While it has long been overshadowed by The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s gargantuan success, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings remains a great RPG in its own right. In fact, in some ways it was more daring and ambitious than its bigger, beardier brother.
Most notably, none of the decisions you make in the Witcher 3 are as momentous as the game-changing choice at the heart The Witcher 2, where choosing to help one of two characters in a fight led to a second act viewed from completely different perspectives. Roughly 90% of The Witcher 2’s second-act strands are unique, each with its own locations, key characters, and quests.
I’ve always wondered if CD Projekt will commit so wholly to an in-game decision again. But according to CD Projekt’s co-CEO Adam Badowski, such an eventuality is unlikely.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Badowski discussed the changes CD Projekt made between The Witcher 2 and 3, noting that the biggest of these was structural. “In The Witcher 2, we had a very difficult structure of the game, because there are two paths. You can go one path and you won’t see the other path,” he says. "From the production perspective it’s a waste of resources. From [the] player’s perspective, it might be cool, but definitely it was [an] experiment.
Such a structure was far less feasible in The Witcher 3, the size of which made such radically different experiences prohibitive. “In Wild Hunt I knew that it doesn’t work great, this kind of combination [and] construction of the game,” Badowski says. “So we brought totally something new, something that supported the open world concept.”
Moreover, CD Projekt’s focus on The Witcher 3 was less on choices, and more on maintaining the quality of its storytelling in a much larger world. “The biggest thing was how we can deliver such a big game in the open world, keeping [the] great story of Geralt, and there were many doubts back then.”
On this, Badowski notes that at the time of the Witcher 3’s release players’ main point of comparison for open world fantasy RPGs was Skyrim. And since Bethesda’s RPGs aren’t known for their narrative sophistication, there was some doubt that it was even possible to combine the two. “It was just after the success of Skyrim, so people, they were super oriented on that game, and they were comparing our concept with Skyrim and sometimes saying that it’s not gonna fly. So it was [a big] moment for the company.”
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