The Witcher 3 Has Really Large Dungeons; CDPR Handcrafted The Game, Now Works On LOD Fix

New The Witcher 3 information is now trickling out on a daily basis. Just a few days ago we’ve reported a summary of the most interesting findings by Gamestar magazine in their extended playthrough, and today a Community Q&A has been posted on the official forums, with Level Designer Miles Tost from CD Projekt RED answering questions.

There are quite a few interesting highlights. For example, he confirmed that there will be really large dungeons in the game and some of them will take even an hour of play time to complete.

There’s some really large dungeons. I guess some of them offer 1H+ game time, depending on how good you are with combat, how thoroughly you explore them (SECRETS!!!) and how well you cope with being in utter darkness for an extended period of time.

When asked if the dungeons will have a horror vibe, he answered:

With some we did, with some we didn’t. Sometimes you want to go for more of a mystical vibe, for example. It helps that, much like in the previous games, dungeons and caves are very dark unless you come prepared though. Luckily this time around, Geralt has a torch. Comes in handy should you not have your cat potion or if you have it, but already find yourself at the edge of the toxicity threshold. You can even fight while wielding the torch in one hand, however, IIRC it renders Geralt unable to parry attacks.
Does look quite spectacular with the dynamic shadows, though.

Tost was a bit hurt by a user’s assumption that since The Witcher 3 is a very large game, most have it must have been procedurally generated. On the contrary, he clarified that most of it is handcrafted:

Ah, we in the Locations Team are really proud of the fact that everything is hand-crafted, which is why you keep hearing us say it over and over. Your conclusion there makes my heart almost hurt just a little bit. So for this reason, to be a hundred percent sure, I called in what is now called the Environment Council, consisting of me, Daniel Olejnik (Senior Environment Artist) and Marcin Michalski (also a Senior Environment Artist).
We discussed this and shed a couple of tears together. Enough of it is hand-crafted for us to not feel like lying when we say that everything has been hand-crafted by us. Even when the team created the basic land shape it started out in zBrush, then got some erosion applied via software, and then iterated in-engine (sculpting the terrain without terrain brush tools). Terrain Textures are painted by hand, assets including foliage are placed by hand as well. We do have foliage generation for a basic foliage layer based off the type of terrain texture used (which again is painted by hand). It will apply a layer of grass. However, any further vegetation, trees, bushes, flowers, etc, are all hand placed.
Think about Novigrad City: none of the houses have been placed procedurally or by an algorithm, the city was carefully planned and crafted all the way from the rough districts to individual pathways in between (or through) houses. Also I realise that the question might’ve been meant differently. In that regard: Terrain was shaped by hand, erosion effects are applied, at this point, there’s virtually no spot of terrain in the world that hasn’t been touched by a dev.
Yes, it is an insane amount of work that we did have to sacrifice our fair share of evenings for - but for us it’s just worth it and honestly, we firmly believe it makes for a better game, because it makes the world more enjoyable.
If we wouldn’t we would’ve not done it, right?

Finally, he also mentioned that the programmers are presently working on a fix for the vegetation pop-in noticed in the latest trailer.

Not my area of expertise, but I do know that code is working feverishly on something for this.

The Witcher 3 releases on May 19 for PC, PS4 and XB1.