CD Projekt’s Witcher 2 is one of my favourite modern RPG’s; treating me as an adult with a complex, branching story. Is it, perhaps, too complex? The developer says it’s realised it needs to make the storytelling more inviting for its next game, a Cyberpunk RPG currently titled..well, Cyberpunk. Does that mean that CD Projekt will be dumbing the game down for broader appeal?
Speaking to Gamasutra, CD Projekt RED acknowledged that it needs to do more to invite players, and remove the inherent confusion newcomers find in its complex RPG worlds.
“What we learned from The Witcher series is that we need to attract people with a smoother learning curve when it comes to the storyline,” said Cd Projeckt’s Adam Badowski. “In The Witcher 1, for example, we were throwing people in the middle of the story, and we assumed that players would know what is happening! But a lot of players told us that they didn’t really understand this relationship or that relationship,” added Marcin Iwinski.
It’s a complaint many had with the Witcher 2; without extensive knowledge of the lore surrounding Geralt of Rivia, it was daunting for newcomers to step in to that world. The Xbox 360 release of the game shipped with extra content to help players settle in; content that was later added to the PC version via a large update.
“In [Cyberpunk], we want to create a story that is very profound, but the novice players should be introduced to [the world] better than they were in The Witcher 2,” Inwinski said.
That said, it doesn’t mean that the company plans on dumbing down their RPG’s at all – they just want to pace things better.
“Players should be able to choose how deep they want to enter the story or the plot,” said marketing boss Michal Platkow-Gilewski. “If they’re really hardcore, they can really dig deeper and deeper and deeper, and if they’re just casual, they can still learn about the characters and the story, but they’ll do that by going in another direction.”
To further allay fears of their new RPG being Dragonagified (I just made up a new word!), Iwinski was quick to point out that they wouldn’t be dumbing anything down.
“Just to make sure we’re understood correctly by our fans, this does not mean that we are going to simplify our games. That’s definitely not the case.But for some audiences, the learning curve should be improved, and particularly the introduction to the world needs to be better.”
Last Updated: June 19, 2012
