Developer CD Projekt Red has levelled on its decision to ax a sizeable chunk of content from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that involved the Scoia’tael.
First introduced in Assassins of Kings, those non-human guerrilla fighters do have a minor role in Wild Hunt, but according to the studio’s Philipp Weber, one story strand that involved Iorveth remained on the editing room floor as development wore on.
Per CD Projekt Red:
I’d like to give some clarification for this discussion. Like our writers already mentioned a few months ago, Iorveth used to be part of the game. However, as time and development went on, this chunk of the story had to be cut for multiple reasons, but it was quite a big part of the game. At this time, it was simply not possible to “just” create another quest that would replace it and we had to finish and polish the rest of the game. It’s perfectly natural that parts of the game are cut in development, and in this case it unfortunately hit a part that Iorveth had a big role in.
And yes, of course you can come up with many ways and ideas how to still cram him in there somehow, but that’s not our way. If we do something like that, we do it right and we do the character justice. It’s not easy to make decisions like that, so I hope you can respect that.
From The Witcher 3‘s development to the RPG’s imminent epilogue, Weber also took to the forums to discuss the release of Blood and Wine, and why it’s considered to be the “finale of the whole game.”
Technically the expansion can be started before finishing the game (after a certain part of the Novigrad story line), but it would be pretty hard to even try this, since the level requirement is quite high (of course the player can start a separate Blood and Wine game from “New Game” in the main menu whenever he wants).
Players will definitely have a nice experience if they play Blood and Wine after finishing the main game, since we created Blood and Wine not just as a last expansion, but also as a finale of the whole game that is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. So you can look forward to nice things.
The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine is slated for release on May 31. To get the gist of Geralt’s final quest, have a gander at the DLC’s launch trailer from earlier today.
[Source: CD Projekt Red via WCCF Tech]
