The Witcher 3: Wild Hunter, witch which is coming to the PS4, Xbox One, and PC in 2014 doesn’t have a firm release date announced yet, but CD Projekt Group Co-Founder Marcin Iwinski told IGN, “We’ll be announcing it soon.”
Expected to be 30 times bigger than The Witcher 2 when it comes to the environment, Iwinski brought up how long you can expect the game to last by saying, “We’re looking at roughly 50 hours for the main storyline, depending on your gameplay style and the difficulty level. If you do most or all of the side quests, you’re looking at anything between 100 to 120 hours of gameplay.”
To make The Witcher 3 even bigger, there will be 36 different endings, with Iwinski adding, “We don’t tell you what matters and what doesn’t, as your actions in the game speak far louder than words.” He also revealed how you’ll mostly be able to go back and revisit side-quests after you finish the story:
At this moment, the answer is “almost.” Currently you have absolute freedom to do what you want up until the last few hours of the game. If we decide to allow players to return to the game after the ending, I imagine that, based on your choices in the game, some quests could be locked because of your previous actions. So, let’s say you kill an entire village off, you won’t be able to access side quests from there. It’s not a particular example from the game, but you catch my drift right?
Earlier this week, Iwinski told MCV India (via GameSpot) about how making The Witcher 3 for Xbox 360 or PS3 would be impossible. “It would have to be a different game,” he said, “a smaller game, not an open-world game, or with terrible loading times, with sacrifices in graphics.”
In the interview today, Iwinski discussed development on the new-gen consoles, while also revealing how they’re close to capacity on them:
It is extremely manageable. There is a lot of power in these machines, and I don’t want to say we’re using them to their capacity, but we’re fairly close to doing so. We made a decision to go next-gen roughly two and a half years ago, so we’ve spent a lot of time with these machines, and it’s been a great experience across all three platforms. On the old platforms, namely the Xbox 360 and PS3, we probably would have had to sacrifice nearly half of our vision.
Are you surprised to be hearing about a developer already being close to maxing out the Xbox One and PS4? Let us know in the comments below.
