AG: I love it. I loved the first Witcher; it was great. I always found that the combat was pretty unique and it took a little while to get used to compared to everything else, this time you seemed to have approached that a little bit differently, can you talk about that...

Tom: Yeah, sure. There was a lot of feedback on the combat from The Witcher 1, so obviously with that there was a lot of things we could do about it; there were actually two main reasons why combat is so different in The Witcher 2 - the first one was a lot of people thought it was too hardcore [and] as you mentioned a lot of people actually had to take an effort to learn it and some people didn’t want to do that because they’re not into combat, they’re into story. So the first change that we’ve done is real-time; you’re not bound to any pre-defined stances of your sword or anything - you can mix anything at any time and it’s really easy to learn, but on the other hand we wanted to keep the complexity for all those [who] want to master the combat. So it is hard to master, there are a lot of tactics that the whole character development contains; unique gameplay oriented skills that you might actually want to do.
​