The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt developers have been revealing bits and pieces of info about the game on Twitter and CD Projekt RED forums. In particular, Senior Game Designer Damien Monnier addressed questions about enemies and the size of the in-game world, stating that it’s “fucking enormous.”
The reason you have heard different things is because it’s hard to calculate, you have a lot of landmass but oceans too, and small islands scattered around. You know, that’s one of the reasons during interviews now I just say “massive” because I have no clue. Whenever I try to calculate it I come up with “Fucking enormous”.
When asked about the size of the biggest monsters that players will get to slay, Monnier said that The Wild Hunt has monsters that are “bigger than the griffin.” At minimum, it seems that they’ll be the equivalent of two griffins.
With reference to enemies respawning, Monnier said that each group will have a different respawn time.
Each group will have a different respawn time and basically as you walk around and trigger them at various times, their respawn will also be staggered if you would. So by doing your first pass you sort of shuffle the spawns around (or set the countdown).
All our living world encounters will respawn at some point, usually after 2 in-game days. It is possible that he was attacked in one place by some monsters, he killed them and two days later they respawned in the same area, but this area could be big, or they could have been aggroed by something in the distance. There could be so many variables to be honest. Our system is quite organic, we didn’t want it to feel fake where you would always have monster x at some exact same spot. Our monsters wander around and so on.
In a separate forum post, Community Manager Chris Priestly said fans should expect more footage from The Wild Hunt to appear online as the game comes closer to launch. He said that the developer is appealing to “not just hardcore fans, but to casual fans, fans of games similar to Wild Hunt that may not have heard of it and game players in general.” Priestly also said that CD Projekt RED is currently working with Sony and others on pre-loads.
Over on Twitter, a user asked Level Designer Miles Tost if there are set locales for items and if loot is random. Tost said that as far as he knows, it’s a little bit of both. “Some set, some randomized,” he said.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt releases on May 19 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
[Source: CD Projekt RED(1)(2), Miles Tost (Twitter) via DualShockers(1)(2)]
