The Witcher 3 Dev CD Projekt Red Explains Why The Open World Worked

On May 19, 2015, Polish studio CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the final entry in its trilogy continuing author Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher saga. With a huge open world, the game was a big departure from the style of the previous two games, but the risky move resulted in a game that still holds up five years later. It is often considered one of the best role-playing games of all time, and its enormous and lively world is largely responsible for that.

In an interview with Polygon, the CDPR developers have talked about how The Witcher 3 was such a big departure from other games in the series, and what went into making that change.

“Our quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, said that the main goal [of The Witcher 3] was to combine the design philosophy of previous Witcher games, which was to create a complex and mature story that has choices and consequences, with an open world," senior quest designer Philipp Weber told Polygon. "There used to be this preconceived notion you would hear a lot that open world games can’t tell interesting or deep stories. So that was something we took up as a challenge."