New Details About The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

CD Projekt Red, the developers of the upcoming open-world RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, recently held a panel at PAX East, where they revealed more about the roleplaying game. There are no spoilers below, except for a minor creature reveal, which is contained in the last bullet point—simply jump over it if you don’t want to be spoiled.

The developers have confirmed that they’re aiming for 30 FPS.
Skill trees have the same three branches as were in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (combat, magic, and alchemy), but have more options this time.
Enemies don’t scale with players. “The third installment of The Witcher is more reminiscent of Gothic than of Skyrim. In the prologue, when you’re on the first experience level, you have to be really careful about where you wander off to.” However, difficult enemies will be marked.
If players kill something, the carcass may attract creatures in the vicinity. The game calculates whether there are enemies within a one kilometer range (they aren’t rendered, but the game runs a routine so it knows where they are in the game world), and they will come running if they what they’ve “smelled”.
Creatures in the world don’t always get along, so Geralt will come across emergent battles. Monsters can, for example, spook bandits’ horses, causing them to throw their riders, which will likely result in the monsters slaughtering the bandits.
Characters in the game world will talk about what Geralt did, but will sometimes get things wrong, or the story will become more rumor than fact.
The developers claim the content determined the size of the world, and not the other way around; that is, they needed space for the stories and scenarios they thought of.
The prologue is 4-8 hours long.
Some content will become unavailable as progress is made in the story.
There was ice-skating in the game, but it was cut. (“You play as Ciri and you were going to ice-skate and fight!”) (“Left-right, the blades … You pirouette and then you slice heads.”)
The game has not gone gold yet (as of March 9), but CD Projekt will begin working on DLC soon.
WIld Hunt has been in development for about three years; the writers began work before anyone else did.
Some of the developers’ ideas and stories came from Wikipedia. For example, they found inspiration from a 1432 German story, which has a monster fetus. That design in particular was controversial—some of the developers, parents, objected to it—so it went through multiple iterations.