(adventurous music)
- In many ways, the star of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
isn't Geralt or Ciri,
but the world in which they inhabit.
So today, we're gonna talk to the folks at CD Projekt,
about creating that world,
everything from the locations of points of interest,
to the communities that live in those places,
right down to the food in everyone's cupboards.
To do this, we must talk to the team
about three key areas,
level design, environmental design, and open world design.
Creating a world this size is a monumental effort.
The final version of Wild Hunt features large cities, farms,
bandit camps, monster spawners, hidden castles,
quiet cottages, and plenty more.
But, years before of any of those features
will be finished,
the team would start with a blank landmass.
- [Len Voiceover] We all have our little specialties.
We have one, senior environment artist,
all he does is trees.
(Danny laughing)
Since Witcher one, I think,
like, trees.
Some of us do landscaping.
Some of us like pretty much, set up villages.
Others do, like, the meshes of the actual houses.
Some of us go through the entire world,
and just put pots and pans, basically.
What you see right now, in this tavern, right,
everything that you see right here,
we were putting them on the level.
- It's easy to make a place look really, really nice,
and just, like ah, let's add more stuff to it!
But, at some point, you have to wonder, how do I play this?
Can I even navigate it,
or do I get stuck on every single thing
that has collision there?
And to sort of help guide this process,
and make sure that our environment, obviously,
don't get too crazy,
that's sort of where our level designers sit.
We communicate a lot with the gameplay team,
the quest designers, to see what their needs are,
and make sure that everything is implemented properly
on the world.
And, on the side, we also try to, sort of,
plan how the open world works, or looks like,
where we have forests, where we have mountains,
where villages are,
how dense the amount of villages is on the map,
and how often players should pop into some event.
- So, we had points of interest,
which were combined with environmental points of interest.
Things like bandit camp fires,
abundance of lands, like like hidden treasures.
Then, we had points of encounters.
So, simple spawners of monsters in the woods,
or bandits in the woods.
And then, the communities.
Integration of citizen, in villages.
- [Miles Voiceover] The studio
had never done an open world game.
So, neither did I, neither did the other level designers.
And so, we were sitting there, going,
all right, I guess we need places that we should visit,
but the real question was, how many places do we need,
and what kind of content do we put into these?
So, we started out very roughly,
by taking a 2D screenshot of our world,
and just, and Photoshop,
just placing different items, little markers on the world,
where we thought there should be locations of sorts.
And we roughly define them as well,
to make sure that they're consistent.
So, maybe on this area, we have farming settlements right,
and what could be a POI, maybe a broken down mill
on top of a hill.
And, of course, the farm itself.
But, we also try to make sure that everything is...
The infrastructure is consistent,
so we would try to put these places close to each other,
connected by main roads, et cetera.
But, after that, we just took literally blue cylinders,
I remember vividly, there were blue cylinders,
and we placed them on the map, in 3D,
where we thought these places would be,
and then we started just running in between them,
and taking their time.
Basically going, all right, so,
now, it seems that every minute I run
into one of these occasions, which could be of any size,
like, we didn't really define if this is a major location,
or just your average campfire.
- [Bartosz Voiceover] We did some tests,
and we found out that...
Player is focused on stuff which we produce,
like every 40 seconds, they should see something,
and focus on it, like a pack of deers, some opponents.
Some NPCs wandering about.
So, we have our rule of 40 seconds.
On Skellige, we add a lot of water.
- [Danny] Right!
- So, there was a problem with smuggler's caches on the water.
- [Miles Voiceover] So, it used to be that the,
the bay, with the clan village,
it used to be facing away from Ard Skellig,
which resulted in players
either docking on the wrong side of the island,
going from...
Ard Skellig.
Or, having to go all the way around it, and...
Boat speed used to be much, much slower back then!
(chuckles) I remember we had tests run,
where (exclaims) you going, from one island to the other,
like the bigger islands,
to somewhere in between 25 and 45 minutes.
(Danny laughing)
(chuckles) We quickly realized that this is not,
this is not gonna cut it.
And ended up, rotating the entire island by 180 degrees!
So that players would actually goes,
we'd be able to go straight,
and that cut down the traveling time,
to do that harbor, by 15 minutes or so.
It was nuts.
I think what we did for forests
is we sort of started embracing the fact
that it is hard to see things,
because most of the time,
when you're walking around the open world,
you kind of have a pretty good idea where you're headed.
You know, maybe you'll find yourself in Skellige,
and you see Ard Skellig,
the fortress with gray castle.
The way we designed the world,
was that maybe you'd have the starting point,
from one village,
and you'd see the point in the distance, like that castle,
but somewhere in between,
the road would be lost, right?
So, you'd see your starting point of your adventure,
which is where you are. (chuckles)
You know the end,
and you know the rough general direction that you head for,
but sometimes we put a forest in between,
just to get, to allow the player to get lost.
When we did that, we usually, still had our main roads,
the more safer spaces,
that if you were to just ride through them,
you shouldn't really be attacked by most monsters,
unless we really wanted you to.
- Ghoul nest.
Oughta just destroy it.
Now, how long are you gonna have me wait?
- [Miles Voiceover] Making POIs,
that allow the player to navigate the world much easier,
that just simply looking around, and like,
ah, there was this, this fort on the hill
that I've seen a couple times here,
but now, I seem to see it from this side,
so I know, in relation to that, this is where I am,
I think the landscape does help with that,
and Novigrad sort of lended itself to this,
with the temple island being there, the...
The most highest point,
and then you have the richer areas,
which are higher than the poor area,
so you have this gradient throughout the city,
and I guess some clever road placement.
Overall, if you look at the city,
there's just a handful of main roads.
I think there's like two,
and the areas can be very broadly defined, like the harbor,
you have the fish market, you have the main square,
the poor area, the rich area, and the temple island, so...
This definitely helps allowing the player
to sort of figure his way, his way around the city,
without actually having to consult the map all the time.
- [Danny] Right.
- So, the...
work starts in our environmental team,
they preparing buildings,
like a whole setup of the village.
Then, my team is deciding what kind of purposes
people have in those spots.
Then, we are recasting animations,
and preparing dialogues for them.
So then, we will have,
we have the whole village prepared.
For example, we have a village on the coast,
of the Ard Skellig,
so we need to set up like a fishermen community,
so requesting rocks for fishermen,
and then preparing dialogues for them,
and then, together, everything creates believable settlement.
- So, some of us do, like,
more, more or less, rough paths.
So, we put the house there, we put the road there,
and we put the couple of wheel barrows,
and then it just looks like that.
The houses are empty, nothing.
And then, another guy comes in,
or potentially stumbles upon it, in our editor,
and they're like, this looks so bare!
I need to do something about it!
(Danny laughing)
And so, they're like, okay, let me plant some flowers,
and stuff like that!
Like, let me put some more rocks, and stuff like that,
or like...
Let's add more decals on the wall,
like a little bit more moss,
so it looks a little bit more detailed,
and then they leave, because they're like,
okay, my work is done.
It looks okay, now.
And then, the quest guy comes in, and he's like,
oh, what's this cute, little village?
Ah, let me put something in it!
But it, the houses are empty.
And then, they put on a request,
take it, and put something in there, you know?
And so, some of us go right in,
and we start decorating,
and we interview, actually, the quest designer.
What's your story about?
Like, who are the characters involved?
Do they get along?
What, this person is dead?
Okay, are they supposed to be dead inside the house,
or are they supposed to,
you know, and these kinds of questions.
You take that into account,
and with that bit of information,
we designed inside of the house,
the tailor, that kind of personality,
or other people looking in it.
And then, after that, we leave the house, and we're like,
this place is still quite barren, you know?
And then, I'll just sneak in a couple of barrels over here.
And then, little by little,
people just like, were sweeping through he landscape,
are like, this feels so...
I plant a little bit more here, and you know?
And eventually, the village is made.
- [Danny Voiceover] It takes a village to build a village,
and the process involves a number of steps,
first figuring out where to put them, how to design them,
then building houses, then furnishing said houses,
and finally, populating those villages
with communities of people, with their own roles, routines,
and dialogue.
And from talking to Len, Miles, and Bartosz
about those processes,
it's clear, that each step in that process
has its own set of challenges.
- [Bartosz Voiceover] So, the obvious one would be Skellige,
right, where everything's cold, so people try to stay warm.
We're doing research on viking houses,
and we saw that most of them had open fireplaces.
We decided, it will be the center every place,
because people tried to stay warm.
- [Miles Voiceover] To us, this was very real.
It's not like, yeah, we're making a game,
and I'm making a village that is on a hillside,
and they have to.
In my mind, this is why they make the scaffold.
Actually, we had the height map done already, right,
and we decided okay, this is probably the best place
for a village here, so let's make it here.
This is where I would build a village,
because it seems easiest, and natural,
for me to build it here.
But sometimes, and again,
you have to go and make something where there, it shouldn't be,
so maybe a hillside village,
or maybe in a hazardous environment, even,
high up in the mountain,
and then you would start thinking,
all right, if you really wanted,
if people really wanted to settle here,
there must A, be a good reason,
and B, we need to see how they sort of started coping
with the environments, right?
So, maybe, the Skellige village, high up in the mountains,
which is built on like 90 degree angles.
There's gold next, nearby to it, right?
So, this is why they decide,
we need to build a village here,
because we can get that gold,
and we show that there's mining infrastructure
between the village, and the mines that they build.
Yeah, we were definitely thinking about these things,
while making locations.
You go, aw man, this is probably a very humid environment,
so let's add more moss to the walls,
and maybe have them be decayed by fungus, right?
- I would pack the port houses with all of this, you know,
minus all of the shining stuff.
But, that's a little bit more like it,
because when you go through the slums, in the Philippians,
you'd see that all of their stuff is exposed.
The bedrooms aren't necessarily segregated.
Sometimes, they're just curtains, you know.
So, these theories kind of applied also, in Witcher.
A while back, because we'd been given the task,
to add interiors to every house in the world...
Because, they were empty. (chuckles)
So, we decided that, all right, we have two weeks.
How do we do this shit?
So, we had the board, and we were like, alright,
let's put this like, let's do a competition.
- That was a competition born out of necessity. (chuckles)
So yeah, we realized way too quick, all right,
by this point, we have made too many houses,
to just easily make interiors,
so we came up with some simple math calculations.
We thought, all right, we have couple sets of houses.
The Skellige houses, the Novigrad houses,
No Man's Land houses,
and then, let's say, three to four house types, per set.
So, we thought, all right,
let's make a couple of, we called it,
decoration sets, for each house,
depending on how often this exists in the world,
let's try to find out a way, where players will not notice
that these tend to repeat themselves over the world.
So, we were pretty generous.
We thought, from our lesson,
we could probably have done less variations,
but we wanted to make sure that it is not obvious
that these houses repeat themselves.
- [Len Voiceover] Those things at the back,
yeah, the kegs,
they used to barrels, this big.
And then, we were like, we don't have kegs in the world!
(Danny laughing)
(Len shushing)
- [Danny] Oh, really?
(both laughing)
- We have kegs now!
Yeah, so yeah.
- [Danny Voiceover] How many houses
would there have been in total, like ball park?
- [Miles Voiceover] There were a lot.
I couldn't give you an exact number, but it's,
I think, Novigrad, alone,
features more than 80 accessible houses.
(man coughing)
- [Bartosz Voiceover] It was something,
like 15,000 lines for communities.
And sometimes, it was...
Easier to write those lines.
Sometimes, it was harder, because, you know,
let's imagine that you have to write 50 times "Hi,"
in a different way,
and you need to do that, to achieve...
Believable community, in the city.
I was supposed to prepare, like, a coherent design
for parts of the world,
so Novigrad designs, they have different subjects.
There's gossips, and...
On the Skellige Islands, completely different topics,
and the same in Velen.
(scattered conversations)
I was supposed to create really different, different world,
using just lines.
We had something like a main subject,
and then, smaller subjects for each village.
But, for example, the Guardians,
who are focused on military topics, thinking about strategy,
or missing their wives and children.
In Velen, the main topic was family.
On Skellige, we had honor and sea, and like viking stuff.
You need to achieve something, which is not catchy, at all,
because this is the background.
But sometimes, because you have dialogue lines,
and players are focused on them,
but to be honest,
this is like a small percentage of the game.
Mostly, you are just...
Wandering about, going from one place to the other place,
and you keep hearing those things.
So, you have to create that background,
but also leave to the players some diamonds, small diamonds.
This is small, like a...
A case for him to just grab it, to hear it,
and just say, wow, that's nice!
- [Baron's Guard] Well, bring out the gimp.
- [Man] Think the gimp's sleepin'.
- Well, guess you just have to go wake him up now,
won't ya?
(whimsical music)
- [Len Voiceover] We have a lot of funny bugs.
There was one point, when we were like,
let's implement this whole skidding thing that Geralt does
when he's on the slope, thing.
And, people had just too much fun with it,
but we decided to have, like,
let's try this again, on this mountain.
And let's just fix Geralt's textures,
so that he looks like a ski,
like a snowboarder, sorry.
And then, they just let him go,
and then made him skid through there.
Yeah.
One of them is, the zero-zero bug,
and what basically the zero-zero bug does, is that...
Let's say, I put a house,
no, actually, no.
Let's start with something small, right?
I put one of those tankards right here,
and then I was like,
doesn't look right, control-Z,
and then it disappears.
I'm like...
- We were doing optimization passes,
and part of that was figuring out physics, right?
How many physical objects are you going to actually move around,
can we have?
And I remember, we were being told that,
there's an area where there's a lot,
and this one house is really weird where it drops,
and then, the items, or something disappears, and something,
and we had to actually do research as to,
where do these land?
- Somewhere in the world, that tankard actually pops up.
That's what control-Z did.
Puts it in the middle of the world.
- We have this asset selection, right, you see a list,
you select it and you see that
transform data, the coordinates in the world,
read zero-zero-zero,
and we're like, huh?
Start looking there, and then,
(chuckles) it was amazing.
It was like opening the box of Pandora,
and like trees, houses, you had swords!
I don't know, there were NPC meshes.
We had this reference guy,
who was basically just a gray person of 190 height.
We just placed next to objects,
to see how large our cave, or whatever we made would be.
He was there! (chuckles) (Danny laughing)
He was having himself a party,
with all sort of market stands, it was crazy!
- It was somewhere in Velen. (chuckles)
And you'd travel from Baron's Castle,
and you'd see this pool, with I don't know, cupboards,
and walls, and stuff.
- There's a house, and 500 tankards,
and a horse, and a chair, and a bench,
and it's just all just there!
- We ended up deleting most of it.
I know most of those places,
and Skellige is in the bay of Ard Skellig, and...
- [Danny Voiceover] He just drops into the water? (laughs)
- [Miles Voiceover] (chuckles) Yeah, and...
The coolest thing, is actually that, in No Man's Land,
the spot was above ground level,
so we marked this one with a special tree,
there's a forest with a little, a little creek, I guess,
and there's this one rotten looking tree,
that stands right in the middle,
and he stands right on zero-zero-zero.
♪
- [Danny Voiceover] To ensure that bugs, glitches,
and inconsistencies were spotted,
the various teams at CD Projekt had a lot of dialogue
between one another.
Teams would discuss areas of design over lunch,
give pointers, and watch each other's backs.
One good example of this collaboration working,
came when somebody on the open world team realized
that the environmental team hadn't accounted
for the famine in Velen.
- [Bartosz Voiceover] So, we had a famine over there, so
we were trying to...
Get rid of all these cows, pigs, and chickens.
Our tremendously talented guys, from the environmental,
prepared, like a...
wonderful villages, with
houses, with sausages and pudding here,
hanging around,
and we go, guys, there's a hanger on the door, so please,
get rid of it!
- I had, at some point,
had to make a set of food decorations,
which were just leftovers,
because we realized, that all of the food that we had
was just like the best apple in the world, you know,
it's like, it's a big thing of cabbage,
and it didn't make sense, for the lore of No Man's Land,
to actually have food.
So, for about a week, I was just like, alright,
I'm gonna...
Fish, I'm gonna strip you down, into just bone!
All right, and then, I was just picking all of the food items,
and just compiling a set,
which would be suitable for a famine-esque situation.
- And it was fine, but sometimes,
we can still have a guy in there, in some village,
that keeps saying that, I am so hungry,
and then, you see the pack of deers in the back!
So, yeah.
- I mean, there were other issues, like this,
with loot, for example.
Actually, it was the same issue.
It'd have food in every crate,
and they were talking about
being hungry all the time, you know?
Or, there were issues with food placement,
like you would go into these long, lost tunnels,
you know, like these old, ancient, elven tunnels.
Nobody sets their foot in there, in 1,000 year,
but you'd find a chicken sandwich, or... (laughs)
- [Danny Voiceover] While Len made sure
the environmental team had rotten apples
to place on countertops,
other members of the team were emptying cupboards,
and inventory of fresh poultry, sandwiches, and milk.
It wasn't enough for this world, just to look real,
it also had to retain some semblance of continuity.
This extends outward into the wilderness,
where packs of deer are hunted on by wolves,
but areas where bears reside are scant of other predators.
Over months and years, the team molded this world,
but they did so with a fear,
that ultimately, most players would skip over it.
Open world games have fast travel systems
that let players travel from anywhere they want,
but that idea flew in the face of the world
they were designing,
one where random encounters and points of interest
are designed to lead you astray.
It was a point of contention,
but the team found an elegant solution,
to let players only fast travel to and from sign posts,
at specific junctions on the map.
- [Miles Voiceover] Once we got the green light
to do it this way,
level designers and environment artists,
it screamed us a shout of victory,
because for us, it was,
yeah, we made this beautiful world,
now you players have to look at it!
(both laughing)
- Yeah, but I think that we really did a good job of it,
because players keep running through Velen,
and through Skellige, and through Novigrad, and...
They were finding those spots, and it was nice.
- You know, you get a better sense
of the scale of the world that you're traversing.
You have a higher chance
of actually having something interesting happen to you,
and being sidetracked, perhaps,
from whatever quests you were following right now,
when you are pushed to follow the road for a bit.
And at the same time, we thought,
obviously, fast travel is very convenient,
so let's have you have it, when it's...
Unlocked, right?
You have to unlock the place, and then you can use it
for fast traveling.
I realized, that not all players were happy with that,
but I think most of them appreciated it really,
because some of the most coolest stories that we had,
that I read on the Internet,
or I saw happening on YouTube, or what you have you,
were definitely chance encounters,
by people trying to get somewhere,
and then being sidetracked by something else.
- [Danny Voiceover] As somebody who loved the books,
and then loved the first game,
and then was able to be part of this crazy story,
for CD Projekt,
are you proud of the work that you've done?
- Yes, I am.
Yes, I am.
Like...
I remember, whole, long moments,
moments of the project, Witcher 3, and I was,
sometimes I was afraid, sometimes I was tired, but...
I felt that we are doing something special,
and I really...
I was sure, that we're much of it.
And now, when I'm watching the parts of the game
on the YouTube,
I was preparing for that interview today,
and I was watching some things, which I've did.
I read those lines,
and I see that people appreciate those things,
and really like Witcher,
and it is amazing feeling,
like that I'm part of something special,
like a special game, and special company.
(gentle music)
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