Ahead of the upcoming Blood and Wine expansion, some of the designers behind The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt reveal which quests were the most challenging to create.

Upon its release last year, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was highly praised for a number of reasons, but one constant among critical response was the high quality of its quest content. Now, quest designers Pawel Sasko and Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz have revealed which quests pushed them furthest.

Answering fan questions on the official CD Projekt Red forums, Sasko and Tomaszkiewicz stated that the most difficult quest to design in The Witcher 3 was the Battle of Kaer Morhen. Sasko added that he's "never implemented such a technically challenging quest."

In this case, the difficulties sprang from the array of characters that the player can feasibly have accompanying them. Each possible arrangement required new scenes and dialogue to be written, to ensure that the quest turned out to be a "quality experience."

Another quest that apparently "took a long time to get right," according to Sasko, went on to become known as one of the high points of the game. The Bloody Baron is described as "ambitious" by the designer, who notes that it took plenty of input from Tomaszkiewicz, story director Marcin Blacha and senior writer Karolina Stachyra to get it right.

Tomaszkiewicz agrees that the team "spent loads of time on" The Bloody Baron, and that it was perhaps the most difficult quest to design from a writing standpoint. "This whole effort turned out to be worth it," added Sasko. "Because this quest won Golden Joystick Award 2015 for the Best Gaming Moment."

The designers also pointed to The Last Wish and The Tower Outta Nowheres as two of the side quests they were particularly proud of. There's also praise for Scenes from a Marriage and Dead Man's Party, both of which were included as part of the Hearts of Stone expansion.

Hearing the designers share details of their process offers a look into the realities of game development that we don't often see. It certainly seems like the hard work that the team at CD Projekt Red poured into the game paid off, both in terms of critical response and its enormous financial success.

At this point, quest designers like Sasko and Tomaszkiewicz have likely finished their work on The Witcher 3, as its final scheduled expansion is set to hit very soon. The pair are probably working on Cyberpunk 2077, but unfortunately it seems that we'll have to wait a little while longer to see the fruits of their efforts on that front.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Source: Gamespot