CD Projekt RED on The Making of The Witcher
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Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published an interesting feature on the development of the original The Witcher, with interview excerpts from some of the developers. It's the tale of an inexperienced studio that arguably bit more than it could chew, but that also had a very clear idea of the series' identity. A small snippet on my favorite quest from the game:
While the story that ultimately drives the last act of The Witcher is a typical (battle for the fate of the world), most of the game is concerned with petty crimes and betrayals.
(The games about Geralt contend that evil has its source in people in their lies and weaknesses that others can easily exploit,) Blacha continued. (Stories of this kind are far more suggestive than, say, a story about an invasion by evil demons. True, we use supernatural beings and forces in the games, but merely as metaphors. The Beast from the Outskirts is not scary just because it's a dangerous monster. It's also frightening because it's an incarnation of misdeeds and sins we might witness or experience in our daily lives.)
The flip-side of that is The Witcher's focus on friendships. Even if Geralt was routinely exploring the dark-side of human nature, and alternating between dour impassivity and ironic distance, he was warmed by the friends who surrounded him.
(To this day,) said Stępień, (I have fond memories of Old Friend of Mine, [a quest] which culminated with the get-together at Shani's house. That's a quest that I think really manages to capture the spirit of Sapkowski's prose, a spirit that's hard to capture in a computer game because it assumes an almost complete lack of action: no enemies none of the challenges players are used to having in a quest. But we managed to produce something successful and had a good time doing it. I think I still have the uncut version of that quest somewhere, where there's at least three times as much dialogue as you saw in that quest in the game.)
