CD Project RED presents Witcher3 at E3 2013

CD Project Red Witcher 3 was one of the titles shown as examples of new games that will be available for the Xbox One at the Xbox Press Conference.

The game is a continuation of The Witcher 2, the title that brought fame to the company from Poland. Key to the game is a mythical story based on a novel of Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski. The story has background information on all of the mythical creatures and areas of the world.

The game uses both a traditional controller, as well as voice and motion commands with the new Kinect. The trailer and game play showed multiple scenes and story lines. As in the previous games in the series, The Witcher 3 is an open world game. All areas are now playable instead of just certain paths, and the game has added new models of transportation (running, horses, boats). The game will be available as a download game where the main content is available from the Web and is stored and runs on the local machine. The information that goes back to the Web are the scores and character movements (twitches).

Right now this information comes up on the main screen and pauses the game, it has not been figured out yet, if any of this information will be moved to being on a “smart glass” display to accompany the game. The use of smart glass as a second screen is still being decided.

CD Project RED chose to develop their own render engine and mesh system with a proprietary loading system. This gives them a new “streaming” load method that they believe will be faster for XBox live users. This streamer and new mesh loader have not been finalized for the new platform as yet.

They have spent a lot of time building a system for secondary characters. They have a parts library of clothing, legs, arms, hands and heads. The limitation on the creation of new characters is the number of heads that are available as facial recognition is very strong among users. They currently can change up the “same basic head” with different eye color, hair color, and facial hair options as well as voices.

Due to the expansive background scenes which are close to cinematic CGI levels, they have a separate environmental team from the art design team to handle weather, lighting and movement of the vegetation.

The game is scheduled for release sometime in 2014 for Xbox One / PS4 and PC. The minimum PC configuration is not known as yet.