The Witcher 3 needed to be on the PS4 in particular according to CD Projekt RED

Developer CD Projekt RED said in a recent interview that it was very important for them to bring The Witcher 3 to next-gen consoles, and in particular to the PS4. The first game in the series was a PC exclusive and although it was very well received, its sequel was much more successful. The fact that it also came out on the Xbox 360 definitely helped it a lot seeing as how many more people were able to play it. Now the Witcher 3 is coming to both the Xbox One and PS4 as well as the PC and it’s the first title in the series to arrive on one of Sony’s consoles, which is why the PS4 version is so important. Worth noting is the fact that this version isn’t important because it’s better in any way than the other two, but because it helps the developer to reach a much wider audience.

“With The Witcher 3 we knew that we would have to reach a wider audience,” CD Projekt Red’s Mical Gilewski told VG247. “We needed to be on the new consoles and in particular the PS4, because a lot of people are attracted to them.” The developer also said that thanks to the capabilities of next-gen consoles it can finally create an open-world title, something that was not possible with The Witcher 2 due to the Xbox 360’s hardware limitations. “It’s only with the next-gen consoles that we can do much more,” he said. “Open-world was something we’ve always wanted to do and we believed that was the missing element for this story. To make it truly immersive we had to let people explore it their way. We always wanted this but we couldn’t because of technical limitations and because of the experience and size of the team. For The Witcher 2 it was very hard to make the game run on the Xbox 360. It was a demanding game, system-wise on PC. Then we had to squeeze all that on the other platform. We had to redo a lot of the stuff inside the game.”

The developer also says the The Witcher 3 is more similar to the first game in the series in the sense that the story revolves more around Geralt and is not so much about politics like the second game was. Gilewski adds that CD Projekt RED is starting from scratch with The Witcher 3, but at the same time, the game will feel very familiar to those who have played the previous installations. “We are starting from scratch but at the same moment making sure all the fans are going to find a lot of familiar elements – NPCs, places, story – some connection. We are introducing them in a way that if you don’t know them you will not feel that you’re missing something. If you do know them, it it’s us winking at you.”