CD Projekt on Witcher 2's sales, patch, and bringing the game to Xbox 360
Joystiq got to meet up with CD Projekt on the windy roof of a hotel in Venice, CA earlier today while the company's "Summer Days" streamed press conference was going on, and afterwards had a quick chat about what was announced. Senior Producer Tomasz Gop and level designer Marek Ziemak kindly answered our questions, the first of which was how the company felt the Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings launch went. "We can dream about more," said Gop, "but this was really good. We didn't set a milestone where we'd be happy or not. This is really good, we're not disappointed at all."
Some of the game's players, including our reviewer, were slightly turned off by the high difficulty early on, and while that curve will be smoothed in the game's first big patch, out today, Gop says CD Projekt never said things would be easy. "A lot of people chose normal difficulty setting and they thought it would be like normal in other games," he told us. "But from the very beginning ... we said it's a hardcore game. Normal is slightly more hardcore than other normal difficulty settings." The patch will also fix key bindings, an issue with lock-on during combat, and a money exploit that Gop and Ziemak laugh about. "We got a couple of hundred emails," jokes Gop, "about, 'Do you know that you can get infinitely rich at the beginning of Witcher 2?'"
CD Projekt also announced that the game would be out on the Xbox 360 by the end of the year, something they could only do after the PC launch. "First of all," says Ziemak, "we were 100% focused on the PC version, because that's our way of creating things." CD Projekt tried to port their first game before, and had to put the project on hold when it was clear the title wasn't good enough to release.
"The biggest lesson we learned from actually canning the whole project," says Gop, "was if we wanted to do it, we'd have to do it in house," and Witcher 2 is being done with an in-house team as an adaptation, not a port. Does that mean that after the Xbox version is out, that same team will work on bringing the game to PS3? Gop doesn't rule it out. "We would love to," he says, before admitting that decision has yet to be made. But if you're worried about an exclusive for any reason other than a lack of resources, don't, says Gop. "No," he jokes, "Microsoft has not bought us. "
Some of the game's players, including our reviewer, were slightly turned off by the high difficulty early on, and while that curve will be smoothed in the game's first big patch, out today, Gop says CD Projekt never said things would be easy. "A lot of people chose normal difficulty setting and they thought it would be like normal in other games," he told us. "But from the very beginning ... we said it's a hardcore game. Normal is slightly more hardcore than other normal difficulty settings." The patch will also fix key bindings, an issue with lock-on during combat, and a money exploit that Gop and Ziemak laugh about. "We got a couple of hundred emails," jokes Gop, "about, 'Do you know that you can get infinitely rich at the beginning of Witcher 2?'"
CD Projekt also announced that the game would be out on the Xbox 360 by the end of the year, something they could only do after the PC launch. "First of all," says Ziemak, "we were 100% focused on the PC version, because that's our way of creating things." CD Projekt tried to port their first game before, and had to put the project on hold when it was clear the title wasn't good enough to release.
"The biggest lesson we learned from actually canning the whole project," says Gop, "was if we wanted to do it, we'd have to do it in house," and Witcher 2 is being done with an in-house team as an adaptation, not a port. Does that mean that after the Xbox version is out, that same team will work on bringing the game to PS3? Gop doesn't rule it out. "We would love to," he says, before admitting that decision has yet to be made. But if you're worried about an exclusive for any reason other than a lack of resources, don't, says Gop. "No," he jokes, "Microsoft has not bought us. "
