CD Projekt Sundays
The developers at CD Projekt RED gave a number of interviews recently, all of which concerned The Witcher 3 (of course). The general tone running through them is that the studio don’t really care what the game ends up being rated; they don’t intend to sacrifice any aspect of it to achieve a particular rating.
More recently, other interviews have been published in which a) The Witcher 3 has been compared (and contrasted) with Skyrim, b) romance mechanics and dice get discussed, and c) weapons and combat get some attention.
GamingIllustrated got a preview of the game recently, as well, as did OXCGN. VG247, meanwhile, pronounces that The Witcher 3 is open world “done right”.
It was also announced this week that Warner Brothers will be The Witcher 3’s North American publisher.
There’s an interview with CD Projekt RED’s Marcin Iwinski at Gamasutra, which isn’t specifically related to any one game the studio has in development, but rather focuses on the studio’s recipe for success: focus (sticking to what they know) and respect (for the fans).
Some new The Witcher 3 concept art also got released recently. And in addition to the five things we apparently needed to know about the game previously, there are now twenty-five additional things we should probably know.
Finally, there’s an awesome new graphics mod for The Witcher 2 available now, which totally overhauls and vastly improves flora quality and draw distance.
To say they “don’t care” what rating the game gets is probably not entirely accurate – for example, if the game got an AO rating it would be commercial suicide. Although they may not want to, and may well try and avoid doing so as much as possible (and so they should), the hard reality is that they *have* to care enough about what the game will be rated as so that places will stock it.
Unless, of course, they plan to sell primarily online via Steam or their own GOG. How much do physical sales (for PC) count for now, anyway?
Steam might care about ratings (especially the AO one), but GOG? Not so much. But even GOG has issues with game content censorship; how that’d go with their owner’s games, not so certain.