10 Facts About The Witcher Series You Didn't Know
Capping Off the Combat
Motion capture performance is often used in game development to help shave off some extra work for the animators while providing a sense of realism for certain characters. Why animate by hand when you can capture a physical performance through suits and cameras? CD Projekt integrated this practice during development of “The Witcher III”, and they utilized it in a creative way by hiring a professional swordsman to perform various maneuvers. So, the swordfighting you see Geralt employ is composed of actual moves used in the art!
A Place in Politics
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Ever since “The Witcher” exploded into pop culture with “Wild Hunt” and later the Netflix TV series, the franchise has seemingly found its way into nearly every corner of life, including the world of politics. In 2014, then-U.S. President Barack Obama went onto Polish TV network TVN24 and mentioned about a previous trip he had made to Poland. He recalls that in 2011, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, had gifted Obama a copy of “The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings”. Though he admits he isn’t exactly fortuitous when it comes to video games, Obama did cite it as an example of how Poland has contributed to the global economy.
Aren’t You a Little Short for a Video Game?
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By 2007 standards, the first “Witcher” game was incredibly meaty compared to most of the big boys that were on the market at the time. Not as big as traditional RPGs, but still sizable nonetheless. And yet, for a game that takes a few dozen hours to beat, “The Witcher” did not spend a lot of time in development, only going through eight months of production. Considering most games were taking a year or two to make it from pre-development to printing discs, you just cannot fathom how hectic CD Projekt’s offices must have been at the time.
Idle Chatter
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Jumping back into “The Witcher III”, it is still astounding to experience a game that was so intricately crafted with various details to make its world believable. Many outlets fawn over beards growing in realtime, but the weirdest yet most impressive detail is in NPC behavior. CD Projekt took their world a step further by including a wealth of conversations for NPCs to have with each other. It actually adds a whole other layer of immersion that most other open world games fail to consider.
A Past Worth Forgetting
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While we all fawn over the “Witcher” series on Netflix, this actually is not the first time “The Witcher” was adapted for film and television. No, we actually had a movie all the way back in 2001 called “The Hexer” directed by Marek Brodzki. We won’t lie - it’s a pretty awful movie. The story is all over the place, and the visual effects are so laughably bad that it makes the live-action “Scooby-Doo” movies look like a masterclass in CGI. Worth your time? Probably not, but maybe a good choice if you want a laugh with your friends.
Goggles Not Included
Even for a game as colossal as “The Witcher III” with its hundreds of hours of content, every work of media is bound to have some stuff left on the cutting room floor. “The Witcher III” had two very interesting mechanics that were cut from the game. We’ll get to the other in a second, but the best known one was a sort-of “x-ray vision” mechanic. With this, Geralt would have had the ability to see his opponent’s insides and strike at organs and bones to inflict critical damage. Perhaps the power of modern hardware can allow this mechanic to be revisited for “The Witcher IV” or even the remake of the first game.
Graceful Blades
Now, this scrapped mechanic was a bit goofy, but man, we would have loved to have seen it make the final build of “The Witcher III”. While speaking at a panel during PAX East 2015, designer Damien Monnier mentioned the game once had “ice-skating combat” during development. As silly as it sounds, we can honestly picture Geralt skating around as graceful as a ballerina while decapitating monsters. If we had to choose between this and the x-ray vision to put into the next “Witcher” game, this would be the one we’d keep in.
Strength in Numbers
Even before it launched in 2015, “The Witcher III” was generating some obscene numbers for CD Projekt. For starters, developing “The Witcher III” cost CD Projekt roughly eighty-one million dollars to make, which is shockingly less than the cost of most AAA games today. Even so, that’s an astronomical number, but what was more obscene was just how much code there was to tweak and go through during debugging, playtesting, etc. CD Projekt had to go through over one million lines of code and squashed more than five thousand bugs. For a game this massive, you know a few more bugs and glitches had to have fallen through the cracks.
Just Gimme a Few Days
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If you’ve already played “The Witcher III”, you’re likely already aware about the game within the game. We’re talking, of course, about “Gwent”, the card game that captured fans so much they made an entire online game out of it. With its simple yet deep gameplay, one would think developing “Gwent” had to have taken quite a while to complete. On the contrary, it only took three days to conceive, flesh out, and program by a few people. When the idea was pitched, they were told if this card game was to be included, it had to be simple and take the form of a collectible quest. The rest is history.
A Raw Deal Made Fresh
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With “The Witcher” being as successful as it is now, one would assume author Andrzej Spakowski would be swimming in cash. Alas, that’s not exactly the story, at least not at first. Back when CD Projekt had approached him about buying the rights to make the first “Witcher” game, Sapkowski agreed to a small payment of less than ten thousand dollars. It wasn’t until 2018 when Spakowski filed a lawsuit against CD Projekt and demanded over sixteen million dollars in royalties. This prompted CD Projekt to renegotiate with Sapkowski and his lawyers in order to maintain the license, and roughly a year later, the two reached an undisclosed settlement.
