The Witcher 3 Lead Worried That Fans Wouldn’t Like The Open World

The Witcher 3 is often heralded as one of the best RPGs of all-time, but CD Projekt Red worried during development that people wouldn’t enjoy its sprawling story given the enormous open world.

“Not many games were trying to do what we did back then, which is, we tried to combine these really expansive storytelling techniques that were usually built in more linear RPGs […] like The Witcher 2, and we tried to carry that over to an open-world,” lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz said in an interview with GamesRadar.

“There was a risk to having such a long story as we did with The Witcher 3. We didn’t know if people actually [wanted] this, if that actually fits the play style of an open-world game. But we took these risks. We did what we could to mitigate them. I think, I mean, in the end, it worked out pretty well.”

Risk Is What Led To The Blood Of Dawnwaker

Risk is what led The Witcher 3 to push the envelope forward for open-world RPGs, with some of the boldest, most intricate storytelling in the genre. All these years later, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz is keeping that spirit alive. He left CDPR back in 2021 to join his brother’s new studio, Rebel Wolves, where he’s now the creative director of a much smaller team on The Blood of Dawnwaker.

“We had crazy ideas. We knew that if we wanted to make them, we needed to open our own studio, because it would be hard to convince any big company — you know, with non-IP — to change, and do something new, and do something crazy,” Konrad Tomaszkiewicz explained. “Actually, it’s risky, because we’re doing some solutions which are new.”

Whether The Blood of Dawnwaker will live up to The Witcher 3’s reputation remains to be seen, but Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz is just as excited as the rest of us to see what CDPR has cooking with its own follow-up, The Witcher 4.

Released

May 19, 2015

ESRB

M for Mature: Use of Alcohol, Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content