CD Projekt: Skyrim ‘Playing Around More Casually’ than The Witcher 3

When you think of Bethesda’s open-world epic, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skryim, the word “casual” doesn’t exactly come to mind. The massive RPG contains hundreds of hours of exciting gameplay to enjoy, with enough lore and documentation to make anyone’s head spin. However, The Witcher 3 developer CD Projekt RED sees its competition’s game as a something much different, and more casual, that what Wild Hunt is attempting.

“I am a fan of Skyim, a lot of us love Skyim. But while they are doing their thing, like open world, jumping and playing around quite casually, we are doing it a little bit differently,” said Jonas Mattsson, CD Projekt Red’s environmental designer, in an exclusive interview with Gameranx. “We are heavily story driven and open world. This hasn’t really been done before and we want to prove that it can be done.”

The series’ new move into a more open-world setting will allow for a unique, vast gameplay experience. It’ll be quite different from what we’ve seen before, but that doesn’t mean The Witcher 3 will drop what’s made the franchise so interesting in the past.

“How do you bring the intensity and quality of The Witcher 2 into an open world? For us, it was not about making compromises; it was about having better tools,” he continued. “So for instance, say we create a mountain… now if we want to make a forest, we have a forest tool that calculates procedurally where it would rain, where the water would gather, and where the forest would grow out of that.”

There are some bold choices being made, but when you call yourself the first true next-generation RPG, being bold is just part of the business.