FiringSquad: You say that the player can kill almost any character in the game and can wait for some quests to basically time out as he chooses to do something else. Isn't this a nightmare for the designers, trying to think up everything a player might do? How much development time does compensating for the openness take up?

CDProjekt: We do realize that such an approach requires a lot of input and bay bring about certain problems. That is why we'd begun working on the script long before the production phase started, and we believe we managed to create a solid basis for an involving, non-linear storyline. The additional time we got was entirely devoted to polishing the plot and placing it in a very flexible world avoiding linearity. We have also created very meticulous and specific system of hints and gameplay mechanisms, allowing us to foresee the consequences of character's reputation and flexibility of interpersonal relations. All these sum up into a consistent structure that responds in a foreseeable way to the player's actions and matches itself so as to provide a number of alternative solutions to certain problems. It is of course worth mentioning that the players' lack of sense and responsibility may cause the main character's death.

In majority of the games such choices are restricted within the bounds of a good/evil axis, where eventually the "good" is preferred. In The Witcher there is no "better" solution - the consequence will be vital, consequence of the choices that become more and more dramatic and result in an arising difficulty of discarding the once-taken path. The very final, climactic outcome of the game will be a result of a number of choices made during the gameplay. It will be impossible to change one's mind at the eleventh hour, as it took place in e.g. KOTOR.