I’m often curious about how major plot twists are pitched. Did Darth Vader revealing he’s Luke’s father make sense to everyone else in the room? What about when Ken Levine told his team about where BioShock was going? In the case of one of the bigger moments in The Witcher 3, the writing team was slightly flabbergasted, according to the person who came up with it.
To mark the 11-year anniversary of The Witcher 3, Pawel Sasko, a quest designer on the RPG who’s now an associate game director at CD Projekt, revealed he threw out an idea for The Battle of Kaer Morhen that rendered his team speechless.
He’s got a point, and this particular scenario was begging for something dramatic. It’s where the Wild Hunt storms the witcher school in search of Ciri, an attack, as Sasko points out, only ends due to a huge outpouring of her unrestrained powers.
To get to her unleashing those abilities, the story needed a catalyst. Vesemir, being an old, embattled witcher, was prime for a heartbreaking death on the battlefield, and so it goes that he does, and we all wept.
Sasko goes on to describe his ideation for the whole sequence. “I prototype meteors, rifts opening in the forest, Wild Hunt pouring out of them, the ride back to the keep on horseback,” he recalls. “So much of it does not work. Technical issues. The quest flow is unclear. Review feedback I get is negative, so I rebuild.”
He calls it the time of his life, and may we all be so creatively fulfilled at one point or another. If we’re really lucky, it can involve a story-defining bit of writing, too.
The Witcher 3’s best ending is the one where “everybody lives happily ever after,” says Geralt actor – and he got it in his only-ever playthrough: “I didn’t know the choices that would lead me there.”
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