CD Projekt RED’s upcoming open world monster masher The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt may still have some time left before it sees an official release, but the game has already made into a lot fans’ wish lists for next year. This being an age of multiplayer gaming (and at least co-op), Wild Hunt was expected to add a lot of flair with its huge open world. However, the only way gamers will get a taste of this world is by flying solo.
It was not long ago when developers confirmed that The Witcher 3 was confirmed it would be avoiding a multiplayer mode. Back in April, the studio’s head of marketing Michal Platkow-Gilweski told Eurogamer that there’s no place for a multiplayer mode in a game like Wild Hunt, which is mostly a story-driven game.
"Yes, I can confirm this," he said. “There's no place for multiplayer in so strongly a story-driven game as The Witcher 3. We want to focus on the single-player experience, delivering more than 100 hours of truly immersive gameplay. Geralt can be only one..."
Prior to that, studio manager Adam Badowski also did away with the possibility of The Witcher becoming an MMO any time soon.
Coming back to the present, director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz revealed to StickSkills that the company is focused on a strong narrative and “this is something multiplayer games, even the ones offering cooperative play, do not offer at this point.”
“When we tell a story we want it to resonate within gamers and some choices of plot elements we show are best to be experienced alone with no-one to say “I’d do this differently” shouting behind you. Cooperative play introduces an element of dissonance to the choice and consequence process and we’d like to avoid that.”
On the role of the next generation on Wild Hunt and what next-gen features has attracted the company the most until now, Tomaszkiewicz went on to admire the power built inside the likes of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which will add to the game’s overall performance.
“The horsepower of the new hardware is something that will really help in terms of adding to the visual side of things. As far as the features, we’re very cautious about saying anything at this point because we don’t want to spoil the fun,” he added. “Plus, we’re in the middle of testing various features now. To be perfectly honest, we’d rather wait for the official launch of the next-gens and present a full list of awesome features already implemented than to speculate.”
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is currently scheduled for a 2014 release on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
