Because of Geralt, women in The Witcher 3 could abandon babies - CDPR had to refine character behavior
Recently, a quest designer gave an interview and shared memories of the development of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The CD Projekt RED team at an early stage focused on creating a believable daily routine for NPCs and paid less attention to another important aspect of the game — developing an adequate reaction of characters to the main character's actions.
Philipp Weber, in a conversation with EDGE, said:
We focused on developing the countryside to make it easier for players to explore. If there are only eight houses in a village, people will want to check if its inhabitants truly live in this world or if it's just an imitation. Nowadays, many are interested in such details, and in the end, this approach made our lives much more complicated.
At that time, CD Projekt RED focused on "simulating a full day-night cycle," and when it came to actual player actions, "there wasn't much detail."
One of the most striking manifestations of this approach was the characters' reaction to fear. For some time, if Geralt started swinging his sword and scaring people, they would drop what they were doing and run away — and the system didn't take into account that the NPC might be with a child at that moment. Therefore, Philipp Weber says, "for several weeks, women simply abandoned their babies." The NPC behavior had to be refined.
The developer also revealed details of the NPC behavior system implementation in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: for most characters, they did not specify specific routes, but created several points of interest available to them, and then they independently plotted their path.
Currently, CD Projekt RED, in collaboration with Fool's Theory, is preparing the Songs of the Past expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
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