GAMING-POLAND/WITCHER Polish developer hits record sales with role-playing game Witcher III

Record ID: 146100

  • Title: GAMING-POLAND/WITCHER Polish developer hits record sales with role-playing game Witcher III
  • Date: 22nd July 2015
  • Summary: WARSAW, POLAND (JULY 17, 2015) (REUTERS)? (SOUNDBITE) (Polish) PRESIDENT OF THE CD PROJEKT, ADAM KICINSKI, SAYING: "We think that Witcher was only a step in the evolution of our company. We want to aim higher and we have much greater ambitions than what we showed in Witcher III."
  • Embargoed: 6th August 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Poland
  • Country: Poland
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA5BTD6JXG3MF38RGYP42J1ROGQ
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Poland's largest video game developer CD Projekt has garnered record sales of the latest edition of its "Witcher" fantasy saga, as it starts to attract mainstream gamers and gains critical acclaim abroad.
    "Witcher III - Wild Hunt" is the third edition of the role-playing series, which has collected more than 200 awards and which the former Polish prime minister presented to U.S. President Barack Obama during his last visit. It massively outperformed the two earlier versions in preorders.
    The company sold 1.5 million copies of the game before its release versus 1 million and 1.7 million of total annual sales of the saga's previous parts, respectively.
    "Witcher III has been phenomenally received by both critics and players. In the Metacritic service which aggregates ratings by critics and players it has a rating of more than nine out of ten, which places it in the forefront of best games for the present generation of consoles, but also in the forefront of best RPG games in history" CD Projekt's chief executive, Adam Kicinski, said.
    He added that the record sales were result of unrivalled player autonomy combined with a complex and large-scale narrative.
    "We give the player freedom of choice, he goes where he wants, he does what he wants, and at the same time we tell an incredibly extensive long epic story and we combine these two things into one. So far nobody else in the world succeeded in combining such two elements at this level. That's why Witcher III is an absolutely unique game," Kicinski said.
    For scriptwriter Karolina Stachyra, one of their tasks had been to keep players guessing as to where the choices they make in the fantasy world would lead.
    "We have created very mature plot where choices and consequences are not obvious. We often place a choice before the player and afterwards it turns out that the consequences of that choice are different than the player would have expected," she said.
    The game's main character, Geralt of Rivia, faces the game battling against the sinister "Wild Hunt" in a range of different locations and challenges. But for every player, the quest will be different as they guide themselves through the story across an open world spanning deserts, villages and mountaintops - each with their own individual populations.
    "What we do is that each creature will have a brain and that brain will tell them how to interact with another creature when and if they come and cross it. So it's very organic, it feels very natural, as we walk around you will see things interacting with each other," senior gameplay designer Dammien Monnier said.
    The game has 36 different main endings and hundreds of situations depending on the player's own input and decisions.
    Despite the high sales figures, Kicinski said that CD Projekt's ambitions were not limited to the Witcher series.
    "We think that Witcher was only a step in the evolution of our company. We want to aim higher and we have much greater ambitions than what we showed in Witcher III," he said.
    Profits from the release are mainly earmarked to finance new projects, including Witcher add-ons and a completely new game entitled Cyberpunk 2077.
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