Quests Have Never Been Better Than They Were in ‘The Witcher 3’
Ten years later, CD Projekt Red’s action RPG still sets the standard for open-world storiesQuests Have Never Been Better Than They Were in ‘The Witcher 3’
Ten years later, CD Projekt Red’s action RPG still sets the standard for open-world stories
A novel, however complex its timeline and plotting may be, advances page by page. A movie, even one with dizzying flashbacks and multiple perspectives, follows the linear roll of film. Only a video game, especially one with an open-world structure, splays out in many different directions across time and space—a complex matrix of player-induced cause and effect.
We tend to remember either the settings of open-world games or the emotions they summon within us: romantic adventure in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the physical hardship of trudging across the craggy, moss-covered terrain of Death Stranding. It’s rarer, though, for open-world games to imprint specific characters on the brain or to leave us with a keen understanding of a world’s factional politics. But that’s precisely what 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, released 10 years ago on Sunday, achieves. Few of The Witcher 3’s 50 million players (and counting) can forget the Bloody Baron’s deep, uneasy ruefulness, the creepy religiosity of the Eternal Fire, or the fetid, shimmering horror that lurks in Crookback Bog. This may sound like a slight distinction to draw, but more than its open world writ large, the most memorable aspect of The Witcher 3 is the stories its world contains. Its people and places are tethered to a virtual space so narratively dense that even its skyboxes—which are liable to turn an ominous blood red in the evening—are an opportunity for storytelling.
The Witcher 3, from Polish studio CD Projekt Red, doesn’t play as well as the best of the 2010s-era open-world games (which include all-timers Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto V). The movement of sardonic, white-haired monster slayer Geralt is conspicuously floaty; the swashbuckling swordplay lacks heft; your horse, Roach, is liable to get stuck on assorted objects in The Witcher’s 3-D space. But none of this matters when you’re locked into one of the game’s famed multi-hour quests. “All those quests,” stresses lead writer Marcin Blacha over a video call from CD Projekt Red’s headquarters in Warsaw, “are anchored in the world.”
What The Witcher 3 did—in a break from most open-world games before it—was to make plot, rather than the player’s innate desire for wanderlust or compulsion to work through a topographical checklist, the great engine that inspires exploration.
In short, the medieval fantasy magnum opus shifted the Overton window of open-world storytelling. You don’t have to take my word for it. Brian Mitsoda, narrative designer and lead writer of the 2004 cult classic RPG Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, remembers The Witcher 3 as an “event game.” Almost all the developers he knew in the role-playing scene played it, including former colleagues from illustrious studios Black Isle and Obsidian.
“Everyone was talking about The Witcher 3,” says Mitsoda, who sank the better part of 100 hours into the game at release. The consensus among his peers? “The bar had been raised.”
Mitsoda has created hundreds of quests across his career. As such, his praise for The Witcher 3’s quest design should not be taken lightly: It is “great” and “really compelling,” he opines, filled with many “twists and turns.” Take “A Towerful of Mice,” in which Geralt sails to the windswept isle of Fyke. What initially seems like a straightforward mission of vermin control slowly morphs into a tragedy involving the ghost—and, more gruesomely, bones—of a woman who was left to perish on the island by her lover. Follow the quest line further, and Geralt finds himself at a pagan ritual at the stroke of midnight, with rain lashing down, lightning cracking the sky, and monsters looming out of the inky dark.
Quests like this were a giant-sized step up from what typically happened in open-world RPGs, even lauded pioneers like 2006’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (now lavishly remastered) and its 2011 world-beating sequel, Skyrim. For all these games’ medieval fantasy wonder, a lot of their quests were, in fact, “pretty rote,” says Nathan Grayson, cofounder of Aftermath and former reporter at Kotaku. “They don’t feel fully authored.” The Witcher 3 moved decisively beyond “go here, kill this” cookie-cutter Bethesda quests to a model in which practically every mission, no matter how ostensibly inconsequential, was wrapped within a unique and “interesting story.” A quest often starts small, says Grayson, who also sank more than 100 hours into the game, before “blossoming” into a multistranded story line involving many characters.
Andrew Webster, entertainment editor at The Verge (where I also contribute), agrees. Ten years on, he can barely recall the primary story line—whatever the titular Wild Hunt was—“but I remember the Bloody Baron and all these other quests,” he says.
When he was reviewing the game, Webster’s initial impression was simply “holy shit.” It was the first open-world title he had played where he felt as if he, the player, was discovering stories as he moved through the landscape. “[Open-world games] all have that promise,” he says. “‘See that mountain? You can go to it.’ But most of the time, nothing happens when you get there.” Yet CD Projekt Red skillfully weaved narrative into The Witcher 3’s play space, from a haunted hillock to a seemingly innocuous garden full of exquisite, brightly colored flowers.
At the time of The Witcher 3’s release, gaming had yet to wholly establish its narrative chops. Even though the likes of 2007’s Bioshock and 2013’s The Last of Us had popularized the idea that the medium could deliver great stories, and indie games of the early 2010s like Gone Home and Kentucky Route Zero had solidified the argument in the eyes of more artistically inclined critics and fans, the “story versus systems” or “story versus gameplay” dichotomy lingered in the discourse, summed up by three pieces written by game maker, critic, and academic Ian Bogost.
In those essays, Bogost offered intellectually nimble takedowns of the idea that games’ strength lay in telling stories with embodied, human identities at their core. He argued that the “best games,” like SimCity, “model systems in our world.” But the vast majority are action-focused, their actual gameplay interspersed with traditional movie-like narratives. The great bulk of game design “craft” and the major portion of development resources are dedicated to such “player action,” arguably at the expense of other, more narratively fertile endeavors.
Open-world games supersize movement through space while multiplying collisions with those objects inside it. Amid this maelstrom of elements, The Witcher 3 maintains its unwavering narrative focus; indeed, the story feels seamlessly integrated with this open-world structure. As such, the game offers a robust counterargument to Bogost’s criticisms. It’s surprising, then, to hear that the story wasn’t written with this type of game space in mind. “When we started work on the story, we didn’t know it was going to be an open-world game,” Blacha says.
Still, the decision to move from the enclosed environments of the first two Witcher games to a more expansive game world happened “pretty early on,” per Blach, influenced, naturally, by Skyrim, the juggernaut that launched four years earlier to critical acclaim and sold 7 million copies in its first week. This shift prompted a profound creative question, Blacha says: Is it possible to marry a “beautiful, entertaining open world” with the kind of narrative the Witcher games were renowned for? Blacha and his colleagues' ambitions were sky-high: “cinematic” quality, a “complex and engaging” story, a “more emotional” tone than the franchise’s two prior entries. This story of novelistic depth, based on Andrzej Sapkowski's hit fantasy books, would be told while wrestling with the most finicky, capricious video game element of all: player agency.
Blacha, a 48-year-old with a wizened face and deep-set features who’s now vice president of narration at CD Projekt Red, outlines the open-world storytelling problem succinctly. With each additional element—code, art, mechanics, cutscenes—these gigantic games become exponentially more difficult to debug. The same goes for a story that can be approached in enormously variable ways. The narrative entanglements of an open world were a new challenge for the team. “The more complexity you add … the more dependencies you need to script,” says Blacha. Characters will talk to you differently depending on what you’ve done, where you’ve been, and whom you have spoken with. “You need to remember all of these situations,” says the writer, whose script, coauthored with five others, totaled more than 450,000 words (approximately the length of four average-size novels) precisely because of this intricate lattice of dependencies. The game needed to account for these variables, lest the fiction’s illusion fall apart.
In 2011, when Blacha began concocting the story for The Witcher 3, the writer was already a veteran at CD Projekt Red. He had started in 2006, when he joined some 70 other hungry young game makers who were keen to make their mark at the then-four-year-old studio. At the height of The Witcher 3’s production, that head count swelled to more than 300. Now, following the (eventual) success of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red numbers more than 1,400 across an international suite of studios, including a recently opened shop in Boston.
One common refrain among longtime employees is that the early 2010s were a more chaotic, less systematized time. “The studio was much smaller back then, much more Wild West,” says Miles Tost, a level designer on The Witcher 3. At the time, CD Projekt Red occupied just a few stories of a former industrial unit in central Warsaw. A pipe fabrication business operated below. Every 30 seconds or so, the game makers would hear metal slamming to shape the pipes, causing their desks to shake and keyboards to rattle.
There’s no better example of the studio’s hands-off approach than Tost’s first few weeks of employment. The cheerful, chatty 34-year-old recounts joining the studio in January 2013, fresh out of a game design course at the SAE Institute in Berlin. Tost, hired as a level design intern, walked through the studio doors expecting to be hit with a flurry of onboarding processes. Except that didn’t happen. The studio was in a tizzy: Senior staff were showing off The Witcher 3 to Game Informer for a splashy cover feature that would double as the game’s grand reveal. Furthermore, senior creatives were putting the finishing touches on the debut CG trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 (which wouldn’t be released for another seven years).
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Amid the hubbub, Tost, who’s now a level design lead, was mostly left to his own devices, given a single assignment of stomach-churning magnitude for a newbie: “Plan the open world.”
The intern was handed a smattering of lore and key areas: the city of Novigrad, for example, and the war-torn quagmire known colloquially in the game as No Man’s Land. Tost began by plotting points on a map using an internal studio tool called Black Box, kind of “Google Maps for our game world,” he says. He dropped pins for different landmarks: villages, ruins, castles, swamps, battlefields. A topographical picture emerged. But this picture had to be plausible, both geographically and socioeconomically—it had to tell a story.
Tost recalls one conversation with lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz: “I proposed the idea that Skellige [a Scandinavia-like archipelago] should have some form of agriculture. He was like, ‘No, Skelligans pillage, raid, and fish! They don’t really grow their own food.’” Tost pushed back, suggesting that these people needed some type of food-producing infrastructure. “We ended up with a small amount of farmsteads on Skellige,” he says, “just enough to support the main settlements because they’re the most wealthy and important.”
This kind of verisimilitude is widely taken for granted today. In Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, the latest entry in Ubisoft’s tentpole franchise, stubby ends of hacked-down trees are often found close to gigantic, wooden fortifications such as the stunningly realized Osaka Castle. In The Witcher 3, as you trot up to the city of Novigrad, you ride through the wheat fields that sustain its population.
“The logic we had,” explains Tost, “is that players will not actively notice. But by adding a lot of these small elements, we will create a believable world that doesn't feel uncanny.” Because of sheer cost and time, Tost and his colleagues couldn’t build a watertight facsimile of a functioning feudal society. What they could do, at least, was “imply it heavily.”
These locations, plotted on the digital map by Tost and his colleagues, are the figurative soil from which story elements germinated. Quest designer Paweł Sasko points to Velen, a region of conflict and famine overseen by a warlord called the Bloody Baron: a rotund, boozy oaf who enjoys what fat is left on his land yet is also emotionally impoverished, estranged from his family, and suffering from PTSD. From his Boston home, the 39-year-old Sasko says that characters who embody a location, personifying it in this almost folkloric manner, partly explain why The Witcher 3 feels so rich. These people don’t feel randomly placed on the map; they feel “deeply ingrained.”
The Witcher 3's "Family Matters,” which centers on the Bloody Baron, is one of the most celebrated video game quests ever (so notable it even boasts its own Wikipedia page). From his castle, perched atop an elevated crag of rock in a monster-infested bog, the Baron attempts to track down his wife and daughter. Enter Geralt of Rivia, who, using his Witcher senses to scan the environment for clues, surmises that all is not as the Baron tells it. The truth involves substance abuse, domestic violence, a miscarried child, and a folk horror showdown with three witches. This quest, whose script was written by Karolina Stachyra, also contains one of the most heartbreaking moments in the whole game: when the Baron, sitting in the garden that his estranged wife tended to, laments that he will never know which exotic flowers his unborn second daughter would have liked most.
Working from Blacha’s outline, Sasko, who is now associate director of the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, constructed an elaborate quest line of undulating drama that would ratchet up the tension before delivering moments of calm for the player to mull over the consequences of their actions. The first section culminates in the transfiguration of the Baron’s miscarried child into a slavering baby-like monster called a Botchling. This being was Sasko’s own creation, a synthesis of two distinct Slavic folk creatures: the “poroniec” and “kłobuk.” Geralt then accompanies the Baron as he carries this creature to its ultimate resting place, the threshold beneath his castle door. Sasko describes this first climactic sequence as a “peregrination,” an almost “purifying, religious experience” that unfolds entirely in gameplay. Through duration and the distance traveled through the landscape, Sasko hoped the player would almost come to feel these themes and heavy emotions in a “physical” way.
But the quest does not end there. Geralt continues to gallivant from castle to grove, encountering a quirky holy man and village leader who willfully cuts off his own body parts. But the plotline isn’t overcooked; it unspools naturally between settings. “When someone comes up with a [quest] idea for a location … they also think about how it affects the surrounding [area],” says 41-year-old Joanna Radomska, the quest designer who handled the second half of “Family Matters.” She notes how the three witches have a pact with a nearby village; if they give up some of their children, the witches won’t harm the settlement. “In a way, there’s a whole ecosystem,” she says.
For a large portion of the quest’s creation, Sasko had major doubts about its quality. “I was so disappointed with myself when working on this quest,” he says. “All the time, I was thinking that this is just so fucking boring. I felt like I dropped the ball.” Still, the designer kept iterating, tweaking elements, and adding new details. “That’s why, in this quest, we have so many small, optional things, because I was convinced that it was shit,” he continues. “I was thinking, ‘This is just missing a texture. This is just missing depth.’” It wasn’t until he heard that journalists played and enjoyed a preview version of the game that included part of the quest that he began to relax: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, maybe this actually works.’”
The years of tinkering paid off. PC Gamer has since called “Family Matters” “one of the best RPG quests”; The Guardian wrote that “the scriptwriters succeed in building an affecting and authentic scenario in which you are not merely a spectator, but active participant.” Such plaudits are typical of the praise the game received at the time of its release: “Landmark RPG,” wrote Eurogamer, and Kotaku declared that CD Projekt Red had “finally achieved many of the narrative and design ambitions that previously seemed just out of their reach.” The game sold 4 million copies in two weeks (not quite Skyrim numbers but not far off). On the eve of its launch, Polish prime minister Ewa Kopacz visited the studio, thus making The Witcher 3’s release a national event.
According to Blacha, the two games that paved the way for The Witcher 3 were Mass Effect 2 and Skyrim. Yet consider how the third Geralt saga definitively leaped beyond each of those titles. Mass Effect 2, developed by legendary role-playing studio Bioware, delivered a benchmark RPG experience for 2010, yet the morality system, in which your own Commander Shepard could lean into Paragon or Renegade virtues, felt dated on arrival. The moral murkiness of The Witcher 3 was one of the final nails in the coffin for that binary design.
More than revolutionary, Skyrim-beating quest design, it was the dialogue system that immediately made Bethesda’s own seminal RPG look like a relic. In some ways, Bethesda games have hardly changed, continuing to opt for close-ups of uncanny talking heads, as if you, the player, are standing mere inches away from your conversational partner. The Witcher 3 encounters are infused with the storytelling techniques of cinema—cuts, pans, medium shots—all while you, the player, direct the exchange.
The cinematic presentation of dialogue scenes, achieved using all-new directorial tools for this entry, “elevated” The Witcher 3, says Mitsoda, making it look “less generic and janky” than its counterparts. These dialogue sequences rarely just relay expository information before whisking the player to a scenario involving violent action, gaming’s preferred vehicle for drama. Rather, The Witcher 3 treats such scenes as drama and conflict in themselves.
Grayson stresses the game’s storytelling maturity, drawing a distinction between the “big narrative swings” its writers took in exploring such dark subject matter and the “buttoned-down, triple-A” fantasy fare of a game like 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. A white-hot “raw passion” burns though, says Grayson. “It feels like individual creators and people were allowed to dictate things a little bit more. It was less ‘by committee’ and more like, ‘This person has something they want to express, and [CD Projekt Red] is going to facilitate that.’”
That’s perhaps the key point: The characters in The Witcher 3 (even the monsters) are never less than human. Likewise, the game seems more like the product of people than—as is often the case for triple-A open-world titles—of a corporation. Gigantic games are suffused with personal expression, but it’s often difficult to make out—such is the extent to which their designers are subsumed by massive companies and their contributions are incorporated into finished products with sleek eye-and-brain-massaging smoothness. If you know where to look, individual authorship is everywhere in The Witcher 3.
The telltale sign of Radomska’s quests is their logical flow. “Everything has a purpose,” she says. In the office, the quests of her former colleague Jakub Rokosz, like the werewolf and ice giant story line on Skellige, were renowned for their complexity. “They’re nonlinear. You can pursue his quests in many different ways,” she says.
If there was any remaining doubt that games could tell stories just as well as literature and movies—maybe even better—then The Witcher 3 put those suspicions to rest for many who played it. In fact, the game closely resembles what Bogost characterizes as something of a fool’s dream of interactive storytelling in one of his contentious essays. Describing this long-standing narrative goal, he wrote how players might one day “interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot.” Playing this kind of game “would be like living in a novel.” That’s what The Witcher 3 feels like. The open-world structure is vital, adding both a durational and spatial sweep that makes the player feel as if they are both at the center of and directing their own odyssey.
The Witcher 3’s DNA runs through the modern video game landscape. Grayson points to the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which, from 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins onward, steadily incorporated RPG elements. It’s hard not to draw a line from the medieval entry in the series, 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, straight back to The Witcher 3. “That game even had its own analogue for Gwent [the fast-paced card game that can be played within The Witcher 3],” jokes Grayson. Webster sees further similarities: “The Assassin’s Creed games were always very deft and stealthy,” he says. “Then it becomes, like, grrr—you’re just killing dudes. It’s very bloody.”
The latest game whose narrative Mitsoda directed, an earthy Metroidvania game called Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree (developed by Hungarian studio Primal and released this spring), was heavily inspired by The Witcher 3. In quest structure, “We tried to be a little more interesting than just killing things,” he says. The overall mood hits similar notes: “a dark fantasy world that is kind of grounded.”
Mitsoda also credits The Witcher 3 with helping to foster the resurgent interest in more traditional CRPGs like Divinity Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and, from former CD Projekt Red employees, The Thaumaturge, which was released to warm reviews in 2024.
The Thaumaturge, developed by Fool’s Theory, points to where The Witcher 3’s influence is most keenly felt: among a generation of Polish game makers, many of whom have passed through the studio doors of CD Projekt Red. “There is this running joke in the Polish game dev scene that if you are starting a new game studio in Poland, you need to find a creator of The Witcher,” says Blacha. In the past few years, studios like Rebel Wolves (working on a “triple-A dark fantasy RPG”), Blank, and Dark Passenger emphasized ties to CD Projekt Red as they announced themselves to the world. Each studio carries something of The Witcher 3’s narrative sensibility. Blacha sums that up as “grounded stories” shaped by “choice and consequence” in which “bad things happen to good people.” The “choice and consequence,” in particular, are something of a “holy grail,” says Blacha, that many Polish studios attempt to implement.
Still, no one is doing multifaceted storytelling in video games quite like CD Projekt Red. It’s able to flex like this, Mitsoda believes, because of years of investment and thoughtful evolution. The approach has proved fruitful. “In some ways, CD Projekt Red almost has the Rockstar Games thing where there’s a whole crowd waiting for their next game,” he says.
When talking about the making of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, Blacha, a man of carefully chosen words both in person and in his scripts, riffs on the foundations laid by original Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski and the heady, dystopian sci-fi of Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson. But ultimately, Blacha returns to storytelling principles. When you die in Cyberpunk 2077, you do so mostly in the streets; when you die in The Witcher 3, it is usually face down in the mud. “When you are thinking about the story in the game, you always think about it in categories of a space,” he says. “It's physical space because you need to populate the story and characters on the map. But it’s also virtual space because you have a net of interactions and relations between them.”
Blacha has internalized these fundamentals. For him, “the road” in The Witcher 3 is not just populated with eccentric characters, foreboding woods, bandit hideouts, and, if you’re lucky, a welcoming inn. Fundamentally, it's “populated with quests.” Each quest is an invitation that carries the essential appeal of narrative video games. You do not really “beat” The Witcher 3; rather, you feel compelled to complete its prismatic, rip-roaring story—to find out what happens next while playing the role not just of Geralt, but also of coauthor.