What does ‘quests per pixel’ mean? Apparently it’s a new term coined by Witcher 3 game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and is used to describe how much content is crammed into a game.
According to Tomaszkiewicz, CD Projekt Red has packed as much content into The Witcher 3 as it is possible, every NPC will have a convincing back story and every part of the land will have a bit of its own folklore.
“The quest per pixel (we should trademark this!) metric is as high as it’s humanly possible in The Witcher 3,”
“We try to give every NPC a convincing back story and every part of the land a bit of their own folklore. 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,”
Although The Witcher 3 is the first game in the series to implement an Open-world system Tomaszkiewicz has stated that they are putting a lot of effort into what they do best, and that is storytelling. After a decade working on The Witcher series (whose development began back in 2002) the Polish developer (and publisher) has acquired a knack for non-linear gameplay and branching narrative and they intend to use that expertise to infuse the final installment in the trilogy with a deep emotional structure.
“What we excel at is reaching that centre of the brain that’s responsible for evoking emotions – we constantly put stuff in and observe a full palette of gamers’ reactions,” he said.
“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. We’re still focusing on the narrative, the world just got a lot bigger and the borders within it disappeared.”
The Action/Fantasy RPG is due in 2014 and will be available on PS4 Xbox One and PC.
