The implementation of Geralt's swimming turned out to be a difficult task.
CD Projekt RED co-founder Adam Badowski recently shared his memories of working on The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt. His logical remark about the swimming mechanics eventually led to a large amount of work.
I remember the moment when I asked a very difficult question, [which seemed] obvious: there is water, but where is swimming? The whole room went silent.
At that moment, the main concern of The Witcher 3 team was that "they thought we would have to cut something so that there would be no need for swimming."
However, in the end, Geralt was given the opportunity to swim. If there was no swimming, the hero would not be able to enter the water or would drown in it, which would break the immersion. For Badowski, "the question of immersion [in the game]" drove ideas forward:
If there is water, there is swimming, if there is swimming, there is diving, if there is diving, you need to create completely new locations. And [the team] is like: "it's logical"! Sometimes [we, the developers] just forget about this [logic]
