It's really hard to put into words why I love the first Witcher game so much. Blind and grotesque NPCs create almost limitless horror at points. Especially when he tries to meet Shani at night and has to fight off her monstrous old mistress. Then there are the frustrating, near-rhythmic combat and a completely disconnected story from the basics, with an amnesiac Geralt trapped in an entirely different love triangle without a single mention of Yennefer. Still, there's something incredibly compelling about this garbage bucket development. It captures the early days of CD Projekt Red desperately trying to compete with the RPG masterpieces.
So when the remake was announced, I was a little skeptical. The Witcher has a distinct mid-2000s charm that's almost impossible to recreate without alienating all the new fans that The Witcher 3 brought with it. And that's not even mentioning older aspects of the original, like Geralt hoarding nudes of the women he slept with and treating romance like some sort of Vizima-themed trading card game. Nonetheless, Fool's Theory is giving Kaer Morhen an honest attempt at a remake, and lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec has some concerns and some important advice about what needs to change.
“I respect the work of everyone involved, but in some ways it was basically a modding effort,” Ganszyniec told Mateusz Łysoń (via Game Observer). “We were a group of enthusiasts fighting against the engine to squeeze out something new, something we wanted to make, something that didn’t have a big budget.”
Should The Witcher Remake go open world?
As much as I love The Witcher 2 (thanks in part to its excellent opening and Iorveth and Roche's branching paths), it's my favorite entry in the series, there's no denying that The Witcher 3 comes much closer to what CD Projekt Red was originally going for. Ganszyniec himself admitted that the third entry was “spiritually closer to The Witcher than we would have made if we had the time, money, skills and technology.” Instead, they had the Aurora engine and a dream. But revisiting the 2007 cult classic years later, Ganszyniec wasn't convinced it would be a success. more Like The Witcher 3, this would be the right approach to idiot theory.
“As you open up locations, there will be more space, and with more space there should be more content,” he explained. “It immediately changes the tempo and scale of the project. In The Witcher, a lot of things worked well because we knew exactly where the players would be at any given time. We could set up a trigger, run a scene, and then have Alvin appear between fields and villages. In an open world, we had to approach this completely differently.”
Ganszyniec uses the fifth act as an example of where the cracks in the open world begin to appear. The map revolves around Lake Vizima, so if it were open world, wouldn't the player be able to take a boat outside of Vizima and head straight to the old mansion? “It may be exciting as a player, but as a designer, I’m already feeling gray,” he said.
In other words, if Fool's Theory wants to make The Witcher remake more similar to The Witcher 3, it's not a remake, but a much more ambitious reimagining. What Ganszyniec argued would not be practical. “When does proliferation of these routes stop being worthwhile? You can invest infinite time and money, but can you bring in an infinite number of new players? At some point, the costs and returns start to diverge.”
If changes need to be made to the remake, Ganszyniec suggests removing the infamous romance card, overhauling combat, and improving level design. While he supports the Amnesia storyline, this not only helped the team keep the scope at a manageable level, but also made the game easier for newcomers who haven't read the previous books to pick up. Geralt's lack of knowledge about Yennefer and Ciri may be jarring for returning fans, but it could equally make the first game the perfect introduction for future newcomers, allowing them to ease into The Witcher 3 and ultimately The Witcher 4.
- released
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October 30, 2007
- ESRB
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middle
- engine
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aurora engine
