![]() ![]() In The Witcher 1, however, that clumsiness is exacerbated by inexperience and budgetary constraints. In fact, it’s a fundamental apect of RPG design – a necessity that makes the conversation wheel go round – and even Bioware was guilty of implementing the basics a little clumsily back then. There’s nothing wrong with safety-netting the player with a repeating interaction they can come back to once there’s more to say. Other conversations, meanwhile, can be bafflingly empty – bare scaffolding waiting for events to occur elsewhere in the game before they can be dressed with meaning. New information has a habit of materialising in Geralt’s mouth, as if he’s been carrying out his own investigations while the player is asleep. This structural confusion has a muddling effect. But the dense tree of quest logic they hang from is as gnarled and twisted as the one that sits on the Whispering Hillock. The dialogue itself is perfectly good – taken individually, practically every line is illuminating, funny, or at the very least functional. Yet the precise, purposeful plotting that would define later games is absent in The Witcher 1. They are real, the problems are real, the decisions in the game’s world are real.” It’s a guiding statement that ultimately led CDPR to The Wild Hunt and mass cultural resonance. They just want to have fun, to gain power, to earn money, to drink. They don’t want to save the world by dropping a ring into a volcano. ![]() ![]() “You can easily understand their motivations. “Those books are about modern people,” said chief designer Michał Madej. Their commitment to his “inherent” humour, emotional truth, and rejection of easy answers in his stories. Watch behind-the-scenes interviews – particularly those aimed at the Polish audience – and you can sense the team’s awe for Andrzej Sapkowski’s work. It’s clear too that, from the beginning, CDPR was the right developer to tackle Wiedźmin, as the Witcher series had been known until that point. It’s these decisions that make the games such great companion pieces even now – existing comfortably alongside the novels and the Netflix adaptation, each part further enriching the others. So many of CDPR’s high level decisions were sound: to set the story after the books, rather than repeating old events to bring back Geralt as protagonist, despite the ‘00s fashion for character creation to locate the action in the city of Vizima, where the consequences of Geralt’s past actions could play out. It’s not that the studio’s debut was a bad Witcher game, or a poorly-written one. No matter how shiny it might look on the outside, this is a game that could never be mistaken for a modern product, or accepted as one, once it opens its mouth. Were CD Projekt RED to remake The Witcher – its first ever RPG – the result would be much the same. ![]()
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