The chosen approach to world‑building proved to be highly resource‑intensive.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings employed a complex structure that reacted to player choices: under certain conditions portions of content would be cut off — in effect the developers created alternate versions of the second act.
For The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt the team took a different direction: an open world peppered with countless “question marks” — points of interest. Many fans wondered why the branching structure of The Witcher 2, which was popular with players, was abandoned.
Recently, in an interview with PC Gamer, CD Projekt RED co‑founder Adam Badowski explained that creative decision. He estimated that roughly 90% of the second act’s storylines in The Witcher 2 were unique, each with its own locations, key characters and quests — the writers had to invest enormous effort to flesh out every version of the act.
Badowski admitted that while such a structure can be appealing to The Witcher 2 players, from a development perspective it looked like “a waste of resources”.
In The Witcher 2 we had a very complicated game structure because there were two paths. You could take one path and never see the other. From a production point of view it is a waste of resources. From a player’s perspective it might be cool, but it was clearly an experiment
While developing The Witcher 3, CD Projekt RED moved away from branching in favor of an open world. In Badowski’s view, the sheer scale of the game made a Witcher 2–style structure impractical:
That structure was far less feasible in The Witcher 3, whose scale made such radically different experiences impossible. In Wild Hunt I knew that a combination and construction like The Witcher 2’s didn’t work very well. So we introduced something completely new, something that supported the open‑world concept
The team behind The Witcher 3 prioritized maintaining narrative quality across a far larger world rather than branching for the sake of choices:
The key question was how to build such a massive open‑world game while preserving Geralt’s magnificent story — and at the time there were many doubts about whether we could pull that off
Source: iXBT.games