The Witcher 3: A Prose Explanation of Why It Got So Gloomy!

CD Projekt RED (CDPR) explained why they chose a darker, more somber style for their game released ten years ago.

 

As part of The Witcher 3’s 10th anniversary celebrations, CDPR spoke with GamesRadar about the “secret sauce” that made the missions so special. Mission designer Paweł Sasko cited maturity as the key ingredient, noting that most of the developers are in their 30s and 40s. Also importantly, they were Polish. There’s certainly a lot of dark stuff in The Witcher 3: There are zombie maggots, nail torture, and a doll in a furnace, among other things. Sasko likened these horrific elements of CDPR’s RPG to the moment when you accept that your parents will die one day.

“I would say that we Polish people are much more negative than Western societies. We tend to see the glass as half empty rather than half full. Part of creating mature entertainment is accepting that not everything in life will go well. Horrible, sh*tty things are going to happen in all of our lives. As a development psychologist, I think about these things a lot. For me, the moment you realize that your parents are aging, getting sick, and eventually dying is part of the human experience. It’s dishonest to always paint the world in a positive light.”

“You can’t prevent your parents from dying. You can’t prevent your pet from getting cancer after spending 15 years with them. You can’t completely prevent this. But it’s about being thankful for everything you experienced. Even in a f*cking dystopian, horrible Cyberpunk world or a dark, noir Witcher world, there are good people. There are good moments. There are friendships. There’s love! I think that’s the ambition: to encourage people toward this. It might sound a bit dark when I speak about it, but I want to make sure that ray of sunlight is visible in our work,” said Sasko.

Hopefully, this point of view will remain in The Witcher IV and its sequel, Cyberpunk 2077.

Source: PCGamer, GamesRadar

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