CDPR Reflects on The Witcher 2's "Costly Experiment"
CD Projekt RED looks back at one of the features of "The Witcher 2" as a costly experiment. While "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" won the series worldwide recognition, its predecessor "The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings" is fondly remembered for its one particular audacious design choice. However, the central feature is now looked at by the creators of this game as having wasted significant development resources.
The Ambitious Choice That Split the Game in Two
The particular feature is the major choice presented at the end of act one to a player: siding either with Iorveth or Vernon Roche. This wasn't a minor choice; it really did split the remainder of the game into two distinct paths, each with unique plotlines, locations, and quests. And a player going through the game would experience only about half of the content that was made for the second act.
An Indolent Experiment
From Adam Badowski, co-founder of CD Projekt RED and the game director of "Witcher 2", this design must be considered from a production perspective to be simply a lost experiment.
Witcher 2 had a very complicated game structure because there were two paths. You could take one path and never see the other. From a production point of view, a waste of resources. For the player, it could be nice, but it was more or less an experiment.
Adam Badowski, Game Director of The Witcher 2
Shifting Focus for 'The Witcher 3'
Badowski explained that they had taken ideas from the experiment and directly influenced the design of The Witcher 3. He stated that the highly divided structure was not suited well for the open-world layout that they desired for the sequel. Instead, the studio created a different sort of storytelling model that would allow such a great open world.
This decision matched with the studio's desire to put an emphasis on a tightly knit story as opposed to designing for a vast multitude of player actions leading to the creation of huge amounts of unseen content. Thereby, CDPR decided to avoid such forms of experiments as the one it did in Witcher 2.
