The Witcher 4 dev reveals big lesson from Witcher 3 development

Many people consider The Witcher 3 to be an all-time great video game, but one of its original devs has discussed an element of the game that they now feel was a huge mistake.

The Witcher was already a well-liked series and was building momentum before The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt came along, but the 2015 game categorically put the franchise on the map.

Its exquisite blend of deep storytelling, fluid gameplay, and captivating open world led to millions of copies sold and a subsequent Netflix show.

Despite all the game’s perfect review scores and never-ending praise, one of the game’s junior quest designers, at the time, revealed a deep regret they have with the game.

The Witcher 3’s map was too convoluted

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of CD Projekt Red being founded, the company has been running livestreams celebrating their work and accomplishments.

During the July 21, 2022, livestream of The Witcher 3, Philipp Weber, the campaign director for The Witcher 4 and The Witcher 3 next-gen, revealed some interesting tidbits.

“I actually started my career on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, so there I did smaller quests and pitched a lot of quest ideas,” he said.

After discussing how the process worked, he mentioned the game’s plethora of white question marks that were found all over the map, acknowledging that he was the one responsible for them.

“I can admit freely I’m one of those people that actually put those question marks in the world. It was already late 2014, so not that long before release, when we basically just filled the world with them.”

Anyone who’s played The Witcher 3 will know that all of the map’s regions, in particular, Skellige, were filled with these question marks, and Weber declared: “I did a lot of those terrible — I can say terrible because I did them — smugglers’ caches. But originally, we put them into the world, we put some seagulls over them so you would see them circling, but it wasn’t planned to actually have an icon on the map.”

Weber would go on to say that the inclusion of so many question marks was “a mistake” and he “wouldn’t do that one again.”

To be honest, given the overall quality of The Witcher 3, this was a tiny detail that was easily overlooked by most who played it.

It will be interesting to see how CD Projekt Red attempts to advance the newest game in the series, and if it’s learned anything from the controversial Cyberpunk 2077.