- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Lead quest designer Paweł Sasko says his suggestion to kill a certain character surprised the team.
- Sasko argued that the “weight” of the scene was exactly what the act needed.
- He says that the team had many technical difficulties during the Battle of Kaer Morhen questline.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Lead quest designer Paweł Sasko has revealed that he left the development team silent when he originally suggested killing off a certain character.
Spoilers ahead for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt just celebrated its 11th anniversary and, to mark the occasion, Sasko, who is also the Cyberpunk 2077 The sequel’s associate game director took to X/Twitter to reminisce about the challenges of writing for the 2015 Game of the Year winner.
After going through the process of writing his first outline for the Bloody Baron quest, Family Matters, which Sasko said he saw fall apart in the review session, and finally coming up with another idea after reading Slavic folktales, the developer touched on one of the game’s most crucial moments.
This is when Wild Hunt appears in Kaer Morhen near the end of the game. Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer and the rest of the dysfunctional gang have gathered to plan their next steps before the antagonists appear and a battle breaks out. During the battle, Vesemir, the Wolf School teacher and father figure to Geralt, is killed by the Wild Hunt general. Imlerith.
It’s a great moment that pushes Ciri to her limits and, according to Sasko, surprised the entire development team when she first suggested it. However, despite the concerns, he was able to argue how crucial it was to move the story forward.
“Next comes the battle of Kaer Morhen. The outline of the story is only two paragraphs. In a meeting, I propose that Vesemir die. The first reaction is wide eyes and silence,” Sasko said.
“The weight is exactly what the act needs. Ciri’s outburst, the moment she throws the Wild Hunt back, requires the ground to fall out from under her first.”
The developer went on to explain the technical difficulties he encountered when designing the mission, but despite the challenges, he was having a great time.
“I make prototypes of meteorites, cracks opening in the forest, Wild Hunt coming out of them, the journey back to the fortress on horseback. A lot of it doesn’t work. Technical problems. The flow of the mission is unclear. The review feedback I get is negative, so I rebuild. The pieces start to hold. I start to see why something works and why the next thing doesn’t work. Through repetition, I really start to understand the craft,” he said.
“The most important thing of all is that I’m having the time of my life. Designers are showing each other ideas in the team room. Someone solves a problem, someone else builds on it, someone else innovates and iterates. We’re playing. We’re putting interesting things into a game we love. We still don’t know if the open world will really work. We’re trying anyway. We’re pushing ourselves until we reach the finish line and release it.”
As Sasko said, the game sold 60 million copies and is now considered one of the best role-playing games of all time, with the developer saying that the development period included “the skills, the friendships, and the failures that taught me more than any success.”
Right now, CD Projekt Red’s top priority is The witcher 4, which he said will be the first game of a new sorcerer The trilogy plans to release within a six-year period and is unlikely to release before 2027.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to receive news, reviews and opinions from our experts in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
The best Xbox controllers
