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CD Projekt explains why The Witcher 2 has console exclusivity

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Skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur may be dominating the RPG scene at the moment, but that might all change soon when The Witcher 2 arrives on the Xbox console in April.

Owners of the Microsoft platform are eagerly anticipating the release of a game that was exclusive to the PC back in 2011, but unfortunately, PS3 owners are being left out in the cold when it comes to male-witchery experiences.

And developer CD Projekt has a good reason for that apparently.

“It’s our first experience with consoles, we’ve only worked on the PC until now, and we wanted to make a really good adaptation of our game,” Konrad Tomaszkiewicz told OXM. “We’ve used the same team who worked on the PC version to make a really good adaptation”.

We’ve used the same team who worked on the PC version to make the transition to Xbox, mainly because when we tried to outsource the first Witcher, it ended up being a bad experience. We could have tried to bring it to other consoles, but we just wanted to focus on the one platform.

“Our team isn’t that large – we can’t focus on three platforms at once,” Jakub Stylinski added. “What we’re doing now is making the same additional content for PC and Xbox, and if we were working on PS3 too we just wouldn’t be able to get it all done.”

Bringing Geralt onto the Xbox platform hasn’t exactly been an easy task for the team, as the console platform presented certain limitations and challenges during the production of the port.

“I think the memory limits were the biggest problem,” Stylinski said. “You know we wanted to make the game look as good as the PC version.”

So the majority of work was done by the programmers who had to create a new kind of streaming to feed the console. The art assets are one thing, but we also had to figure out a way of streaming all the quests in too.

We had to cut each of the main quests into many smaller parts and that means – because you have more quest parts on Xbox, there are more gameplay sections to debug and polish.

As for fears regarding a possible watered down version of the beloved sequel for the platform, Stylinksi explained that Xbox gamers had nothing to worry about, as the core game was still intact. “We didn’t have to alter the content of the quests at all, but we just split them into smaller chunks.”

Personally, I’m of the mind that if a developer can’t get a port done right, it’s better to not do it all. I’d rather have no game than play a bug-riddled mess, which is why we’re also seeing the next Transformers game only release on consoles, due to Half Moon Studios admitting that a PC version would be an absolute mess.

The Witcher 2 arrives on Xbox 360 on April 17.

Last Updated: February 21, 2012

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