“Blood and Wine we literally started from scratch.”
CD Projekt Red confirmed today that The Witcher 3‘s final expansion, Blood and Wine, will release on May 31. The expansion adds more than 30 hours and 90 new quests. “It’s something that I think gamers will remember for a long time,” game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said. Tomaszkiewicz confirmed to Eurogamer that there will be no new content released for The Witcher 3 after Blood and Wine releases, saying “this is the last thing we deliver and we focus on Cyberpunk.”
“The first thing is that we try to fix as many bugs as we can for the second expansion and the main game,” Tomaszkiewicz said, “and we will release a patch before we release the expansion and maybe one later.”
Senior environment artist Len de Gracia told Eurogamer that the expansion is “a graphics upgrade from the base game.”
“Generally it is a graphics upgrade from the base game. We have employed methods that we did not implement in the base game. You can literally bring your camera up to a wall now and the textures would be crisp – at least in most cases” he said.
“We just wanted to show that we can actually push it to the limit this time.”
de Gracia said that the team “got really organized,” saying “It’s like a fresh development. Blood and Wine we literally started from scratch. The mistakes we went through, in terms of perhaps optimisation before, we have covered them.”
Tomaszkiewicz said that the team is “pointing it at 30fps” for consoles, with de Gracia adding “We are still aiming for that but for the most part we have already hit it. In certain places we still need to run through stuff and try to optimize it the best we can, but in comparison to Witcher 3, production has been way smoother.”
