14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at CD Projekt ZRED working on The Witcher series believes that one of the reasons for the success of the franchise, apart from the gameplay and the story, is the way the studio has interacted with gamers and showed them respects over time.
Andrzej Kwiatkowski, one of the designers working on the title, tells Examiner that his company always wants gamers to extract as much value as possible from the titles they are buying, which is why the company has decided not to include any Digital Rights Management solution in its releases.
He explains that, “From my point of view, I think that it’s a mix of how we treat gamers and how we value what they say about our games. We have the no DRM policy that’s a big bow before those who decide not to use pirated software, we support our games well after they’re launched and we actually listen to players’ feedback.”
CD Projekt is basically willing to accept that some gamers are too poor or too uninterested in the law to buy their games, but believes that there’s no way to stop them from doing so without hurting those who are willing to pay and expect a superior experience.
The respect for the gamer is also manifested in the launch of comprehensive Enhanced Editions for both the first and the Witcher titles, designed to fix problems, introduce new content and more mechanics, all of it for free.
Andrzej Kwiatkowski also says that his company is not announcing an official launch date for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt because it does not want to disappoint its player base.
He adds, “we’re one of those companies that believe in the ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’ thing. This stems both from our respect to gamers and the fact we just won’t release a game that does not represent the quality we want it to represent.”
The new title is expected to arrive this year on the PC, the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony.
The title is the last in the series and will see main character Geralt deal with a powerful supernatural threat that could destroy all humanity while also dealing with one of the most painful episodes from his past.
CD Projekt says that it is rebuilding the entire combat system in order to make it more satisfying while introducing an open-world structure to the series for the first time.