Cool story of gamedev companies supporting each other.
Some parts of the article:
I presented the demo, and this demo wasn't great," Badowski says. "Afterwards, Ray and Greg ask the question, 'Okay, so what do you want to achieve?' We said that we would like to be the biggest, the best RPG team in the industry. We would like to create the best RPG game ever."
At this point, CDPR only had 15 people in the team, with the hope of expanding to 35 in the not-so-distant future. Regardless of how hardworking everyone clearly was, it was undoubtedly an awkward moment around the table. After a bad demo, the realisation that it was only a small team working on this project, and the declaration that despite all of this, they wanted to make the best RPG ever. All BioWare could muster up was a "We'll call you back".
But luckily, the lasting impression must've been a good one, as eventually BioWare did get back in contact with CDPR. "They were super supportive,"
The engine that they ended up getting was the Aurora Engine, which powered BioWare's Neverwinter Nights series of fantasy RPGs. But those at CDPR still had their work cut out for them. "We wrote 80-something percent of the code," Badowski says. "We had no multiplayer, we removed so many, so many elements from the engine, and the render was completely new."
10 Comments
Interesting piece.
W1 was far from perfect. Very repetitive combat (a problem that arguably persists even in W3) and wonky translation were two things that kinda turned me abit off.
Those collectable titty pix tho.
They did create the best RPG
CDPR as a studio just loves to farm PR
They made some good *action* RPGs, but they’ve always been in that hybrid RPG-lite genre.
The Witcher 1 was rough in many areas, but we could sense the writing was already on point.
First game was actually meh game. Combat specifically was wonky, weird. The story and dialogues were alright.
But, I have a question. Did someone hurt CDPR? Looks like Ciri MC in w4 really did a number of them with all these sudden “cdpr almost died, nobody believed in Witcher 3 after Skyrim” and so on.
And years later, I would argue they succeeded with The Witcher 3. The ‘best’ anything is always contentious, but I don’t think anyone can deny that The Witcher 3 is one of the candidates of best RPG to date.
It’s cool to see some of these early stories. Despite the early struggles of Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR is a company with heart for games. They got Cyberpunk to a very good state, still release DRM free games, honour their source material and don’t release games at ridiculous prices.
I find this PR a bit hypocrital from CDPR, given that they later decided to start trashtalking Dragon Age 2 (which was rushed and done in just 15 months due to EA) to promote The Witcher 2.
It’s so weird that we constantly have to see Bioware and CD Project Red pitted against one another.
I guess this is why I’ve never heard anyone talking about TW1