- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Lead quest designer Paweł Sasko says his suggestion to kill a certain character shocked the team
- Sasko claimed that the “weight” of the scene was exactly what the plot needed
- He says the team ran into many technical difficulties during the Battle of Kaer Morhen questline
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Lead quest designer Paweł Sasko has revealed that he shocked the development team into silence when he initially suggested killing off a certain character.
Spoilers ahead for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has just celebrated its 11th anniversary, and to celebrate the occasion, Sasko, who is also Cyberpunk 2077 successor associate game director, took to X/Twitter to reminisce about the challenges of writing for the 2015 Game of the Year winner.
After running through the process of writing his first outline for the Bloody Baron mission, Family Matters, which Sasko said he saw falling apart in the review session, and eventually coming up with another idea after reading Slavic folktales, the developer hit on one of the game’s most pivotal moments.
This is when the Wild Hunt appears at Kaer Morhen near the end of the game. Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer and the rest of the dysfunctional gang are reunited to plan their next move before the antagonists show up and a battle ensues. During the battle, Vesemir, master of the Wolf School and father figure to Geralt, is killed by the Wild Hunt general Imlerith.
It’s a huge moment that pushes Ciri to her breaking point, and according to Sasko, it surprised the entire development team when he first suggested it. Despite misgivings, however, he was able to argue how crucial it was to move the story forward.
“Then comes the Battle of Kaer Morhen. The story outline is only two paragraphs. In one meeting I suggest that Vesemir die. The first reaction is wide eyes and silence,” Sasko said.
“The weight of it is exactly what the act needs. Ciri’s burst, the moment she throws back the wild chase, requires the floor to fall out from under her first.”
The developer went on to explain the technical difficulties he ran into when designing the quest, but despite the challenges, he had a great time.
“I’m prototyping meteors, canyons that open up in the forest, wild hunts pouring out of them, the trip back to the holding area on horseback. So much of it doesn’t work. Technical problems. The quest flow is unclear. The feedback feedback I get is negative, so I rebuild. Pieces start to hold. I start to see why something works and why the thing next to it doesn’t understand,” I said, not really repeating it.
“Most importantly, I’m having the time of my life. Designers show each other ideas in the team room. Someone solves a problem, someone builds on top of it, someone innovates and iterates. We play. We put cool stuff into a game we love. We still don’t know if the open world will actually work. We try anyway. We push to the finish line.”
As Sasko put it, the game went on to sell 60 million copies and is now considered one of the best RPGs of all time, with the developer saying that the development period, including “the skills, the friendships, the failures, taught me more than any success ever could.”
Right now CD Projekt Red’s main priority The Witcher 4, which it has said will be the first game in a new Witcher trilogy, it plans to release within a six-year time frame and is unlikely to launch before 2027.
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