(dramatic orchestral music)
- A living, breathing world is all well and good
but it's not really worth much
unless the time you spend there is fun.
So for a fantasy role playing game like The Witcher,
that means quests, main quests, side quests,
interesting quests, stories quests
with unique things going on in them.
And above all of those, quest variety.
Today, we're gonna take a look at quests
from a number of different angles,
and dive into the design of some of The Witcher 3's
most memorable ones.
But this story starts with the first quest
the team ever made for the initial release demo,
built on the first piece of land designed
by the level design team.
A quest entitled, The Lord of Undvik,
where Hjalmar went to slay an ice giant.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- To be honest, in general, our approach to the open world
changed throughout the production
so at the start, we still had the habits from Witcher 2.
For example there was this quest with the ice giant.
That's basically Hjalmar went to this island
and he wanted to kill the giant.
So at first, when we were thinking
with categories of Witcher 2,
we would say, yes, so we need this path,
this has to be closed before you kill the giant,
this has to be closed, you know?
Then you have these two paths so we have triggers there,
so it's all scripted and so on.
But then we felt, it doesn't feel open world.
It feels like this island is closed up series of tunnels
which basically is not open world,
it's more like multiple paths, island, basically.
So we changed that but then obviously
some issues started arising, so what happens if you go
through the lake that you were not supposed to go.
At first we like, "Yeah, you'll drown
"because the water is super cold."
But it's like some new system that we didn't have.
(laughter) You know, things like these.
Later on, you would say well, what if he goes
through the lake, whatever?
Like we just covered the option and something else happens.
Like this quest, especially,
because it has so many side things you could do.
For example, you could have helped this guy
that the trolls wanted to eat.
And then basically, after you helped him,
he would join you and he would follow you around the island.
It was the issue of the lake again
because the NPCs cannot swim in our game.
Only some exceptions like Siren can.
So there was an issue like he's staying there
and what happens to him?
And we thought well, maybe he should just die there
because he left him, you know?
Stuff like that.
So we basically decided to cover the options
and in this case also, basically this quest
is open to you from the start of Skellige.
But the quest giver is actually Crach an Craite,
who tells you that in the main story line.
But you can go to the island before you talk to him,
before he talks about his son going there.
He says that basically, Hjalmar disappeared a few days ago,
and it'll be weird if Hjalmar wasn't on the island
at the time, right? - (laughs) Right!
- So you basically, to have to cover the option
that you found Hjalmar-- - He just went to that island!
- Yeah!
You found him but you didn't talk to his father
and he's like, "What are you doing here?"
and Geralt is like, "Well, I'm just exploring or something!"
(laughter)
- [Danny] I'm just out on my boat!
- Yeah.
So, I mean, the quest would still progress
and everything would work but the dialogue
was changed, basically.
- [Danny] And then when you eventually meet up
with Crach an Craite--
- Yeah, he mentions it.
- [Danny] He's like, "Oh, gee, you got my son!"
- I already done that, yeah.
(laughter)
So it made the game much more complicated
but in the end I think it's impacted the quality very well.
I think it's much better a thing to do
rather than just wall something off
or de-spawn the NPCs.
In most cases, players probably will play it
as you intended, but when the players won't,
and they will see these weird quest places
that something obviously is happening here
but not yet, because he didn't talk
to the quest giver, right?
You can feel that something is wrong
and the immersion is breaking suddenly.
You can see it's Hollywood, you can see that basically,
the back stage, you know. - How difficult was it
to anticipate all of those permutations?
- It was crazy.
I won't give you an exact number, obviously,
but it was a huge amount of different combinations,
and different things that we had to cover
and some of them we didn't even think about
until QA pointed it out that, "Yeah, we played it
"in this order," and we're like, "Oh, fuck yeah,
"you can do that." (laughter)
- [Danny] While The Lord of Undvik may have been
the first quest the team tackled,
they had a very different series of initial quests
in mind for the player.
On-boarding players into an open world game
is always a difficult challenge.
But this is especially true of a series
that never had a true open world before.
The opening level in Kaer Morhen worked as a tutorial
for the game's basic mechanisms
but to teach the players how to interact
with this new open world, they'd have to create
a very special place.
They called it White Orchard.
- First was a basic tutorial of the game.
And this we covered with Kaer Morhen sequence
with the dream and then we basically thought,
"Okay, we need to introduce the open world,"
This is a new feature in The Witcher games,
and people should feel basically,
how do we approach the open world in general.
But we don't want to open up the whole map to them
from the start because they will be overwhelmed
with all of it, you know?
And they didn't learn all the basics yet.
So we thought, yeah we need, like you said,
we need a smaller version of what we have in general,
so a small region that will be open for the open world,
but smaller in scale in which you can basically explore,
learn the ropes of every system,
learn more about characters.
We had to take into consideration that it might have been
the first time you played the Witcher games,
so you might not know who Geralt is
and there are also all these new subjects
that we had to introduce like Ciri, Yennefer.
Nilfgaard invaded, who's Nilfgaard?
Who's Temeria?
There were a bunch of things like these.
- [Danny] Introducing the player to the main quest
was critically important but so, too,
is showing them how to take on and complete
the game's broad range of side quests.
One of the most memorable of these from White Orchard
was the Witcher contract Devil by the Well.
- It's interesting because basically,
at the point we were doing this,
we didn't have a
ready formula about how we want to approach monster hunts.
This was like one of the first ones.
Our designer basically had to sit down
and he had to think how to include all these elements
of investigation in there to
make it work but also how to set them up in a way
that it won't be too hard because at the beginning
of the game, you might not be familiar with the systems yet.
Initially, the place where you were supposed to learn
about these systems was the griffin hunt
and they're all laid out in there.
But
we thought basically, yeah why not?
You should be able to do all these side quests
and open White Orchard as well.
And yeah, you can go there first.
You don't have to hunt the griffin first,
right? - Right.
- So in every one of these places,
you would have to learn about the
witcher senses for example.
How do they work, how do they tie in
with the quest system and so on.
So it was a difficult task and I remember
this specific quest,
it was very cool but it had a lot of possible solutions
because we didn't want to block the player
from entering the well, for example.
So if you wanted to rush through it,
you could just jump right in without inspecting anything,
and take the ring.
So we opted for basically taking
your actions into considerations instead of blocking you.
I know in some games you would get, for example,
the well would be closed until you do something, right?
But in here, it didn't make sense
so we decided not to close it and we decided to keep it open
and if you decide to do it in different order,
fine, you will just get to a different outcome.
- [Danny] If White Orchard was the Witcher
with training wheels still attached
and Velen was when the player was fully free to get lost,
the team at CDP meticulously designed the opening area
of Velen to ensure that players hit certain points
while still feeling free and in control of their destiny.
They used heat maps to track where most
testers went and what they did.
And dotted side quests and activities on the way.
For instance, the vast majority of players bump
into the monster nest side quest very early on
which was perfect as this was also designed
as the monster nest tutorial.
Throughout the development process,
Velen was heavily tweaked.
In fact the focus of the quests in this area
and even the baron himself changed quite a lot
over the course of development.
- The northernmost area of No Man's Land,
probably one of the areas most ravaged by the war.
This is where both fronts clashed.
We had the idea of showing how the plague,
which played a (chuckles) much bigger role
during our development back then, had affected the area.
We came up with the Devil's Pit,
which people liked to have all sorts of conspiracies
about that.
At some point for us in development,
it used to be this quarantine zone of pestic people.
- Well, the initial idea for a bloody baron
was there from the beginning of the story.
Although in the first versions,
it was not as deep thematically.
So we weren't planning to touch so much
on the alcoholism problem on his family issues and so on.
- It was much more about problems with the baron's soldiers,
must more about being him as a warlord
of that space.
And it was changed but to be honest
I was thinking that the first draft used to be nice
and fits to the atmosphere of the Velen
but I was wrong and they did a good job of that quest.
- The general idea in the beginning
was that he was this warlord that was,
he took these lands for his own
because it's not strategically important
and no army is actually claiming them
so he's gonna claim them.
And the idea was that you as a player
will meet another father that lost his daughter.
So you have similar goal, kind of.
Obviously there are differences like his daughter left
on purpose and yours
is gone for other reasons.
We decided at some point to explore the theme
of alcoholism more and the reason of why
his daughter left him and why his family's like this
and so on, and it was a very difficult subject, obviously,
because it's a very serious subject to everyone
so we wanted to do it right.
The baron was rewritten so many times,
I couldn't count it (chuckles) basically.
Even after recordings we did rewrite them.
- [Danny] How did you space out the quests
throughout the world?
I feel like when the Witcher 3 came out,
it was around the time where people were starting
to get fed up with mini-maps full of quest markers.
- Well,
there is no golden method for that,
it's trial and error.
The general idea was to basically,
aside from the main storyline, obviously,
it will make these,
every village has some contracts for you.
And it's like a small quest hub basically.
And then when you're done, you're moving on
to the next notice board and, you know,
this is the gameplay loop, basically.
- Something that was a bit of a running joke
in our development as well because,
if we didn't know (chuckles) what it was,
we can say, "Yeah, let's make it a bandit camp,"
and we quickly realized that
that's very much the easy way out,
so we tried to make it thematically consistent with the area
and still try to give it flavor.
You'll find a lot of notes, for example,
that describe, "Man, this bandit wasn't actually
"really a bandit, he was just in it
"because he traveled with these guys and he needed safe travel
"and he needed to get to this place
"and then his wife was waiting for him."
So we tried to give meaning to these things, right,
its context.
One example again would be the cannibal ones.
This is technically a simple bandit camp
but given the context that
there's a famine in this part of the world,
so this part is also a bit more remote,
it's further away from most of civilization,
we thought, alright, so how could these
people have behaved in this scenario?
There's no food,
it's easy to come to the conclusion
of cannibalism taking place there.
So we came up with this one village
which used to be much nicer, more civilized, you could tell,
and had been raided.
Nearby you'd find this cannibal camp,
and even further away, I think there's like some people
worshiping this weird bird statue.
We made this the crazy part of No Man's Tow--
No Man's Land, No Man's Town. (laughs)
No Man's Town! (laughter)
Jesus!
Yeah, let's have fun in No Man's Town! (laughs)
What happens in No Man's Town stays in No Man's Town.
(laughter)
- [Danny] While the way in which you found side activities
and their variety was critically important,
a game like The Witcher 3 lives and dies on its quests,
be it them part of the main quest line
or stories off the beaten path.
And The Witcher 3 is full of these stories.
Be it tower fulls of mice, drunken witchers, or lost goats,
these stories stick with the player
long after they've walked away from the game.
So we asked the team to tell us about
the design of some of your absolute favorites
and some of their favorites, too.
- I remember that I saw the first draft
of the Towerful of Mice,
and
I read it and it was like, "Wow!"
And I remember that the quest hasn't changed
like a bit.
It was written by Joanna Radomska and then
without any changes on the reviews,
he was like in the final game.
- [Danny] It's one of the quests in the game
that feels the most like a Sapkowski--
- Exactly, exactly. - Short story.
- Like from The Witcher 1, you feel the atmosphere
of the horror and the wicked romance story,
and devotion and love and it was real nice.
And the whole story in that quest was perfect,
in my opinion.
- [Danny] And the ending of it is--
- Yeah, exactly. - Haunting.
No matter what happens, it's like an awful--
- There's no happy ending.
It is happy ending but not for them.
(laughter)
- [Danny] Actually another White Orchard classic,
The Frying Pan--
- Oh yes, this one. (chuckles)
It's funny, because I remember,
our project lead was very skeptical of this quest.
- [Danny] (chuckles) No!
- Why are you making me look for a pan? (laughs)
- [Geralt] And some old scars.
The kind a soldier might have.
- [Old Woman] What's that, dearie?
- [Geralt] Nothing.
- We were very convinced that it will be fun,
little quest to have.
Basically, we wanted to have this
foreshadowing of one of the characters
that appears later on in the story, Thaler, basically.
And we thought, yeah, it was a cute little quest
and why not make it and exactly, because it's different
from the other quests and it stands out,
it's unexpected, right, that you would get that.
- [Old Man] Princess, my goat!
She's fled!
- Those men must have scared her off.
Can we get back to the auguring?
- Princess quest, as far as I remember,
was done by the same guy who also went
into the baron quest line, go figure. (laughs)
- So it was a quest of one of our designers,
Pawel Sasko,
and basically, we're looking for
inserting some more gameplay in that quest.
So he got the task to think what you could do in that quest,
make it actually have more gameplay in it,
because it was very dialogue heavy.
So basically he thought, "So yeah, there is this guy,
"and he has a goat and basically you already had
"to go to him and what if he lost that goat
"and you have to go and find it?"
You know, she's his best friend.
- [Danny] Let's not get into
that relationship! (laughs) - Let's stick
with this version, yes! (laughs)
It's fun to put Geralt in situations
in which he doesn't naturally fit in.
- (sighs) Will you help me if I bring the goat back?
- He sees the absurdity of the situation
and he comments on it but he,
you know, what can you do, I have to go with bell,
and bell on is goat so she will come after me.
And then now, I don't know, she got distracted
with strawberries or something. (chuckles)
It was funny.
It was funny and yeah, I mean,
the base idea was to add more gameplay in the quests
but I think it was nice and cute idea
so I'm glad it made it in.
- [Geralt] Do I really have to keep ringing this bell
for you to follow?
(bell rings) Come on, dammit.
Where'd the hell did you go?
Bear, bear!
Run, you stupid piece of shit!
- [Danny] And I love the fact that when the bear appears,
I think Princess gets her own health
like
bar?
- (laughs) I don't think she can die in that sequence
but Pawel did it on purpose
so you would stress out about her
and to make it even funnier.
(laughter)
So it's actually one of my favorite quests in the game.
I laughed every time I played it on the reviews
even though I've seen so many times.
So this one was, our designer, Dennis Zoetebier.
He worked with a writer
It started off pretty small, actually,
and it grew as it went on.
We talked with Dennis that it would be cool to have,
it would be cool to have a small quest for every witcher.
Because you could have not played Witcher 1,
so you might not know them. - Right.
- So it's nice to learn more about them
in some situations not just dialogue.
And that was already pretty long,
it was supposed to be just one quest
and it grew up to be like three.
And the culmination of this as you met them already,
and as you talked with them about what you're supposed
to do with Uma was basically this witcher reunion.
So basically the witchers sitting together
and drinking, talking about you know, what happened to them
in the meantime, after Witcher 1.
And yeah, the guys thought what would be cool
to add in the sequence to make it funnier.
I remember Dennis really liked this quest in Witcher 1
with Shani and there was a party at Shani's place
and there was this moment that you were drunk
and you had to go and get the pickles, basically,
from the storage downstairs.
And you have to be careful so her grandma wouldn't hear you.
(laughs) So he was aiming for the similar mood
here, basically.
I think at some point, yeah, at some point,
there is this moment that Eskel gets lost
and you have to find him and you find him
with a goat and so on.
And yeah, and then they have this idea
to call the sorceresses.
Yeah, it was so absurd, it was basically,
yeah, one of the best moments for me.
On the review, I remember people coming in
because we were laughing so hard
to see just what we were doing,
why we were laughing so hard.
- [Danny] Was there ever a worry that like,
"Oh, maybe we shouldn't have them."
Like call the sorceress, that's like too much! (laughs)
- Oh yeah, for sure.
But then we said, well, let's just go with it.
It's so funny that I think people will like it.
- Given the amount of work I put in on the enhanced edition
of The Witcher 1,
I missed the first year
of
the life of my elder daughter. - Right.
- My younger daughter was born in December of 2008.
The Witcher 2,
work on The Witcher 2 occupied very,
a lot of
the first year of her life.
So I think the quest (laughs) that resonated with me
for The Witcher 3
was Geralt looking for his adoptive daughter.
In general,
a lot of the saga and a lot of the three-game series
is actually
about Geralt,
in spite of being an itinerate monster slayer
and dealing with a lot of nastiness and sleeping around
with sorceresses and
making questionable moral decisions,
is about Geralt trying to
figure out
how to
re-establish himself within a nuclear family.
- [Danny] Geralt's quest to find Ciri
is the essential quest of the entire game.
But even this was changed radically during development.
A quest where Geralt infiltrated the Wild Hunt dressed
as one of them in order to assassinate one of the generals,
was cut as they felt the endgame was getting too long.
So too was the far larger version of the universe,
jumping 'Through Time and Space.'
Originally, it was planned so that each world wasn't
just a single level
but individual White Orchard-style quest hubs.
- I think in the final version, we had the desert,
we had this darkish valley with the green
and red toxic grass, I think.
Then we had this underwater bit
and then the frozen wasteland, right.
And of course the Elvin bit.
I remember, we were going through so many different versions
of what this could have been.
(chuckles) And it took us quite a while
to actually settle on this final version.
- [Danny] Yeah, people told us that there were,
at one stage there was actually they were hub worlds.
So they were like zones with quests in them
that you like to spend time in as well.
- Yeah, but that (laughs)--
We realized pretty quickly that's
a lot of extra work. (laughs)
- Like, there would be the sequence
that you would be in prison,
and you would do different things.
And this wild portal throwing you into the prison
and other dimension and you have to now flee
and but they think you're crazy
because you're talking about other dimensions
and how you got there and they were like,
"Oh, right, okay. (Danny laughs)
"We should lock him up." (laughs)
But the problem was that basically,
first of all, it was getting super long.
I remember even on the reviews,
without the assets and all that,
it was taking us a lot of time.
So the issue of quests when you're traveling
between dimensions, if you want to do interactions
with people from another dimension,
it would be nice if they weren't exactly like people
from our dimension, right?
And if you do that, it's starts becoming confusing
and increasingly difficult.
And if you don't, it feels like,
"Yeah, they tell me it's a different dimension,
"but they behave like us, they look like us."
So in the end we opted for the option
with like these vastly different landscapes,
the unnatural landscapes you couldn't see in our world.
At times we discussed cutting it
even because it was so costly
but in the end, I'm glad we didn't obviously,
because it worked out to be pretty cool.
- [Danny] Designing a variety of quests
meant creating a lot of bespoke systems
that would ensure these quests worked properly.
But of course that doesn't mean that the team
didn't sometimes take shortcuts
resulting in unforeseen bugs.
For instance, opening every door in the game by accident.
- So the issue was that basically,
all the doors in the game, they had a tag,
which is 'door', basically.
And a designer, at one point,
wanted to close all the doors for his quests
because basically, in this point of story,
you weren't supposed to go in
and it was happening on one street or something.
And there were a lot of doors in that street.
So he thought instead of tagging them uniquely
and closing them separately,
I'm gonna just lock all the doors.
It works, obviously, and then I'm gonna unlock them
because the quest is over so now they can be opened.
So, fine, but all the doors in the entire game
will have the same tag so basically he would open
all the doors in the entire game,
even the ones that were closing the interiors
that you were never supposed to see.
Interiors that were empty, basically.
A lot of fixes we did,
after the game was released,
we had to take into consideration which point
of the game you were in, right?
But if there was a fix that was supposed
to apply to everyone, it was difficult.
Because we didn't know where the signal in the quests is.
- Right. - In our tool, basically.
So we had this one quest structure, basically,
that would control all the traveling merchants
that would travel I think somewhere in Novigrad,
or something, or in Velen, I don't remember.
It doesn't matter, but the point was that
this phase of the quest would keep the signal always.
It doesn't matter, did you finish the game or not,
did you go to the baron yet or not,
the traveling merchant was always active.
It was one thing that was always active.
So I remember we thought, "Oh, that's a good place
"to put the fixes in."
And if you opened this phase
in the quest-- - No!
- Yeah, he contains all the fixes for the different bugs
we got (chuckles) from users.
- [Danny] So the traveling merchant
is like the god of the game. - Yes, he is.
We have his poster in the quest room upstairs
because we appreciate his help
in the production process. (laughs)
- [Danny] The length of a game is always a talking point
prior to release.
And initial reports that the game was over a 100 hours long,
actually proved to be conservative.
But despite that, in truth, the designers at CD Projekt
were terrified that the game didn't have
enough content right up until its release.
- One thing you need to know about CD Projekt,
we are really bad at estimating play time. (laughs)
And we always underestimate the play time for our games.
So the first objective we got for Witcher 3,
the estimation was we need to get 100 plus hours.
And when we implemented all that we have
in the game right now,
we actually had even more because we cut some content.
And we were worried that it won't be enough
to fill it in to get have 100 plus hours of gameplay.
And you know, it was our first open world game
so obviously we weren't sure how to pace it
and how to
make it dense enough.
So, yeah, we thought, oh this is like 60 hours at best.
We have to add more stuff.
Seriously, it was a big worry late and alpha and even beta.
And later on when the actual dialogue started
to get recorded and when you would get actual gameplay in,
it would change because it looks much different
when you're playing in alpha with god mode
or with opponents that are, you know,
they die after one hit.
And it gets much different when you actually get
these gameplay systems in and when you play this
as a game, not as separate parts.
I remember designers coming up to me
and they were like, "Are you sure we should do this?
"I mean, we were supposed to have 100 hours of gameplay
"and I don't think we're gonna get it now."
And now we're doing it again
with (chuckles) Gwent campaigns.
(laughter)
- [Danny] Not to mention Hearts of Stone.
- Yes, not to mention Hearts of Stone
or Blood and Wine
so,
yeah yeah.
We're not very good at estimating play time
so please don't ask me about this ever. (laughs)
(dramatic guitar music)
(crow caws loudly)
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