Witcher 3's heaviest scene stunned its devs into silence, but Cyberpunk 2's associate director says it was crucial for 'understanding the craft' of quest design
In the event you have not yet gotten around to 2015's best singleplayer game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, then beware—spoilers await you ahead.
If you have gotten around to it, then you'll be agonisingly aware of its most harrowing scene. After spending so long searching for Ciri, Geralt and the gang are (relatively) safely ensconced back at Kaer Morhen, enjoying a bit of a breather after the White Wolf's long schlep across Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige. You're squabbling with Yennefer, trading stories with Eskel, composing poetry with Lambert.
Then the Wild Hunt rocks up and puts a blade in Vesemir, the Wolf School's master and a father figure to Geralt and his fellow witchers. It's a gut-wrenching scene, and you can tell because it apparently wrenched the guts of the whole dang writing team. In a recollection of The Witcher 3's development on X, its lead quest designer (and current associate game director on Cyberpunk 2) Paweł Sasko wrote that, when he suggested to a room of devs that they off Vesemir, the reaction he got was "wide eyes and silence."
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Alas, they overcame their sadness and acknowledged that "the weight of [Vesemir's death] is exactly what the act needs. Ciri's outburst, the moment she throws the Wild Hunt back, requires that the floor fall out from under her first." So CD Projekt got to work killing our witcher-grandad. Which wasn't easy, it turns out.
"I prototype meteors, rifts opening in the forest, Wild Hunt pouring out of them, the ride back to the keep on horseback. So much of it does not work. Technical issues. The quest flow is unclear. Review feedback I get is negative, so I rebuild." Gradually, tragically, the scene began to come together properly: "Pieces start to hold. I begin to see why something works and why the thing next to it does not. Through repetition I truly start understanding the craft."
If designing Vesemir's death is when things started really coming together for Sasko, in terms of the craft of making videogame narratives and setpieces, then I'm beginning to understand why Cyberpunk 2077 (on which he was lead quest designer) and Phantom Liberty (on which he was quest director) were so chock-full of tragic moments and Sophie's choices. I'll give Sasko this: he and his team are pretty good at them! Perhaps too good!
Oh, and just to rub it in, Sasko says he was "having the time of my life" while working on this stuff. "Designers are showing each other ideas in the team room. Someone solves a problem, someone else builds on top of it, someone else innovates and iterates. We are playing. We are putting cool things into a game we love." And killing my grandad, Sasko, don't forget that.
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