CD Projekt RED have gone out of their way to establish how the game world in their upcoming The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which is the follow up to the widely acclaimed The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and the final entry in the franchise, will feature a living, breathing world, that exists independently of you, and reacts to how you interact with it. Now, here’s one other neat touch to continue adding to the immersion of all of that- Geralt’s face and skin changes according to how many toxins you have injected. It basically acts as a toxicity indicator.
“Geralt’s face actually changes the higher his toxicity is,” CD Projekt’s lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz told Game Informer. “As you know, Witcher elixirs are highly toxic, and could kill a human if he/she drank one. Witchers are more resistant to this toxin, but it does influence them. In game you have this ‘toxicity bar,’ which shows you how intoxicated Geralt is.”
The higher the toxicity bar, the more those toxic changes show on Geralt’s face,” Tomaszkiewicz says. “His face becomes unnaturally pale, his veins become visible and seem to be black, dark circles appear under his eyes, etc.”
So it’s a neat visual touch, and actually serves a gameplay function too.
That sounds very neat to me, honestly. It’s little details like these that separate the good games from the great ones. The Witcher 3 may end up being a great one.
It launches on May 19 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.