The Polish developers are doing everything in their power to avoid chaos during development, which won’t be easy.

Following a predecessor widely regarded as one of the best open-world RPGs to date, CD Projekt RED (CDPR) must deliver a game with The Witcher IV that meets the high expectations set by its predecessor. Although Cyberpunk 2077‘s launch issues were eventually fixed and patched, many are concerned that the studio’s next big adventure will have a similarly troubled release. However, the Polish team has introduced new requirements to ensure that the development chaos that plagued their previous games is a thing of the past.

During a presentation at this year’s Digital Dragons event, Adrian Fulneczek, the lead technical writer, explained that new requirements have been introduced, particularly a new definition of “done.” These requirements apply to both The Witcher IV and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, and precise documentation will benefit both teams. Jaroslaw Rucinski, head of the technical writing team, explained that every project milestone will now undergo strict review. One requirement for passing the review is documentation, which was not the case during the production of older titles.

If the studio puts more effort into making documentation available to developers, future projects won’t suffer from the kind of development chaos that affected even The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Interestingly, the only game that didn’t suffer from this before the new requirements were introduced was Gwent: The Witcher Card Game. Ruciński described it as the studio’s best-documented game.

“In a live service environment, such as Gwent, it’s easy to claim that you don’t have time to document everything because the game changes so quickly. It receives patches, new content, and balance updates every month. All those documents need to be constantly updated, and someone has to do it. It is a cost,” said Ruciński.

However, this upfront cost was offset by the fact that new artists, programmers, and designers could contribute to any task immediately, highlighting the importance of maintaining documentation. This demonstrates that documentation accelerates development rather than slowing it down. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait long to find out if CDPR’s new documentation requirements will bear fruit with The Witcher IV.

Source: WCCFTech, RPS