Michał Kiciński,

Managing Director and Co-Founder of CD Projekt

About shines and shades of The Witcher release and closer and further plans.

The Witcher release is already behind us. The game has received very positive reviews from gamers and some good reviews from media all around the world. It’s the end of many years of hard work. Are you relieved?

Certainly. Although I cannot say that the pressure has vanished completely. We are still waiting for sales results from around the world. It is clearly visible that the game has made quite a successful debut. In England The Witcher debuted in 5th place on the bestsellers chart and in many online stores the game is sitting anywhere from 4th to 8th place. I was really suprised when I went to Amazon.com and saw The Witcher on the main page. It’s a great feeling. To sum up it up, I think that the game has a successful entrance for a debut product from a new development team. We are curious how that reception will translate to sales.

Surely sales won’t be bad. The question, rather, is just how successful the game will be. Right now we still have very random and incomplete information. In Poland, Russia and in scandinavian countries, we’ve already started to produce additional copies, since there weren’t enough copies to meet the initial demand.

Obviously it would be nice to see The Witcher in first place on sales charts around the world. Still, we have to be realists. We’re competing with some of the largest companies in this sector – companies that are supported by recognized brands and tons of experience.

The game’s debut was quite a success. Nevertheless, many games disappear from the charts too quickly. Aren’t you afraid that The Witcher will share their fate?

I think that The Witcher has also a number of concealed advantages, which might help its longevity on sales charts. First of all, the game grows on you: the longer you play the game, the more you like it :). And it seems that people like it so much, many gamers recommend it to their friends. So there is a great chance that the word-of-mouth will greatly support the popularity of our game. Moreover, we plan to care for our product; after all, it is our child :) Patch 1.1 (in two versions) has already been released and it won’t be the last thing we do in terms of post-release support. We will do our best to improve our product many months after the release.

We are aware that The Witcher has some technical shortcomings. Unfortunately as a developer, our position and experience are not as strong as, for example, those of Blizzard, so that we could be postponing the release for so long, that we’d be 110% satisfied. Such attitude means perfection for us, and we will aim for this.

The good thing is that the situation is changing. We are earning experience. We can plan better now, better estimate the risk, and it will greatly help us in planning our next products, in order to have enough time for improvements. It may be not clearly visible in The Witcher, but we are completely fanatical about professionalism, as we set a very high bar for ourselves.

We will be very active in developing updates for The Witcher. The game will have very strong and long-lasting support from our team, which means that we will release patches as long as there will be nothing left to improve.

Going back to the question: we are planning to release a toolset and demo soon. And what is even more important is that along with a toolset, or soon after its release, we will provide players with new adventures, developed using the toolset. For now we are already working on one adventure that will be free for all registered users of the game. I think — and hope — that our post-release support will help The Witcher become even more popular for a longer period of time.

Coming back to the release, what exactly are you particularly pleased with?

First of all I’m happy that the game has been so warmly received by gamers — and not only in Poland, but around the world. You can get a good idea of fan reaction at large websites like GameSpot where readers’ average is sitting around 9/10, as well as at IGN where the average from more than 100 reader reviews is 9.4, or at Metacritic, where The Witcher has a fantastic average of 9.7! In my opinion these are absolutely awesome results!

The high scores given by gamers are the best reward for us. I think that everyone on the RED team is delighted when they reads gamers’ reviews and their opinions about the game on discussion boards. This is really something to be proud of. Even on RPGCodex discussion boards, which may be regarded as the most critical site of all RPG websites, the game receives highly favourable opinions, despite the fact that before the release date the site wasn’t afraid to be a bit critical.:)

Reviews from gamers are indeed very optimistic. However, reviews in media, even though definitely positive in majority, have much higher discrepancy in terms of their scores (according to metacritic.com the average is 81%)

Rating The Witcher is not an easy task for the reviewer. The gameplay sucks the player in, making it difficult to tear him away from it . Many people have compared it to some of the old classics like Baldur’s Gate or Planescape: Torment. However, we were not able to avoid some shortcomings, because of which review scores could easily be lowered. Although we have put a lot of heart and effort into this game, it’s not perfect. Can a game ever really be perfect? Even if not, it is still worthwhile to pursue such a goal and we will go in that direction.

The review scores will vary as much as the reviewers who give them. Those who focus on gameplay and having an enjoyable experience will usually give us higher scores, while others may focus on the shortcomings and will let those influence them to offer a lower score. I think that IGN’s review is a very good example: the reviewer rated the game 85%, stipulating that the score was lowered because of some technical shortcomings. The game was at the same time awarded a prestigious Editor’s Choice award in on the strength of the gameplay.

Will you share us with something that you are not as satisfied with?

I am probably not the best person to answer such a question; anyone who knows me will know that I’m very hard to please and am often not pleased with anything less than perfection. But I know that our product is not perfect and that we have room to improve.

I want to mention first that I’m very pleased with the results of RED’s work. The commitment and professionalism of our developers has been exemplary. Simultaneously releasing the game in 10 different language versions — focusing on quality in each version — wasn’t an easy task. And we should not forget that it is our first project. Despite that fact, this extremely difficult task was completed well by the team.

I’m actually also very pleased with the degree to which the game has been polished. While we were not able to avoid all shortcomings and had to release a zero-day patch, there are still not too many issues in the game, taking into account its complexity and our lack of experience. I’ve played many games created by more experienced studios, which were worse than Witcher in this regard. Obviously, bugs should be eliminated completely and I’m confident that in our next games we will be closer to that goal.

Speaking of the game only, there are not many things to complain about. I’ve been playing The Witcher for a few days and it is really difficult to stop playing. I tried to avoid alpha and beta versions, in order to not spoil the fun for release. Of course I know the ending. But the plot was discussed so long time ago, that I can’t recall all the details, and I don’t know how it was implemented.

From my position I tend to be more aware of organizational shortcomings, especially concerning the game-release process. I would like to avoid criticizing foreign markets, so I will only refer to our domestic market.

First of all I’m terribly sorry for the turmoil that occurred during the shipment of the Polish limited edition. A number of organizational and communication mistakes accumulated there. I feel ashamed that we were not able to produce printed elements early enough. What can I say? It’s a shame and a failure, for which I would like to STRONGLY APOLOGIZE to every fan of The Witcher!!!

There were other set-backs, both big and small, but all in all there is no reason to write more about them. The Witcher is our first major project and there is no way that everything would work out the way we imagined.

Of course we are not tossing these mistakes out. We’re actively putting together out post mortems, which will help us analyze our mistakes and help us improve things for future products and our ongoing support for The Witcher.

Let’s go back to some less serious matters. What are your plans for the future? You have revealed that you are planning the release of a toolset and a demo. Could you say anything more, maybe concerning future projects?

Many people ask us about our future projects. We are still too deeply involved in The Witcher. We are customizing the toolset so that it can be used by gamers and not only professionals. Of course, even after this procedure, creating your own adventures will be a difficult task, but I think that many people will accept this challenge, as the end result may be really impressive :)

We are working on demo (which we couldn’t finish before the release), as well. Generally, creating a demo of an RPG is not an easy task. We want to make sure we can give new players a good demo of the game that demonstrates the combat system while offering a taste of the role-playing elements that make The Witcher more than some action-RPG.

As I mentioned earlier, soon after the toolset release, we plan to release our first adventure designed by us and created completely using the end-user toolset functionality. That should give people an idea of powerful this tool can be.

Of course we are also gathering gamers’ opinions and comments and we are preparing the next patch release. As I have already mentioned, constant improvements are very important for us and we will be making them till the end!

It’s still too early to speak about future products. We can see there is still a lot of work to do this year. For now, a large part of our team has disappeared for a well-deserved holiday.

Finally, anything else you’d like to add?

I would like to thank fans for many warm words and many congratulations on numerous occasions. I would like also to thank everyone who, by buying The Witcher, has supported us.

The Witcher is our debut. I promise that we won’t rest on our laurels. I believe that The Witcher is just the beginning of CD Projekt making the highest quality games — games with soul and made with passion, games which are not only the result of market analysis and large marketing budgets. :)