an analysis of my motivational letter and the CV. Later there were tests, prepared individually for the position. When I applied, I had to write three forms of dialogs between characters: serious, funny romantic and the so called "chat", which is what you hear in the background, when Geralt crosses a street for example. I guess they liked it, since they hired me (laugh).

How does a writer's job look like? How do you make story lines for a game? It has to be a tremendously complicated process. In a movie or in a book, there is just one path, in a game there are many.
Yes, but a game also has its core, that similarly to a movie's story line is approximately a straight line. The difference is that our story is branching out. The hero makes choices, that have consequences and shape his fate, but in most cases he returns to the main path later on. We try to contain such primary story arc in a dozen or so bullet points, like in an outline for a high-school essay. Later we develop each item on the list. Such item could for example be "Geralt meets Master Mirror and becomes embroiled in an agreement that doesn't suit him". And once we invent that, we begin to answer questions such as: How did he got himself into this? What kind of agreement it is? How to get out of it? And such is each bullet point in the story line.
Once we have the main arc and we know what choices for it exist, we add parallel subplots to it, which we call "side quests" and "minor quests". Sometimes it involves completely separate stories and sometimes they are about stories, that are supposed to emphasize some traits of characters from the main arc, like that someone is very greedy.

Can you always return to the main story line or do our choices sometimes create their alternative variants?
The core of our game is made of choices and consequences. When you decide to kill someone, you must take into account, that someone may be upset by this or that someone else will want to seek vengeance. If Geralt decides to flirt with two girls at a time and tells both that he loves them, he must assume, that it would lead to a conflict situation, and that at least one of them will eventually get riled up about it (laugh).

How many endings to The Witcher 3 are there?
Plenty. Essentially there are three endings to the main story line, but each comes with different so called world states. It means that basing upon player's decisions, the political situation changes, because someone else could win the war, some characters are alive, some are not, some faction has risen into or fallen from prominence. There are several dozen of such end states.

How does work on the story look like from the technical point of view? Do you sit at a whiteboard and write down main items? Or on paper? On a computer?
A few of us will usually sit together, we have a whiteboard and we write on it in bullet points what the story is going to be about and if we decide it looks good, we write it all down to a file. And we give it to Konrad Domaszkiwicz, who is the Game Director, to read, and to Adam Badowski, who is the Managing Director of the studio. If they like it, we expand the themes and individual items. During the process new comments and arcs pop up all the time, it keeps growing. This is how the script for particular scenes and certain arcs come into being.

And the characters? Is creating them difficult?
We have the luxury that Mr Andrzej Sapkowski invented the most important ones for us. We make sure to establish them as real people, so they are not just there to advance the plot. In other words the characters need to be expressive, show emotions. We had trouble with Yennefer, for example, who is essentially a shrew and has a very difficult personality. And we somehow didn't feel that Geralt can fall in love with her. But it worked in the game, because after all her character is deep enough, that we were able to show her complex personality alongside many positive traits.

Do you test whether everything falls into place at this stage already?
Yes, although tests, when the script is still on paper, don't last long. Everyone in the studio simply has access to the script and can say: "Hey, something doesn't work here". We then make corrections. Later the story is expanded upon, details are being added, dialogs are made. Later the story is gradually transfered into the game's engine and basically from this moment continuous tests take place on the computer's screen, although at first the characters are simply cubes, some shapeless forms and they don't talk. There are only subtitles. Most work happens at a very abstract level. And testing essentially never ends, even after the release. After the release of The Witcher 3 we published over 10 little "patches".

Can you share an example of a spectacular bug, that was caught?
Making games is like building a rocket, we have billion pieces and bolts, which are being made in 50 places in the world from 100 manufacturers. And the trick is to test the entire system, to not overlook anything, and for the rocket, after it is put together, to be able to take off. When something doesn't work during the tests, sometimes it is really hard to find the faulty bolt. For example one of our testers kept playing for many hours during the night and at some point she got up from her computer to make tea. She left Geralt on a bridge in Novigrad and when she got back, the world started to disappear. Literally everything was drifting into nothingness, at the end the bridge Geralt was standing on disappeared too! The entire studio came running to witness this. We were searching for the cause for a few days. Finally one of the programmers, our mega-mind, discovered, that in one of the side quests the person responsible for designing it was supposed to make the action of opening door by Geralt trigger appearance of an object in the room. At the programming level it works like this: you assume a pause that needs to meet certain criteria, the object loads and later you assume another pause and the object disappers. The thing is the programmer forgot to assume the occurrence of the pause. The object kept loading and unloading non-stop for many hours. And because in the game engine loading of objects has higher priority than loading of the world, after a dozen or so hours the system ran out of memory to hold all the data. And so the world started to disappear. This story also shows why testers often play for several dozen hours in a row without turning their computer off. There were many such small bugs, for example when the game was making a save, for some unknown reason running horses kept spawning next to Geralt. We couldn't fix that for a long time. And when the team worked on new animations for women participating in a fight, the one who lost always curbed into a ball and we couldn't do anything about it for a while as well.

Where did you draw inspiration from, apart from the obvious influence of Sapkowski's writing? In the game there are many references to literature, movies and real historic events.
There is everything in there, hard to even enumerate and list it all. People from many countries and cultures work at CD Projekt RED, with diverse hobbies and outlooks. Each can come to us and say they have an idea. In The Witcher we have references to pop-culture, to other games, but also to the literature - most often the classical variety [translator's note: by the term classical, Mrs Stachyra means all well established works of literary fiction, not just the stuff from Ancient Greece and Rome]. The wedding in the Hearts of Stone expansion is as taken straight from Wyspiański's The Wedding. The house it takes place in is based upon a real estate from a novel. There is also a fragment taken from The Wedding in the dialogs. And in the base game there is also a reference to Mickiewicz's The Forefathers' Eve, there's Adam Asnyk's poem "There was nothing between us". In the crypt Witold speaks with its lines. We also have Stanisław Lem and a reference to Solaris. In the second The Witcher we also had Assassin's Creed, so a game inside a game. Movies are also there, many exchanges are based on them, as the team working on them watches tremendous amount of movies. They can later work on each conversation, gestures, facial expressions of the characters, the way they talk and appear, for hours. We were praised for our visual narration being conducted in a very movie like fashion from the get go.

What are some other reasons for The Witcher's success? Why did it get so popular in the world?
We took our chance. When the opportunity to make really good games in Poland appeared, we simply seized it. The Witcher is also a very plastic character. On one hand he is very much ours - set in Polish mentality, so everyone here groks him, on the other hand he is universal and you can make him fit many cultures. In Japan they see him as a ronin, in the US - a vigilante from the frontier. That also had an impact.

But it surely also helped that the game is ridiculously expansive, there was no cRPG with such deep world before, with such extensive story and such big number of subplots.
We assumed, that games are not just a type of entertainment targeted at teenagers, who play casually after school. There is increasing number of games targeted at mature consumers. But the teenagers also grow up, see new possibilities - that you can do more than just "boom" and "crash", that you can lose yourself in a story. We probably also had a "win" in the authenticity department, with the game's realism. When we go visit someone in the middle of a night, we shouldn't expect that they would still be there waiting for us. Even the weather needs to be taken into consideration, because characters wouldn't want to get wet. There are no shortcuts in our game. We tend to every path the player can take. For characters to be alive, have feelings, to be able to get hurt them or be made to laugh. I don't know if this is the ultimate goal, but we put a lot of work into it and we achieved the level of realism that satisfied us. Of course there is always some what we call "gameproximation" involved, where we settle on certain compromises, for example the ability to save the game and load it later.

The Witcher won many prizes, you visit many galas, ceremonies and meetings abroad. Does the industry envy you? How is The Witcher perceived by other game producers?
There is no envy. Our industry is peculiar and reminds me a bit of the world of extreme sports, which I managed to get to know a little, because my husband used to participate in semi-professional downhill mountain biking. And there was no envy there, no bad emotions, only camaraderie, patting each other on the back, cheering, being supportive. Similar thing here. We simply chat together, games are our common passion and we all fulfill it in our own way. It's nice to be able to sometimes share tips, experiences, but it's not a war nor a race. We just got back from Los Angeles, where we met the creators of Assassin's Creed. We sat together at one table. Fantastic people, the atmosphere was very nice. We learned that they have 16 writers. Right now we have four and The Witcher was made by six. But they have different work patterns, because they need to produce game in a year, whereas it took three years for us to make The Witcher 3.

Where are games heading? How will the game of the future look like?
I get the impression, that when the future of games is being discussed, people think of VR goggles. But to me the future is authenticity, even more realism. Heading towards true emotions, adventure. To me games of the future will be more like books with story lines we can shape. When I explain cRPGs to my grandpa, I say that they are like movies, but you yourself can decide what the protagonist will say and where will he go.

There will be no Witcher 4?
We were saying from the beginning, that the third installment ends the saga and we are sticking to that. But there will be one more expansion, Blood And Wine, which we are currently working on. I can reveal that the witcher will end up in a completely different, very colorful region. We will distance ourselves a little from the war, with which Geralt had to deal a lot earlier. It will offer 20 hours of gameplay and it will surely be interesting. The release is scheduled somewhere in the first half of this year.
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Sources:
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/48grqw/this_is_how_you_make_the_witcher_an_interview/
Original in Polish - http://www.redbull.com/pl/pl/games/...mowa-karolina-stachyra-tak-sie-robi-wiedzmina
 
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H

Holgaroni

Forum veteran
#4,745
Mezziaz said:
According to Gamereactor Sweden, Witcher 3 has now sold more on the PC platform than on PS4/Xbox One combined.
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That is not really certain, M. Iwinski's words were a bit vague. He didn't specify if he was talking about The Witcher 3 in particular or all the 3 games
 
M

Mezziaz

Rookie
#4,746
Holgar82 said:
That is not really certain, M. Iwinski's words were a bit vague. He didn't specify if he was talking about The Witcher 3 in particular or all the 3 games
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Not unlikely he has been misquoted. Does he talk about this in the interview linked in the post above mine?
 
D

dragonbird

Ex-moderator
#4,749
Yup, Poland. He was discussing the evolution of gaming platforms in Poland at the time, starting with a discussion on what he first used for gaming, then answering a question on whether or not he ever had a console. He then goes on to discuss the fact that consoles were rare in Poland until the PS2, and that the PC is still more popular. At which point he mentions that PC sales of TW3 were higher than consoles in Poland

There's subtitles on the video :)

The Gamereactor Sweden article credits an article in Gamingbolt as its source.
http://gamingbolt.com/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-has-sold-more-copies-on-pc-than-consoles-combin
The gamingbolt article then gives the interview in that video as the source, and screwed it up by re-interpreting it as world-wide rather than Poland specific.
Chinese whispers at work.
 
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S

sv3672

Forum veteran
#4,750
MarkPiasecki said:
Yes, it's only about the sales in Poland.
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That makes sense, it does not seem realistic that world-wide PC sales would exceed the consoles, at not least not in terms of copies sold. Given that after 6 weeks (if I recall correctly) the game sold 6 million copies, and about a quarter of that on PC (somewhat less than half of PC sales on Steam), there must be more than 4 million console sales, and probably more since then. The game currently has about 1.43 million estimated owners on Steam, so if the Steam/GOG distribution did not change much, there are likely still fewer PC players now than on the consoles in 6 weeks. But total sales might be approaching 10 million.
 
M

misho8723

Senior user
#4,752
CD Projekt Red's financial results and strategy (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1195751 - by boskee)

Some information:
- Combined sales of all Witcher games is now over 20 million copies
- Plan for 2016: A new type of video game format previously unexplored by the Studio
- Digital sales of the Witcher 3 - 31.6% representing 50.2% of the revenue

Plans for 2017-2021:
- Release of Cyberpunk 2077
- "We aren't a long way away from the premiere" - Adam Badowski on the state of the development of Cyberpunk 2077
- Release of another AAA RPG
- Expansion of core franchises with additional media content and product lines
- Two fold expansion of the CDPR team - creation of four individual teams, two of them tasked with the development of of games representing new segments
- Establishment of new local branches of CDPR in key territories

GOG.com in 2016:
- Release of an AAA game unaffiliated with GOG, with full support of GOG Galaxy- concurrent with global release date.
- More global releases of AAA titles with Galaxy support coming in 2017-2021

Misc:
- Share price increased by 353% in the last 4 years
- CDPR to buy back shares in the future
 
M

moonknightgog

Forum veteran
#4,755
2014-2016

launch of The Witcher 3 for at least three strong platforms including PC and PS4
launch of Cyberpunk 2077
two smaller (about 20 hours of gameplay) but top-quality games supporting one of the product lines
a cross-platform mobile game based on one of CDPR’s brands
start of license sales for REDengine
long-term Witcher 3 support involving completely new mechanisms
launch of the full version of the REDkit and further modding community support
launch of further local CDPR branches in key territories
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So it seems they dropped both the license sale for RedEngine and the full Redkit version.
 
S

sv3672

Forum veteran
#4,756
moonknightgog said:
So it seems they dropped both the license sale for RedEngine and the full Redkit version.
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That is disappointing, although it was already said about half a year ago that there are no plans to release more than the ModKit:
Marcin Momot said:
Modding support - as we mentioned before, at this moment we are 100% focused on delivering both expansion packs for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The MODkit is the only modding support there is for Wild Hunt. We have no plans to releasing anything else. We will however continue to update it - there's a new, updated version coming out quite soon actually. It will be available on our forums and on Nexus.
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Rawls

Rawls

Moderator
#4,760
moonknightgog said:
Wasn't there a CDPR conference at GDC?
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There was one about the music yesterday. There was supposed to be another one too but it was cancelled. These quotes are from the GDC Schedule:

Slavic Adaptation of Music in 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

During this lecture both composers of the "Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" - Marcin Przybyowicz and Mikolai Stroinski will cover the following aspects of the critically aclaimed game's soundtrack including: music design's influence on narration in the latest installment of Geralt's saga, beautiful ugliness of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt soundtrack, and redefining musical standards for The Witcher franchise - incorporating slavic folk music with modern approach to scoring - something that hasn't been done before.
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CANCELLED - Here Be Dragons, or Lessons Learned in the Development of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

This talk will reveal details about many of the hardships faced while developing The Witcher 3. There are many potential pitfalls in developing such a huge open world game for 3 platforms. The speakers will be specifically concentrating on the most practical topics, namely on the challenges and how they were approached, how certain problems were discovered and how they were solved.
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There is one more scheduled for Friday @ 10:00am

Behind the Scenes of Cinematic Dialogues in 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt'

Non-linear storytelling is paramount for CD PROJEKT RED games and dialogues are one of the main means of its delivery. The dialogue system is one of the most advanced systems in Wild Hunt's game engine and this talk will cover all of its features, as well as provide deep insight into how these features work. Additionally, the session will demonstrate the pipeline, tools and editor. The talk will also touch upon animation problems we encountered during production, as well as provide applicable solutions via a step-by-step lesson on how we created Witcher-style dialogues with our tech.
Click to expand...

http://schedule.gdconf.com/list
 
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