![]() ![]() Szcześnik has similar recollections, although naturally his are more oriented around gameplay than story given that he and Ganszyniec were leads of two separate departments. We all would kill for an engine that allowed Geralt to jump, because every jump had to be an animated cutscene, and it ate our budget for story cutscenes.” “So, in hindsight, the budget constraints were a great thing - however stressful designing the necessary changes was at the time. Unfortunately, CDPR didn’t have the money to re-record the actors, and so Ganszyniec spent three days rewriting journal entries in order to rebuild the story around the voice lines - “I learned a lot about how not to design investigations.” By the time all of the dialogue had been recorded, the quest was still convoluted and impossible to understand. In terms of the ‘moods’ associated with each act mentioned above, Ganszyniec cites Act 2’s detective story as a particularly sticky problem. As far as he can remember, he was the first person to ever play The Witcher from start to finish, largely because towards the end of production he would spend most nights playing whatever the newest build was after a day of performing his other duties as lead. Ganszyniec explains that as development went on, he would spend more and more time playing the game, providing feedback, stress-testing narrative branching, and editing dialogue. This workload was typical of a lead on the first Witcher game. Among other things, he was responsible for several distinctly ‘Witcher’ mechanics like alchemy, the game’s then-original RPG system, and the now-iconic living cities. Szcześnik also had a sizable number of duties outside of casting and supervising motion capture. Despite the ubiquity of major actors in the contemporary triple-A space, this presented a monumental challenge for a late-’00s Polish studio who had never shipped a game of its own. Szcześnik explains that he and then-lead animator Adam Badowski - who is now head of CDPR - were tasked with casting motion capture actors early in production. While all of this was being written, recording and implementing it was a whole other ball game. We would decide the mood of every act - Act 1 was a horror story, Act 2 was a murder mystery, Act 5 was a war movie - and the morale of every quest.” Due to a very tumultuous production, many of the visual assets were created to tell a different story, and we had to repurpose them. Then we would brainstorm how to tell the story using quests, how many quests were feasible, how best to use the characters and locations we had. “We worked act by act and would usually start with a one-pager outlining the story. “A year and a half before the release, there was a pivot point in the production, when many changes were happening to the game’s vision, scope, and to how the team was organized,” Ganszyniec recalls. ![]()
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