Blast From the Past
Let’s take a walk down the memory line, and revisit the first Witcher game.
I joined CD Project RED in February 2006, with a simple job: write dialogues to a game that theoretically had been in production since 2002. Luckily (for me) the production was a mess.
After a few dramatic pivots, the game had no script to speak of. There was a bunch of locations, characters and graphical assets, inherited for the previous versions of the script and some doctored demos. There were many ideas. There was no clear direction and very little time.
Soon I progressed to implementing, then designing quests and after less than a year I was made responsible for the whole script and the story department. Such a clear progression is now unthinkable, but back then there were no narrative designers in Poland, and we were all learning as we went.
Eighteen years have passed since The Witcher was released, and I succumbed to the nostalgia, and decided to install the game.
I played it over a hundred times during the production, and was the first person to play it from the beginning to the end (I started about 8 PM and about 7AM the next day I realised, that for the first time we had an alpha build that was sort-of playable from the start till the ending). But then I never went back. I tried in 2010 and found that the game aged, and not in a nice way.
But in 2025 I found The Witcher retro-cute. And I decided to play it again, with a designer’s commentary, adding context to some design decisions, sharing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes.
The one where I explain why we re-did the Prologue five times
The one where I explain why there’s so much backtracking in Chapter 1
The one with sex card and dark secrets
New episode every Friday. Have fun!