On a purely technical level, there are few feats in gaming as impressive as the absolutely massive open world CD Projekt RED created for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Not just huge, the world is filled to the brim with detail and personality, as well as tied together by intricate systems that give the virtual setting and its inhabitants so much life. It’s one of the key reasons The Witcher 3 tends to rank high on many lists of the best open world games.
Given all the praise it’s gotten, though, it can be easy to forget just how much of a risky move it was. Not only was it a change of pace from the linearly-structured Witcher games that came before, it was CD Projekt RED’s first time creating an open world, and this week, the game’s developers opened up on the process.
“Our quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, said that the main goal [of The Witcher 3] was to combine the design philosophy of previous Witcher games, which was to create a complex and mature story that has choices and consequences, with an open world," said senior quest designer Philipp Weber in an interview with Polygon. "There used to be this preconceived notion you would hear a lot that open world games can’t tell interesting or deep stories. So that was something we took up as a challenge."
Naturally, much of that challenge stemmed from figuring out how to design rich story-driven quests that could be approached from different paths. “One important goal we had was to not compromise on the quality of our quests and stories by having them take place in an open world,” Weber said, bringing up the question of how to make that work across dozens of quests and potentially hundreds of hours. “The team saw its inability to control the player as a strength, not a weakness, and leaned into it.”
Players know how that paid off by now, and Weber agreed that the switch to an open world ended up improving The Witcher 3’s quests considerably. "With the open world, our quest structure also became much more open, and we could give players many more opportunities to experience our stories in the way they wanted. If I can solve different parts of a quest out of order, then maybe this will have different consequences later on. Since we were always big fans of nonlinear choice and consequence, this was a huge bonus."
While the Witcher franchise has grown a lot since Wild Hunt’s release with the Witcher Netflix series and increased awareness of Andrzej Sapkowski’s original novels, for many the game is still the definitive Witcher experience. As for how people continue to respond favorably to it, Weber said that “seeing that kind of feedback was actually a great relief, made even better knowing that people still play the game now.”
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is available for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: Polygon