Some players remember the first The Witcher not only for its plot and specific combat system. The developers added piquant cards with sexy girls to the game.
In a recent interview with the Polish publication CHIP, the screenwriter of the first "The Witcher" Artur Ganszyniec said that these cards "just happened."
The idea arose as a compromise. The developers knew that Andrzej Sapkowski's books contained an abundance of romantic storylines, but they could not implement a large number of cutscenes:
I recently spoke with an acquaintance from those times, and we came to the conclusion that the cards could have just "happened." Sometimes a feature is born as follows: during one conversation, someone mentions that there are many romances in the books, meaning we also need romantic storylines. Someone then compiles a list of characters, and someone else looks at it from a production point of view and says: "We can't make that many cutscenes." Then the question arises: if creating cutscenes is a problem, what can we do? Maybe add 2D drawings?
Ganszyniec explained that there wasn't a single moment when someone consciously made a final decision about a particular game element. Everyone solves some problem, and suddenly the proposed solution makes it into the game:
I don't know if that's exactly how it happened, but it's quite possible. Everyone is focused on solving a specific problem, and eventually something makes it into the game. And once it's implemented, it becomes difficult to remove.
The screenwriter admits that sometimes this card solution might not look very successful. As an example, he cited the episode with the nurses in the fifth chapter
When I replayed the game years later, I saw a scene where we talk to Shani about a child and family, and then Geralt suddenly switches to the nurses. I thought: "Geralt, seriously?" And then I immediately thought: "Artur, even if you didn't write this dialogue, it got your approval." This part looks awkward.
Nevertheless, Ganszyniec is not ashamed of these erotic cards in The Witcher. He just thinks that the scenes were not always written well enough:
It's not that "I'm ashamed of them." It's just that some of these scenes turned out absurd. Sometimes we tried to touch upon the connection between death and sex, known at least from war memoirs: people die, but they try to live, they are young. Eros and Thanatos are deeply present in culture. But sometimes it doesn't get written well [in the script]. Then you play, read the dialogue, and realize: it didn't work.