We know fans of The Witcher franchise have been excited to get their hands on the third and final installment of the series, “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,” and so are we. With a new open world, comparisons to “Skyrim,” and an unbelievable quest per pixel metric, we’ve got a lot to look forward to.

Our Clay Conger had the opportunity to learn more about what’s in store for “The Witcher 3″ with an exclusive interview with game director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz of CD Projekt Red. Here’s what he had to say.

THEPOPFIX EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH KONRAD TOMASZKIEWICZ

Q. To start off, how was the development process for Witcher 3 in general?

A. Was? We’re still neck deep in development! On a serious note though, it’s both a lot of fun and very hard work. The whole team is super dedicated – I’ve worked with a lot of people during my professional career but what we have managed to achieve here in RED is truly unique!

Q. What were some of the obstacles, as well as rewards, for creating an open world so large that people are calling it 20% bigger than Skyrim?

A. I think what we see as the biggest challenge is populating the world with credible and authentic adventures and people. The Witcher games were always about storytelling and we wanted to sustain the level of detail that The Witcher 2 introduced to the RPG genre. To do this, we greatly increased the number of people responsible for the story and quests – each quest is hand crafted, which means it’s not automatically generated – it’s carefully thought out and woven in the whole story. To see the magnitude of hard work required to make this happen you should imagine a situation in which every time you look somewhere you see a potential point of interest and every of these points of interests has its own story that had its own dedicated sub team. Remember the demo we presented during E3? While following up on a lead given to him by Crach, Geralt ends up in a village and talks with a man who has information about the Wild Hunt. The conversation gets interrupted and players have the possibility to start a subquest. If they do, the transition is so seamless that only after a few minutes do you realize that you’re doing another quest. Maintaining this level of coherency is quite hard but we’ll manage!

Q. The Witcher series is known for heavily incorporating moral choice aspects. How will this mesh with the large open world?

A. I think I’ve partially answered that in the previous question – we’re basically extending the way we tell the story in The Witcher 2 to Wild Hunt’s open world. We’re doing it by hand – there’s no randomness here. As for choices and consequences and the moral ambiguity you speak about, it’s here and it’s a predominant thing. Returning to E3’s demo – it could have ended with you either killing the Leshen or leaving it alive and helping to preserve the old ways. At E3 we showed the variant in which the Leshen died. After ending the quest the spectators saw a flashforward (that gamers would normally see after a few hours of playing) showing the village destroyed three months after the events of the subquest. If we chose to spare the Leshen’s life, would the village be saved? It’s a rhetorical question, I’m just giving you an example of how we extend the moral choices to the open world mechanic. Your actions (or their lack) will count.

Q. When developing Witcher 3, did you and the rest of the development team keep next generation consoles in mind? If so, did it change anything?

A. We developed The Witcher 3 with next gen consoles in mind from the very beginning – Wild Hunt will not be released on current gens.

Q. It has been said that when creating something, one way to do it is to create something you personally would enjoy. Would you play Witcher 3?

A. Definitely! Games are an important part of our lives and are one of the ways we express ourselves – we take what we do very personally and every bit of feedback about our creations resonates within us for a very long time. I think that this, although we rarely say it out loud, played a crucial role in The Witcher games achieving so much on the RPG scene. Yes, we would play The Witcher 3 and we love every bit of it. There’s, however, another way of looking at it – as I frequently say during interviews – by the time of the premiere of the game we’ve been effectively “playing it” for a few years. This means that usually when the game launches we’re taking a break and are just happy that the gamers can now take over and have fun.

Q. The debut trailer for Witcher 3 is very impressive, and it notes how this will be the last game of the series. Is this true, and was the Witcher series always planned to have a finite story arc like this?

A. Yes, it’s true. We plan on closing the story with a bang in a truly CD Projekt RED way. As for the plans – we all know franchises which have a few parts too many and should have ended a long time ago, right? It’s the same thing with movies or books. It’s a big part of our philosophy to stay fresh and not milk gamers for money. If we ever decide to return to Geralt’s tale it’s not because we need to fill our bank accounts but because people will truly want to play another game. The third installment of a series is a good moment to give yourself some breathing time and focus on other projects.

Q. The Witcher has a strong fanbase. How do you think they will respond to this game?

A. We think gamers are going to appreciate the hard work and dedication we put into giving them what we think is going to be the best RPG on next-gen hardware!

Q. Lastly, I must reiterate how great the vast, open world looks so far. When did you decide to take the game to such a level?

A. Thank you! An open world game was the next logical step for us. With the first Witcher we’ve shown RPG fans Andrzej Sapkowski’s vast universe and made our first step into the whole genre. With the second Witcher, we mastered storytelling and evoking emotions – the world that Geralt’s tale was spun in was dark and gritty and gamers really loved it. With all our experience, the proprietary technology we work on and a massive and dedicated crew on board, we decided to open the realm so you can go anywhere you want within it.