When developers play through a game they worked on for an audience, behind-the-scenes details have a habit of spilling out.

Artur Ganszyniec, the lead story designer on the original The Witcher, recently played through the game he helped create nearly 20 years ago – and documented the whole thing across 26 separate YouTube episodes. At the very end, he dropped a notable tidbit: in his view, the game’s epic, surprise ending wasn’t what the story team originally wanted, and he now considers it a mistake.

The scene itself is familiar. Geralt collects his payment from King Foltest and heads for the door, but trouble is already in the air. The fight is cool, sure – yet the real point is what happens after: you take a closer look at the dead man, and the would-be assassin turns out to be a witcher. It’s an obvious sequel hook, the kind that makes it easy to assume CD Projekt RED (CDPR) already had firm plans for what came next. Maybe the company’s leadership did. The story team, Ganszyniec suggests, didn’t – not really.

“We wanted the game to end with an open question and an open future. But while we were finishing the game, someone – like the board or CD Projekt co-founder Michał Kiciński – decided that we needed an animated outro. The script for this wasn’t really created with the story team’s involvement. We weren’t really paying attention, so to speak. I think that was a mistake. It became evident that the next game would have to follow up on this and tell a story about witchers killing kings for some reason. That’s why The Witcher 2 is very political, and there’s not much room to explore Geralt’s identity, family, and history.”

It’s easy to see why he’d be frustrated: you build an ending that leaves Geralt’s future wide open, then a last-second twist comes in and effectively locks the sequel onto a specific track, narrowing the creative options. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the outcome. The Witcher 2 was a major success – as of January this year, it has sold over 15 million copies – and that momentum helped push CDPR into the ranks of Europe’s biggest game studios.

Source: PCGamer