Speaking to Polygon CD Projekt Rad's managing director, Adam Badowski, and head of marketing, Michel Platkow-Gilewski, have revealed that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will offer three playable epilogues driven by player choice and include 36 possible world states at the game's conclusion.
They explained that the PC and PS4 versions of the game (and presumably the Xbox 720 edition as well) tracks player choice in relation to a huge number of decisions available in the game from the minor to the earth shattering. Over 300 minute player actions are tracked though the developers stopped counting when they reached that milestone.
"The game is quite complex," Badowski commented, "we didn't mean to develop something special for the ending, it's a natural consequence for the storyline. The story has hundreds of different branches and sub plots. We have to just sum all of those elements up in the epilogues. Some of these elements are taken from the very beginning and some from other moments in the storyline. All of them will connect to the epilogue.
"We have a lot of things to summarise. We didn't spend time on inventing endings, it was just the consequence of those choices," Badowski concluded.
PC players will be able to import their saves from The Witcher 2 into The Witcher 3 but as this is the first time the series has been on a PlayStation platform Projekt Red are working on alternatives.
"We are going to give you the possibility to use your save from The Witcher 2, but it will depend on the platform," Badowski said. "On the Sony platform we are developing the game for the first time, so we invented a way to define your old actions and decisions. If you play on the PS4 and played on the PC previously, you probably want to have continuation, you want to have a similar character."
While Badowski wasn't prepared to comment on how this system will work it may follow in the footsteps of Mass Effect 2 when that game launched on PlayStation 3. Players were presented with an interactive comic which enabled them to select choices from the first Mass Effect which was not available on the system at that time.
Badowski has previously commented that The Witcher 3 offers "extensive replay value."
