The Witcher 3 Dev Reveals the Game Originally Had a Bank Heist
Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors
The Witcher 3 is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and with it comes a host of interviews across a number of outlets with the game's development team at CD Projekt Red. Earlier in the week we learned some juicy details about how the game's most memorable sidequest was almost very different, and it turns out that wasn't the only one.
According to CD Projekt Red quest designer Danisz Markiewicz, one fan favorite quest from the Hearts of Stone DLC, Open Sesame, originally started off as a bank heist, before the team decided it wanted to go even bigger. The result was the quest that we got in the final game, which had Geralt pulling together a team of roguish misfits to run a heist on an auction house.
"We wanted to have something more interactive," Markiewicz told DBLTAP in an interview. "The whole section of Geralt taking part in an auction, getting to meet people from high society, actually buying stuff – that felt very compelling. A bank heist could have certain opportunities, but this was on a completely different level."
A screenshot from the Open Sesame quest in The Witcher 3, showing Geralt and others planning a heist.
A screenshot from the Open Sesame quest in The Witcher 3, showing Geralt and others planning a heist.
CD Projekt
CD Projekt put great care into making sure its characters were a good fit for the bombastic nature of the quest, which takes inspiration from films such as Point Break and Ocean's Eleven. But, because CD Projekt never makes anything easy for itself, designers decided to have multiple options for each role in the heist, which required a lot of careful planning and clever execution to make the whole thing work.
"We didn't want to redo the entire scene," Markiewicz said. "So we developed some new tech to implement a scene so that those characters are technically there, but if they're not present, another character takes their place. You see that in several scenes – for example, when they're talking over the whole plan. If someone were to play this scene just as it is, you would get two characters talking over each other. Almost like Schrödinger's cat."
The quest also originally had plans for a magical security system, with a magic portal whisking Geralt away and into a cave with a Golem. Instead, Markiewicz said, the team decided to keep the quest a little more grounded, eschewing magic altogether and having Geralt dropped through a trapdoor into a pit of spiders.
All of this comes with the context that CD Projekt Red is currently hard at work developing The Witcher 4, which will be the first in a trilogy of games focused on Geralt's apprentice Ciri. The game is currently in development using Unreal Engine, a departure from the studio's usual in-house engine, but one that should allow developers to spend less time tinkering with its engine and more time crafting memorable quests.
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