After so many delays, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is (hopefully) finally almost here. ahead of its release, developers CD Projekt RED held a panel at the just concluded Game Developer’s Conference, where they talked about how the power afforded to them by the next generation machines enabled their vision for The Witcher 3, and everything that they want to do with it.
A lot of it comes down to them wanting to craft an open, living world for the game, one that appears believable to the player. According to CD Projekt RED, this was only possible because of the enhanced power of the new consoles and the next generation PC CPUs and GPUs.
For instance, they pointed to the incredible destruction in the game as something enabled by the added power, but destruction is, of course, something a lot of games do and have been doing for a while. So they also decided to some more subtle touches that will probably consciously never be noticed by the player, but which all make a believable world for the player to inhabit, and all of which are taxing on the hardware.
The example used was hunting. Say you decided to hunt a deer. Now, the deer would produce smell, which would dissipate to a given radius around you before it was too diluted. Monsters, which spawn at great distances from you, should they fall within the circle, might decide they want to go and gorge on the meat. But more than one monster might show up, since more than one might have smelled the deer- and upon getting there, the monsters might engage in a fight over their prey. And all of this would happen in response to you shooting a deer, all of this how the world would react to a small, simple act by you. And of course, all of this would have to be constantly calculated and computed by the CPU.
It’s pretty awesome, actually, and sort of reminds me of something Bethesda tried to achieve with Skyrim on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. I can’t wait to see how the game turns out.