The chosen approach to world-building proved to be very costly.
The Witcher 2 Assassins of Kings used a complex structure that took into account player choices: under certain conditions, part of the content was cut off, i.e., the developers essentially made a couple of second acts.
In The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt, players were offered a different approach: an open world with many "question marks" — points of interest. Some fans wondered why they abandoned the structure of "The Witcher 2," which many liked.
Recently, in a conversation with PC Gamer, CDPR co-founder Adam Badowski explained this creative decision. According to his assessment, approximately 90% of the second act's storylines in "The Witcher 2" are unique, each with its own locations, key characters, and quests — the authors had to work very hard to fill each act option.
Badowski admitted that players in The Witcher 2 might find this structure interesting, but from the developers' point of view, it looks like a "waste of resources."
In The Witcher 2, we had a very complex game structure because there were two paths. You can go one way and not see the other. From a production point of view, it's a waste of resources. From a player's point of view, it might be cool, but it was definitely an experiment.
When working on "The Witcher 3," CD Projekt RED abandoned branching in favor of an open world. According to Badowski, the chosen scale of the game made it difficult to use a structure in the style of The Witcher 2:
Such a structure was much less feasible in The Witcher 3, the scale of which made such radically different experiences impossible. In Wild Hunt, I knew that such a combination and construction of the game [as in "The Witcher 2"] doesn't work very well. Therefore, we brought in something completely new, something that supported the concept of an open world.
The developers of The Witcher 3 focused less on choices and more on maintaining the quality of the narrative in a much larger world:
"The main thing was how we could create such a large-scale open-world game while maintaining the magnificent story of Geralt, and then there were many doubts [whether it would be possible to do so].
