The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt designer Damien Monnier shared new insight on development in a new interview. The game’s internal ecosystem is an impressive technical achievement.
As you may know, CD Projekt RED acquiesced to fans coming from The Witcher 2 and placed The Witcher 3 in an open world. We know this open world will have incredible scale, being 30 tiimes as big as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.
Many areas within that world will have different climates, land masses, and environments. CD Projekt RED is populating these areas with wildlife, in such a way that it matches what natural ecosystem belongs in those areas in the real world. Case in point, the lush forests you will be spending most of your time in will have deer and wolf populations.
These ecosystems will operate independently of you, so if you opt to focus on monster hunting and stay away from other animals, they will keep operating as expected.
However, if you decide to interfere with that ecosystem, there will be consequences. Kill all the deer in the area, and the wolves will leave, to find other places with more food. Kill all the wolves, and the deer population will start to grow. Presumably, making changes to the food chain on the plant level (such as deforesting a whole area) would have consequences as well.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be released on February 24 on Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
