ComputerAndVideoGames.com has a look back w/ Michal Madej of CDPR on The Witcher.Looking Back... The Witcher
28-Mar-2008 Interview: Will Porter talks Polish fantasy, racism and soft porn with its chief designer Michal Madej
What have the Polish ever done for us? I mean apart from coming over here with a strong work ethic and doing plumbing, building, coffee-making, bartending and vegetable picking in the middle of winter? Well, what they're starting to do is develop some mighty fine games.
The most recent example of this is The Witcher, developed by CD Projekt. A development team comprised of a hardy bunch of individuals that cut their teeth by translating RPG heavyweights like Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate into Polish.
Somewhat controversial in that it allows the player to collect sexy ladies in rude stances, but nevertheless a fine outing in roleplaying, the thinking behind this mature-themed RPG adaptation ran deeper than the designers' overindulgence in female flesh suggests...
BIG IN POLAND
Madej: The initial idea was to create a fantasy RPG based on a known franchise. We started talking to Interplay about making a PC port of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, and after some time and some problems, we started looking for something else.
We realised Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher saga would be great. First of all, he's our own Polish writer and because he has a new vision of fantasy his work was fantastic to turn into a game. It was inspiring, it was unique, it was fresh, and while we had to translate the IP to other territories and that would be a challenge, we knew it would be a success.
In Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic, people are crazy about his work. I believe he's as popular as Tolkien, or even more so. Everyone went crazy about the game when it was released. In these countries it's not just a game - it's more like a cultural event. We had mainstream newspapers writing about it, it was on TV, everywhere. He's the most popular Polish writer today - and not just in fantasy writing - he's just the best Polish writer.
I knew he was popular overseas, but damn -- I didn't know his stuff was *that* popular over there.
How come it really never took off over here?
Maybe The Witcher game will really help more of Sapkowski's works sell over here in the US.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Madej: Andrzej Sapkowski is quite an old guy - he's almost 70 - and because there was an incredibly bad movie in Poland based on his books he'd had bad experiences. He was really afraid that we'd make a bad game.
Initially he said 'I've sold you the license, I just want the money, I'm not interested,' but after one or two years, he realised that it looked good, and the story was interesting, and got more and more involved. He began to help us to create the map of the world, which was something he'd never done before.
He was really excited - by the end he said it was the sort of thing that he'd always wanted to create. Him saying that was almost as important as what gamers thought and the review scores we got. We had created something that even the original author found exciting.
Wow, that's pretty awesome -- to have the original person who originally had no interest in the game just take interest in what other people were doing with his own IP and then actually jump aboard and help out.
DECISION MAKING
Madej: Sapkowski's books are different from the usual fantasy books, as you don't have the eternal struggles between dark and light. You don't have good and evil in his books - just shades of grey, having to choose between lesser evils. So it was important to have choices in the game that were morally ambiguous. Each time you have to think to yourself 'Which one of these is right or wrong?'
Decisions have to have an effect not only on your own character's life, but also on other people's. In most RPGs, your decisions only affect you, but I feel it's more emotional if you see somebody else dying, rather than just seeing yourself change.
If you see the whole city dead because you made a key decision and those people were close to you, then that has a profound emotional effect. The core idea is that these important, emotional decisions make up the story that you're told.
Cool.
THE QUICKSAVE CURSE
Madej: RPGs should let you save and load games - but it does destroy the illusion of choice, as you can load and reload to test what can happen when making key decisions. So we decided to separate decisions from results with large amounts of time, so that it would be impossible to reload to see a different choice's effect without replaying a large chunk of the game.
Their separation also means that when you encounter a situation that's a result of your own choices there's a cutscene that reminds you that something you did 10 hours ago actually meant something.
That's what I liked about Witcher -- that your decision in one matter might now really show any impact to way later in the game, which makes the gamer want to replay the game from scratch to see whatelse the gamer could've done.
SOCIETY AND THE ROLEPLAY GAME
Madej: If you read Sapkowski's books, it's more like reading a newspaper. It's really smart - much more entertaining than reading about some knight going to a bad kingdom and fixing everything. They're about real problems, real people, and about our real history - it says a lot about the way we live with things like racism.
If you look around nowadays, people kill each other just because of the colour of their skin, their religions, their favourite team - small differences get people killed. Can you imagine a fantasy world in which different races like Elves and Dwarves and Humans all loved each other because they're naturally good creatures?
Sapkowski created a world that is much more real - asking what would actually happen in fantasy if those races were real people, with real emotions that are more similar to our own. It's kind of an anticipation of what would happen in a Tolkien world if characters had real feelings.
Interesting.
ALL THOSE SEXY BITS
Madej: Sex is probably the most important element of our lives. The sex is in The Witcher because the game is about real people. It's not the main element of the game, but it exists: it's the main motivation for many characters, and it's a driving force for many plots. In real life, there are many wars that have begun because a king wanted to have sex with another queen.
We imagined that, but in a fantasy setting. We wanted to have Geralt to be able to have sex, but it's difficult to show it in the game, logistically and legally. However, we wanted to give some kind of reward to players for having sex. The cards were inspired by calendars with beautiful girls on them.
We wanted to do something like that with different postures as a reward, without showing exactly what's happening. From the beginning the European countries were the most important, so we weren't afraid of showing nudity. However, we knew the game would be released in America, so we did alternative versions for them.
Okay.
TRANSLATION DIFFICULTIES
Madej: The Witcher was produced in Poland and written in Polish, it's based on Polish literature and uses lots of fragments from those books. So translating it into English was hard, as the languages are just so different.
In Sapkowski's writing there's a lot of swear words - and in Polish we can create thousands of swear words, it's easy to create something new. In English, there are about five ways to say it. So translating this rich vocabulary into English was simplifying things somewhat.
Also, one sentence in English will be much longer in Polish, about 20 per cent longer, just because we have longer words and so on. So, as we tried to estimate the number of words in English, we decided that it would be about 20 per cent less - that was a big mistake. You have lots of short words in English!
We made this very rough estimation of how long the English translation would be, and soon realised we had twice the amount of text to record. Which was just impossible in the time we had before the game's launch. The only way to get around it was to make the script shorter.
Very interesting.
And w/ what they plan to do w/ Witcher: Enhanced, to make the (trunctaed) English script even longer and adds tons of new voice-work is really going to be something to behold.
THE HACK AND THE SLASH
Madej: The most interesting development of the game was the combat. The goal was to create a really exciting system, combining tactical, skill-based roleplay elements with something that was much more emotional - action-adventure, God of War-style.
If you read the books, the witchers fight in a dynamic, fast-paced way. We wanted to have the same impression as in the books: that you're playing as a professional. He's not excited at all, he's a fighting machine trained to kill in the most efficient way.
It took about a year of different prototype fighting systems to create something that was based on timing, which focuses on what's happening on screen in real time, and add some very simple choices to, in the end, create a complex, enjoyable system.
We wanted it to be simple, fluid, and focused on what's happening around you, reacting tactically and intuitively. It's there to make combat fun, cinematic and exciting - very much part of the story.
I loved the fighting system. I didn't give you the click-fest of the usual action-RPG (like Diablo), nor was it really too D&D either -- it was somewhere in-between those styles and it worked out great, I thought.
POLISH PRIDE
Madej: Because of the Second World War and Communism, we lost about 50 or 60 years of our culture, because we were closed. We weren't able to make movies or anything for the western world, and this is one of the first times we've created something that's been a major success there.
The game has also appealed to Polish people who don't usually play games - there's this stirring sense of patriotism. But for me, the most important element was thinking about the people around the globe playing the game.
They're not thinking about it being a Polish game, but as a European game. For me, it's the game we always wanted to create - having something that can be recognised as having European qualities and culture.
Will Porter PC Zone Magazine
