Witcher 3 "quest per pixel" as "high as humanly possible"

CD Projekt RED is willing to bet it's packed as much content into each inch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as it possible could.

"The quest per pixel (we should trademark this!) metric is as high as it’s humanly possible in The Witcher 3," game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz told Stickskills.

"We’ve added quite a few people to the departments responsible for quest design and writing – we’re willing to go very far make side-quests seamless and coherent with the whole world you’ll get to explore."

Tomaszkiewicz said CD Projekt has tried to avoid generic content and clichés as much as possible, and to build everything manually rather than auto-generate.

"We try to give every NPC a convincing backstory and every part of the land a bit of their own folklore. If you remember our E3 demo, where we showed the Leshen and the monster’s impact on the local folk who build something of a ritual around it, yeah, that’s what we mean. And it was 'just' a side-quest," he added.

In a similar vein, the developer said that although The Witcher 3 has taken the series open world for the first time, that's not really the point.

"What we excel at is reaching that centre of the brain that’s responsible for evoking emotions – we constantly put stuff in and observe a full palette of gamers’ reactions," he said.

"Adding the open world to The Witcher is just another step to make it a more complete experience and not the main feature of the game. We’re still focusing on the narrative, the world just got a lot bigger and the borders within it disappeared."

Although it might not be the team's first priority, Catherine took a look at The Witcher 3 at E3 and was blown away by what she called an "open world done right".

The RPG sequel is due on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2014.

Thanks, OXM.