The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a massive deal when it came out almost a decade ago, and for good reason, mixing blockbuster cinematics with an expansive, spontaneous RPG open world that’d make Bethesda blush. The game’s lead quest designer has now explained that it was a huge risk for CD Projekt Red to even attempt making it, but that was, in part, because no one else was even trying.
The Witcher 3’s lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, now a creative director working on vampiric RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker at Rebel Wolves, reminisced about the huge undertaking in an interview with GamesRadar+.
“I think not many games were trying to do what we did back then, which is try to combine these really expansive storytelling techniques that were usually more built in more linear RPG, more corridor-structured RPGs like The Witcher 2, for example,” he recalled. “And we tried to carry that over to an open world.”
Tomaszkiewicz remembered “there was a risk to this, there was a risk to having such a long story as we did with The Witcher 3” because the team didn’t even know if that “fit the playstyle of an open-world game.”
“But we took these risks,” he continued. “We did what we could to mitigate them. I think, in the end, it worked out pretty well. I’m pretty sure some people did not like it, and they preferred the style of a game like The Witcher 2 or maybe some Bethesda games, and I think that’s totally fine.”
The Witcher 3 dev says his new vampire RPG Blood of Dawnwalker wants to challenge genre conventions, but only if “we’re changing them to actually achieve some goal”
