Why The Witcher 3 endures, five years later

Today marks five years since the launch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and players from around the globe are still becoming enamored with its refined universe of monsters, magic, and madness. Its stories, and the game that holds them, continue to endure, but why?

The success and endurance of The Witcher 3 may be boiled down to a single sentence from Polygon’s original review: “The Witcher 3 makes what should have been a terrifying risk look like the most natural evolution in the world.”

Previously known for The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, developer CD Projekt Red had already established itself as a studio known for crafting great games — but not open-world games. So the team took the philosophy of its other, non-open-world games, which placed a huge emphasis on the quality of storytelling, and decided to rework it to keep what was special about its games, without compromising on that for the open world it wanted to create.

“Our quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, who used to be the Lead Quest Designer on The Witcher 3, summarized it nicely for us,” Philipp Weber, senior quest designer at CD Projekt Red, told Polygon. “He 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.”

This is important, because open-world games are often seen as a trade-off, where the price of all that freedom is the tight storytelling from more linear games. This was a fallacy that The Witcher 3’s developers would try to put to rest by using the series’ non-open-world roots to rework the entire open-world formula.

The game holds up, five years later, so it seems like they did a pretty good job.

“There used to be this preconceived notion you would hear a lot that open world games can’t tell interesting or deep stories,” Weber explained. “So that was something we took up as a challenge.”

How to open your world

If you boot up The Witcher 3 today, you’ll see that its environments still feel as though they’re alive in a way that stands out when compared to most open-world games of the time. It’s harder to find the seams of the illusion, and that has a lot to do with the fact that the game wasn’t designed to fit into a traditional open-world mold.

Weber explained that in order to populate these open-world environments with the narrative strength of a more restricted area — like what you’d find in the first two Witcher games — CD Projekt Red had to think outside the box. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the designers had to go back inside the box, and draw inspiration from the small but hard-hitting stories they were already known and respected for.

“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. “As a quest designer, it’s much easier to create quests for a limited area. I can control very well when and where the player will see things and in what order they do them.”

But how do you take that style and rework it for a game where quests can take you across the map, and can be completed in whatever order you want, across tens, if not hundreds, of hours? The team saw its inability to control the player as a strength, not a weakness, and leaned into it.

“At first, changing our design [to fit an open world] seemed difficult, but in the end it actually improved quests a lot,” Weber said. “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.”

It seems pretty obvious now. To make an open world feel more open, you need to create it in a way that allows players to do whatever they want in it, whenever they want. By focusing on nonlinear stories, all of which were self-contained but deeply rooted in The Witcher 3’s game world, CD Projekt Red managed to create a wider, more realistic narrative network, and an open world that actually worked.

But that was just a part of the reason why this game is so special. The quests didn’t just have to be nonlinear and open — they had to tie into each other, and even themselves, depending on where the player entered them. CD Projekt Red wanted to create something that felt cohesive, not just a pretty game packed with things to do that never felt connected to each other.

One big world

There’s a really good example of this approach at the very beginning of The Witcher 3. In White Orchard, the tutorial area where you stalk a griffin, there’s a little house down by the river. An elderly woman is outside, claiming that the person in the hut borrowed her frying pan but never gave it back. Your job is to find a way inside to investigate on her behalf.

Sure enough, the pan’s inside. Conducting a little investigation around the hut’s interior reveals more details — there are burned papers in the fireplace, and some of the writing is still legible.

Image: CD Projekt Red/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

As it turns out, a particularly crafty spy had borrowed the pan because of how dirty it was. He scrubbed it clean and used the soot to write a coded message. But that’s not the cool part — on the floor, you’ll see a smashed silver monocle.

One of Geralt’s companions from previous Witcher stories is well known for wearing such an accessory. And when you meet him much later on in The Witcher 3, you’ll find out that yes, he was there, in that exact hut. There’s more to the story than pans and soot: It appears the whole ordeal is part of an elaborate and ongoing plot to assassinate a king.

Or you could have just ignored her. But the throwaway hint was there, for players who had to see and experience everything.

This style of quest design, where tiny little details can be hugely significant tens of hours after you first encounter them, influences the entire narrative structure of The Witcher 3. It’s an open world, filled with small, detached stories … but that’s why they work as a whole. One side story with a seemingly inconsequential decision could change how another one plays out 50 hours later, and you’ll have no idea how important it was until you eventually witness the whole cycle in action. A monocle could reveal the identity of a spy, while a random monster hunt you hear about by accident could later turn into a multihour side quest, if you decide to follow along.

Even modern games often struggle with introducing quests without relying on static characters in set locations. For The Witcher 3, the team decided that the world itself could function as its own kind of quest giver, filling it with side stories and characters you can stumble upon while exploring naturally. Many stories have multiple on-ramps and exits, allowing you to continue following the thread just as long as it keeps you busy and happy. And, as with the king-killing spy mentioned earlier ... everything is pretty clearly linked, once you’re willing to connect the dots. You begin to trust that certain quests may be headed somewhere larger, even if they seem minor at the time. You never know when the next big breakthrough will come.

“This way, even if we didn’t always switch up the formula, players never knew what to expect,” Weber said. “So we could keep the act of discovering new places interesting.”

You don’t have to be the hero, but they need someone to be

On top of The Witcher 3’s quests being connected to one another across dozens of hours, the entire world is also filled with smaller stories that have nothing to do with Geralt of Rivia, the series’ hero, but everything to do with each other.

Towns, cities, and even random places in the middle of a forest are designed to have a built-in communal aspect, where insignificant NPCs aren’t just coded to walk around in circles, but live actual, functional lives that sometimes interact with the game’s other systems.

“In a Skellige village, you can see a hunter have breakfast with his wife,” Weber said. “Afterwards, he takes his dog out to the forests and stalks deer. Sometimes he’ll be attacked by a wolf or a kikimora and has to fight for his life. If he makes it, he comes home in the evening for a nice dinner and goes to bed. [...] We implemented this for thousands of NPCs, and even though players might not follow them around, just the fact that they are there in the background will make the world seem more alive.”

Image: CD Projekt Red/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

This happens everywhere in The Witcher 3. If you visit Novigrad, you’ll likely be greeted by a legion of drunkards roaming its pub-laden docks. Some might even be cheeky enough to ask for some coin to bolster their drinking allowance. But there are also cult leaders preaching atop podiums, small animals fighting for their place in a bipedal-dominated city, and a whole variety of weirdos wandering their way through lives too absurd for you to understand. And even if you didn’t realize it right away, you might have subconsciously sensed that the reason this world feels so remarkably real is because it so often sticks to its own logic.

“Of course The Witcher is fantasy, so it doesn’t have to be fully realistic, but it always needed to be believable,” Weber said. “That’s why our level designers and environment artists did some amazing work creating the world, and why you see Novigrad surrounded by fields providing the city with food, why there are supply lines, why Skellige villages have a source of water. This realistic approach for the design of the world itself also allowed us to be more immersed when it came to telling our story, and to have the world speak through our stories.”

In The Witcher 3, if a monster or animal is killed in a forest, wolves will be able to smell the body, and they’ll actually form a pack before making a beeline toward their dinner. You can watch this system in action in the clip below, where we’re hunting deer and wolves decide they want in on the action:

It’s a cool feature at face value. But the butterfly effect that systems like these can have on the world is wild.

“This could cause situations like wolves running after a peasant on the fields, the peasant running for his life and a mounted Nilfgaardian knight striking down the wolf,” Weber said. “So this was a great feature that made the world really feel alive.”

The Witcher 3 had other pop culture strengths, including the popularity of the book series the game franchise is based on and the recent, successful Netflix adaptation of those books. But none of that would have mattered if the game itself hadn’t been good. New fans are finding The Witcher 3 all the time, joining the veterans who have played since launch and still return. And it’s that living, cohesive world of choice, adventure, and story that keep them coming back. It’s a loyalty the team tries not to take for granted.

“One of the things that people mention a lot when it comes to The Witcher 3 is how long they actually played the game and enjoyed it, which was at first very surprising and funny for us, because during development we always thought it would be too short and were trying to add more into the game,” Weber explained. “So seeing that kind of feedback was actually a great relief, made even better knowing that people still play the game now. [...] Not a day goes by without me seeing some kind of cosplay or fanart, or a discussion about our characters and story.”

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition brings together the base game and all the additional content released to date.

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