IGN: PC RPGs, including the Witcher, often have gigantic inventories, skill trees and magic systems. These things can be overwhelming to manage with console controls. How do you plan to handle this problem in Rise of the White Wolf?
Badowski: The interface has been one of our biggest challenges with The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf. Our designers spent a lot of time thinking about that issue; on one hand we didn\'t want to remove any elements from the game, but on the other, we knew that it would be unacceptable to make players scroll through massive inventories just to drink a potion. Fortunately both consoles have controllers with a lot of buttons that we can use :-). Really, though, we\'re working on the user interface a lot to make sure that everything\'s easily accessible and intuitive. We want to keep people playing, rather than rummaging through their inventories. We\'ll show off the changes in the future… we don\'t want to spill the beans about everything just yet.
IGN: The Witcher is based on fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowski\'s short stories and novels about Geralt. How involved was Sapkowski in the creation of The Witcher games?
Badowski: Mr. Sapkowski wasn\'t directly involved in creating The Witcher (despite the fact that he has written books about Geralt, of course), although we\'ve often resorted to him for consultations about issues that we weren\'t 100% sure of. Thanks to that, our story and our world fit with his vision of Geralt and the world. I remember a few months before the release of the PC game we invited him to a private presentation, after which he said that we did a really good job and that we had silenced his doubts about using Geralt in a computer game.
IGN: How closely does the story in Rise of the White Wolf mirror that of The Witcher? Is it an exact copy? Will there be more or less content on consoles? Will some parts of the storyline change?
Badowski: We\'ve kept the award-winning story from The Witcher intact. We never wanted to cut out any parts of the plot just to make a 15-hour game that was more inline with the expectations of the console market. RPGs are at their best when they offer a deep and really interesting story in which the player can affect the outcome, and The Witcher has that… it\'s a 40-hour main quest with up to 100 hours including side quests… and then you get one of three different endings and still haven\'t experienced everything the story has to offer, taking into account the different decisions you made along the way.
We\'ve just gone in and modified a few quests to keep players moving; we don\'t want to slow the pace of the game down at all and want to make sure that there aren\'t any spots where players get confused about what to do next. We\'re fairly sure that console gamers are ready for a really deep RPG that isn\'t dumbed down. It\'s a mature game aimed at mature people, after all.
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/947/947419p2.htmlLooks very interesting, and my PC is not as powerful as my PS3. More RPGs are welcome
and this is a deep one.
Thoughts ?