The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt developers at CD Projekt RED spoke to Angry Joe at E3, commenting on how the Batman Arkham and Assassin's Creed games have influenced the title and revealing that there will be 80 types of beasts in the game.
The game uses Witcher vision which works like Batman's detective vision in the Arkham games or eagle vision in Assassin's Creed and allows Geralt to track enemies and see their movement as well as hear better. Senior environment artist Jonas Mattsson said that Witcher vision can be activated when you find a body, for example, and decide to investigate what happened.
Monsters will have different tracks and players can come to familiarise themselves with the different animals, being able to say that certain tracks were left by a griffen for instance. You'll also be able to first bleeding arrows at monsters which only inflict a small amount of damage but then allow you to track the monster through the blood it spills.
There'll be eighty types of creatures in the game and all of them have different strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited by the player.
"There are definitely monsters in the water, some of the them are really freaky because they fly and then they dive water and then they're gone and suddenly pop up in your face," senior VFX artist Jose Teixeira commented.
You can fight underwater and explore hidden passages to find treasures and so on. Save files will "absolutely" carry over from The Witcher 2 to Wild Hunt on PC and Mattsson says they're still looking into solutions for the console versions.
Mattsson also revealed that players will be able to scale buildings in a similar fashion to the Assassin's Creed games saying that there's "no limitation" to what you can climb and that fully flexed mounted combat is featured in the game. The game world will be huge and while fast travel is available, you'll initially have to travel to a destination either on foot, on horse, or by boat to unlock it for fast travel. Teixeira said the game world is "something like 65 times larger than The Witcher 2."
Despite this massive open world, the aim is to eliminate all loading screens.
Players will have the option to use objects they find around them such as bee hives to distract enemies. There will be 36 endings or "world states" depending on the choices players make during Wild Hunt and players who are new to the series will be able to follow what's happening according to Mattsson, who said "we're not dropping the kids off at the deep end of the pool, we want to make things as smooth as possible" for newcomers.
The prologue will explain the game world but be important to the story as well, Teixeira said the hope is that veteran Witcher players will find it just as useful.
The Witcher 3: WIld Hunt is set for release on PC, PS4, and Xbox One in February 2015.
