CD Projekt RED’s co-CEOs spoke about how Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s system-based approach can be a path forward for RPGs.

CD Projekt RED co-CEO Adam Badowski has revealed details about how the studio looks at other RPGs in the market, and how a different approach to the genre, like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, still helps CD Projekt RED learn things. In an interview with PCGamer, Badowski also spoke about how BioWare, as well as the gaming industry around the studio, has changed over the years. He also went into how CD Projekt RED is looking at its past games for things that it can evolve.

“BioWare has changed for sure, but the industry has changed too,” said Badowski. “We have a different strategy for our company. We definitely would like to continue keeping and truly understanding our core rules, how we develop our games, and of course, on top of that, we need to find new things, especially in gameplay, because there’s not such a great progress when it comes to good stories.”

“So here we feel very strongly at the same time, so many great things happened in gameplay [since The Witcher 3]. What are players’ expectations here? And there are great games, great mechanics and plus UI [improvements]. So this is the idea for our development, and we are focusing on that, but at the same time we strongly believe in the core of what we are doing here.”

When it comes to a more systems-heavy RPG like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which pairs compelling stories and characters with more emergent moments that can happen while players are just out in the world, Badowski believes that it might be the next step for not only the genre, but for CD Projekt itself.

“The Kingdom Come kind of simulation, it’s great,” he said. “There’s so many options, you can change the world, it’s super great. And we would like to keep that, we’d like to follow this trend as well. So these are our next steps for sure, and it’s kind of a similar challenge to what we have in The Witcher 3 because of the open world and storytelling here, freedom of choices. But at the same time, we would like to build very fleshy, very well-motivated characters. So it’s kind of in contradiction from time-to-time. That’s a great design challenge.”

Badowski and fellow co-CEO Michał Nowakowski both also spoke about how Larian’s attempts at the genre with massive hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 also help move RPGs forward. However, Badowski also noted that there are major differences between how a turn-based role-playing game handles things like combat and character interaction, versus how an open-world real-time action game does so.

“In Larian’s case it’s turn-based so it’s a different kind of game, and the way you interact with characters is totally different,” said Badowski. “We like to fully build the characters, understand the past and the future of the character motivation. That’s why it takes so much time. [In BG3] there are great characters as well but sometimes your choices, because there’s freedom of choices in Larian’s work, it pushes you to use different tricks than ours. But I think we observe each other, and there are not that many games like that, so that’s natural, yeah, and we see how players react, how fans react to those tactics.”

Nowakowski believes that it might be good for both Larian and CD Projekt RED to stay in their proverbial lanes with it comes to their different approaches to RPGs. Rather, he spoke about how different developers can look at games from the past and build on top of the strong foundations that had already been laid.

“I think we’re still more in the, you know, we’re a big open world,” said Nowakowski. “But a lot of what Baldur’s Gate 3 showed was an inspiration, and to be honest there’s no shame in that. I think everybody who launches games nowadays is looking back on what was done before, and is looking at what worked and what was great and how and if they can fit it into whatever they are doing.”

“So for sure there was a lot of inspiration and what BG3 did, but I think we’re still more sticking to what was The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, even if we don’t want to just make another game like that, just with better graphics. We do want to innovate in terms of what’s available in terms of gameplay and so on. I hope when the time comes, that’s going to become clear for the fans as well.”

Nowakowski also went on to reaffirm that CD Projekt RED isn’t planning on making games in the style of Larian’s RPGs. However, the studio still feels quite impressed and inspired when it looks at a game like Baldur’s Gate 3.

CD Projekt RED is currently working on The Witcher 4. The game doesn’t yet have a release date.