Artur Ganszyniec, the lead story designer on the original The Witcher, has revealed during an interview with Chip that he doesn’t think the upcoming remake of the 2007 fantasy-RPG shouldn’t be an open world game. However, we’ve known for a while that the remake is going to be open-world affair.
According to a translation of the interview DeepL and Google, Ganszyniec argued that bringing over The Witcher to an open world template would likely mean “the pace and scale of the entire project would change immediately.” He continued that CD Projekt RED’s original Witcher RPG excels thanks to narrative and pacing. “We knew exactly where the player would be,” he said.
Going open-world would change things, with Ganszyniec giving an example that a player could obtain a boat on Lake Vizima and cruise through the fifth act without any regard for the original’s old manor and challenges.
At some point, a pragmatic question must be asked: when does this multiplication of paths cease to be profitable? You can invest an infinite amount of time and budget, but will it generate an infinite number of new players?
The Witcher Remake was originally announced in October 2022 and is being headed by Fool’s Theory, with CDPR later confirming the project will launch after The Witcher IV. In January 2024, Fool’s Theory CEO Jakub Rokosz told EDGE magazine that the remake is looking to remove parts of the original that were “simply bad, outdated, or unnecessarily convoluted.”
[Source – Chip via GamesRadar]