CD Projekt Red did a beautiful job of bringing Andrzej Sapkowski’s books to life with its The Witcher sequence of games. This was as a result of the workforce took the descriptions from the novels and translated them from web page to display screen with aplomb.
Look to the game’s model of the lonely Witcher preserve of Kaer Morhen, which Sapkowski writes as being ‘huddled against the stone precipices’ within the mountains of Kaedwen, and also you’ll see a rocky preserve crouched underneath excessive partitions. Or there’s the bustling streets of Novigrad, which Sapkowski presents as ‘the cradle of culture,’ which you’ll see mirrored within the banks, brothels, and bathhouses you run between in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
But there’s much more to visualising this structure as the unique writer wrote it – game growth calls for embellishment. “It’s not as straightforward as taking a description from the books and recreating its content in the game,” Peter Gelencser, degree design coordinator at CD Projekt Red, tells me. “Adjustments are often required […] to make a location stand out or have it fulfil a particular purpose during exploration.”
First, the descriptions in Sapkowski’s books churn by quest designers and setting artists. They love the lore, however have the circulate of the game and participant expertise of their greatest curiosity, so areas will undergo modifications to match the story, actions, and the texture based on Gelencser.
The source material is instructive, then, nevertheless it’s extra of a priceless start line than a blueprint. For occasion, with The Witcher 3’s Novigrad, the workforce knew it wished the setting to really feel enormous, to match the descriptions from the books. In the brief story The Eternal Flame, Dandelion emphasizes simply how giant Novigrad is, and this was a necessary facet for CD Projekt Red to convey within the game:
if Novigrad didn’t astonish or amaze, the entire game would have suffered
‘Novigrad, I tell you, is the capital of the world. Almost thirty thousand dwellers, Geralt, not counting the travellers; just imagine! Brick houses, cobbled main streets, a seaport, stores, shops, four watermills, slaughterhouses, sawmills, a large manufactory making beautiful slippers, and every conceivable guild and trade.’ (Sword of Destiny, Eternal Flame, web page 134)
If you are taking a stroll round Novigrad it’s straightforward to see the workforce’s success. Novigrad, in stark distinction to the war-torn and ravenous Velen, is a sprawling metropolis. It’s a melting pot of various cultures, courses, and trades, with opulent buildings sat alongside mud-splattered quarters for the poorer residents. With a lot to find round each nook it’s straightforward to get misplaced in its streets.
“From the outset we knew that if Novigrad didn’t astonish or amaze, the whole game would have suffered,” Gelencser says. “The city needed to be grand and believable, give players opportunities to get lost, experience the shine and scum, meet lords and beggars, and everyone in between. In this regard I think we came through and delivered something exceptional. We’re very fortunate to have had the talented people, as well as the technology on board that let us go the extra mile – miles, even.”
Kaer Morhen is the same story. Again, the e book served as a tenet, serving to the workforce to create the setting in each the primary game and The Witcher 3. In the e book, Blood of Elves, Kaer Morhen is described as being ‘famous for its wildness and inaccessibility’, and this actually comes throughout in these two games:
‘The wind howled savagely, rippling through the grasses growing over the ruins, rustling in the hawthorn bushes and tall nettles. Clouds sped across the sphere of the moon, momentarily illuminating the great castle, drenching the moat and few remaining walls in a pale glow undulating with shadows, and revealing mounds of skulls baring their broken teeth and staring into nothingness through the black holes of their eye-sockets.’ (Blood of Elves, web page 38)
During the making of The Witcher 3, although, the workforce began taking extra liberties with Kaer Morhen and added new particulars to promote the participant on the passage of time. These modifications took benefit of the improved know-how. As a end result, Kaer Morhen in The Witcher Three feels extra overgrown and dilapidated, with an abundance of weeds and an enormous picket scaffolding holding the preserve collectively.
Witcher method subsequent?
CD Projekt Red is busy engaged on its enormous futuristic RPG Cyberpunk 2077 and has acknowledged that there will not be one other Witcher game. However, the studio’s subsequent launch will likely be Thronebreaker, which is a single-player standalone spin-off of Gwent, the cardboard game. It is, actually, a full Witcher RPG, as we came upon when getting our fingers on it.
“A lot of time has passed between the two installments and it would’ve been a great shame and waste if we didn’t show this in the game,” Gelencser says. “This freedom was a fantastic driving force to explore that which we simply weren’t able to before. It was a lot of fun, as well as a chance to look back on where we came from, which kept motivating us to push the scope and quality further and further. There’s also the case that members of our studio’s environment art and level design teams are really into ruins and take great pleasure in putting as many vines, cracks, moss, and deteriorating scaffolds as they can get away with.”
In The Witcher 3, the workforce additionally had the chance for the primary time to discover the environment of the preserve, letting gamers see much more areas from the books. This contains ‘the gullies and gorges’ that Triss explores on her technique to Kaer Morhen initially of Blood of Elves.
“The two main considerations were lore and opportunity,” Gelencser explains, speaking in regards to the space’s design. “The former acted primarily as quest design gasoline, whereas degree design went on a hike, metaphorically talking, and explored the land past Kaer Morhen’s partitions as sculptors of a forgotten valley.
“We drew lots of inspiration from the pure shapes of the realm surrounding the preserve and iterated on them with ardour and curiosity. It was like placing a puzzle collectively – the lands, factors of pursuits, paths, caves all serving as items of that puzzle.”
Arguably the most important problem through the growth of The Witcher Three was the area of Skellige. Not a lot is written about Skellige till the fourth e book within the saga, The Tower of the Swallow, with a lot of the interactions with the islanders coming from probability encounters on the principle continent. Nevertheless, within the e book, Sapkowski does present some perception into what Skellige is like, equivalent to when Yennefer seems out from Kaer Trolde:
the partitions are produced from native rocks as clay would have been scarce on these rocky isles
‘Almost the entire archipelago was visible from the upper terraces of the citadel of Kaer Trolde, the main fortress of Ard Skellig. Straight ahead, across the sound, was An Skellig – low and flat on the south side and covered by steep fjords on the north. To the left, far away, the sharp tusks and high cliffs of green Spikeroog rose above the waves; the peaks disappearing in the clouds. To the right one could see the steep cliffs of the island Undvik, on which swarmed gulls, petrels, cormorants, and gannets.’
Skellige’s topography is precisely represented in The Witcher 3, with gamers in a position to climb to the highest of Kaer Trolde and see just about of all what’s described within the e book. However, the event workforce additionally checked out tons of reference materials from actual locations, just like the Faroe Islands, Medieval Iceland, and Greenland, to flesh out the area and create an open world that felt distinct from the principle continent.
“We also looked into cultural models of isolated societies – how they react to outside influences, what’s their attitude towards newcomers,” Jakub Szamałek, principal author at CD Projekt Red, tells me. “We then made sure that all the settlements and villages make sense within their context, and so the walls are made from local rocks rather than bricks, as clay would have been scarce on these rocky isles. There are few fields, because Skellige’s soils wouldn’t have been able to support intensive agriculture – but shepherding and fishing plays a much bigger role than on the Continent.”
The Witcher games stay essentially the most trustworthy variations of Andrzej Sapkowski’s work, bringing his world to life with a formidable data of – and respect for – the unique supply materials.
It is evident that this was no straightforward activity, requiring CD Projekt Red to collaborate throughout a number of departments, together with their idea artists, setting artists, and quest designers. And that’s to not point out the analysis they wanted to place in to verify the world felt populated and that each area had its personal historical past and sense of place.
If you haven’t but learn The Witcher Saga – or the brief story collections The Last Wish or The Sword of Destiny – I wholeheartedly advocate selecting them up. They will broaden your appreciation of the duty that CD Projekt Red confronted with the Witcher games and will make you discover the extent of depth and creativity poured into the game’s world.
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