Celebrating the fact that conceptualization work on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt began back in February 2012, lead quest designer Paweł Sasko has revealed some interesting details about the RPG’s development. In a lengthy social media post, Sasko wrote about the early offices of CD Projekt RED, having just finished shipping The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and getting to work on The Witcher 3.
“It’s February 2012. A former factory in Warsaw. Red brick, wooden folding chairs, the smell of an old building that has been a hundred things before. Around 80 of us, the team that just shipped The Witcher 2,” he wrote.
“The lights dim. Game director and executive producer speak briefly about new game we are going to make. Few sentences change the air in the room. The next game will be an open world. At the end, they show one image on the screen – it’s Geralt, but older, with a beard.”
Throughout the post, Sasko wrote about the many challenges he faced when designing some of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s most iconic quests, like Family Matters, which involved the Bloody Baron. It took him quite a few attempts to nail the finer details of the story, including the Slavic folktale-inspired Botchling. However, he faced bigger pushback when he proposed that (spoilers if you haven’t completed the base game, turn back now before it’s too late)…
…That Vesemir, who served as as father figure to Geralt, should die.
“Then comes Battle of Kaer Morhen,” he wrote. “The story outline is just two paragraphs. In a meeting, I propose that Vesemir dies. First reaction is wide eyes and silence. The weight of it is exactly what the act needs. Ciri’s outburst, the moment she throws the Wild Hunt back, requires that the floor fall out from under her first. I prototype meteors, rifts opening in the forest, Wild Hunt pouring out of them, the ride back to the keep on horseback. So much of it does not work. Technical issues. The quest flow is unclear. Review feedback I get is negative, so I rebuild. Pieces start to hold. I begin to see why something works and why the thing next to it does not. Through repetition I truly start understanding the craft.”
Sasko also wrote about how it took the team nine months to write out the main storyline of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, with all the other development teams eagerly waiting for the writing to be finished so that they could start building the rest of the game.
“For the first nine months all of us write the main story quests, because every other department is eagerly waiting,” Sasko wrote. “Level has not even grass yet. RED Engine 3 is still finding its shape. But we keep moving. I write much more than then we need for the game, because we pick only the best. Priscilla’s concert in Novigrad is next. Then the The Last Wish. Some of it is designed last minute.”
He caps off the post by celebrating the fact that it has been 11 years since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was originally released on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. The fact that he once more brings up the Bloody Baron quest line indicates that he is quite proud of the story.
“Today it has been 11 years. Over 60 million copies. A Polish village monster from a threshold burial lives now in the imagination of players on six continents. A Bloody Baron most of those players chose to forgive. A female bard’s concert in a tavern that players adapt and recreate,” he wrote.
In the meantime, CD Projekt RED is hard at work on a number of projects, including The Witcher 4 and sequel to Cyberpunk 2077.