Polish game developer CD Projekt has said that it plans to cram The Witcher 3 with as much content as it can, with loads of quests and side missions that flow seamlessly.
"The quest per pixel (we should trademark this!) metric is as high as it's humanly possible in The Witcher 3," said game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz in an interview with games site 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."
And the famously perfectionist studio isn't going to be randomly generating this content, instead opting to create every quest by hand to ensure it feels like an organic part of the free-roaming world rather than just waypoints and boss monsters slapped on top of the map. "We try to give every NPC a convincing backstory and every part of the land a bit of their own folklore," Tomaszkiewicz said. "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."
And that, it turns out, is why The Witcher 3 will be the first in the series to go completely open world: it allows for better stories. "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," Tomaszkiewicz added. "We're still focusing on the narrative, the world just got a lot bigger and the borders within it disappeared."
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is in development for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and is expected next year.