The Witcher 3 was a high-risk venture for CD Projekt. New RPG by the designer of Geralt's adventures will take more cautious approach
The co-creator of The Witcher 3 mentions the risks that were taken while working on the game. Genre changes will also appear in The Blood of Dawnwalker, but the team is trying to be cautious about this.
Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, the Lead Quest Designer for The Witcher 3, currently working on The Blood of Dawnwalker at Rebel Wolves, recently spoke with GamesRadar+. He talked, among other things, about how risky the third installment of Geralt's adventures was for CD Projekt RED and about the conservatism of their next game.
The Witcher 3 was risky
Undeniably, The Witcher 3 achieved tremendous success, thanks to which CDPR became a studio recognized all over the world. However, this wouldn't have been possible without the risk that the team had to take along the way. Tomaszkiewicz admitted that in those times very few devs even tried to do what they did.
I think not many games were trying to do what we did back then. We tried to combine these really expansive storytelling techniques that were usually built in more linear RPGs, like more corridor-structured RPGs, like The Witcher 2, for example. We tried to carry that over to an open world and so on.
The developer mentions that among the risky aspects was the length of The Witcher 3 story. According to HowLongToBeat, it takes over 50 hours to complete it, whereas for comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 will take 25 hours. Tomaszkiewicz admitted that the team had concerns about whether such a long storyline would fit into an open-world game.
But we took these risks. We did what we could to mitigate them. I think, in the end, it worked out pretty well. I'm pretty sure some people did not like it, and they preferred the style of a game like The Witcher 2, or maybe some Bethesda games. And that's totally fine.
Dawnwalker will be more conservative
In the case of Dawnwalker, Rebel Wolves studio also intends to experiment with RPG genre conventions, but changes will only appear in places where they will have some purpose. Tomaszkiewicz mentioned that even small deviations from the standards to which players are accustomed can sometimes be controversial.
There are certain features that players have gotten used to over the years because there have been so many RPG games, where you just expect to see them in the RPG game when you play. For example, itemization and having an inventory panel. If you don't have that in your RPG, a lot of people could probably try to challenge 'is it an RPG, even?'.
When you sit down to design an RPG, you have to wrestle with that - 'this is the standard RPG set of conventional mechanics, do we do them, or don't we?' And you have to always consider it very carefully, which of these can you touch or modify in meaningful ways.
The team is cautious about how the game will deviate from typical conventions. At the same time, they aren't afraid to make changes if they can bring some benefits. Dawnwalker thus seems to be a more cautious title than The Witcher 3, but that doesn't mean Rebel Wolves has no plans to take risks.
What are we gaining if we are trying to change things? Are we just changing them to be different, or are we changing them to actually achieve some goal?
The Blood of Dawnwalker is heading to PC, PS5, and XSX/S. The title doesn't have a release date yet.
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