Adam Badowski: Yeah, "port" is such an ugly word. We're avoiding it altogether because we think this project is much more than just bringing the game to a new platform. It has practically involved us building the game from scratch, with a massive list of new features, changes and improvements. It would have been a lot easier to do a straight-up port, but anyone familiar with our company knows we generally don't take the easiest route. From a marketing standpoint it was always going to be a challenge to say, "here's a game that shipped on PC in 2007" and to get people excited about it all over again two years later. So we need to make sure Rise of the White Wolf stacks up against the best RPGs this year, too.
We realize that PCs and consoles are very different, each with their own strengths and limitations. It's not just about using the pad as a controller… but about delivering a game that makes the best use of the tools available to the player. We want to bring gamers one of the deepest role-playing games they've played, but we've redesigned most of the gameplay to keep the action flowing, too. Rise of the White Wolf will have a brand new interface to make up for the lack of a keyboard and mouse… but that doesn't mean we're about to dumb down the experience. Everything there will be intuitive and easily accessible. Fortunately there are a lot of buttons on the controllers, so you'll be able to do almost anything on the fly.
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Badowski: The one thing we're not going to mess with is the game's story, and by extension, the game world. The Witcher's universe is a welcome alternative to typical heroic fantasy, where everything is bright and colourful, people are happy and every bad character has to lose because that's just the way it is. In this world, everything is a shade of grey, rather than black or white. It's possible that strangers will want to kick your ass instead of helping you out, even the most decent man will have a dark mark on his conscience, and if you want to count on someone then you should count on yourself. In life there are situations where neither of options you have is "right" but you have to choose the lesser evil. It might seem a bit grim, but in our opinion this world is far more realistic than the heroic standard. There is no good or evil – you just have to live with the decisions you make. We're making a game for a mature audience and don't plan to cut any corners to achieve that.
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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.
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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.
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Badowski: We're definitely aware of the fact that a lot of console gamers haven't heard of The Witcher, much less played it. That's both a good thing and a bad thing – it means that we can present them a fresh game that breaks a lot of perceived console-gaming conventions (for example, it's not a 6-hour game and delivers both action and a great story), but it's also an unknown property. That said, we can benefit from the fact that The Witcher sold more than a million copies and won over 100 awards on PC – it's easier to justify a larger marketing campaign to get the word out to more people.
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IGN: Are there plans for a sequel to The Witcher, and if so, would it appear on PC first and then come to consoles?
Badowski: Currently, we're focused on Rise of the White Wolf – we need to make the game as good as possible and we'll do everything to achieve it. At the same time, as we've mentioned before, the console team is just the part of our crew. We are working on two more projects that must stay unrevealed.
