The Witcher 3 Dev Reveals the 'Secret Sauce' of CD Projekt Red Quests

3.5

The "secret sauce" when it comes to CDPR quests in games like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 is empathy, according to Pawel Sasko. Sasko served as a quest designer on The Witcher 3, the lead quest designer on The Witcher 3's DLCs, a lead quest designer in Cyberpunk 2077, the quest director in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, and now serves as the associate game director of the next Cyberpunk game. Needless to say, if there's anyone with a strong insight into CDPR quest design, it's Sasko.

Sasko took the stage at Gamescom LATAM to discuss how CD Projekt Red develops quests, discussing it at a very high level from day one to launch and post-launch. Afterward, Game Rant sat down with Sasko to learn a little more about these processes. He mentioned that, when it comes to game design, quests should focus on "play, show, then tell, always in that order." This means that players should be able to interact with as much of a quest as possible; instead of there just being drama in a scene, there should be drama in gameplay. After that, it's about showing players instead of telling them, and relying on that latter point only as a fallback. When discussing the "show" element, Sasko discussed how important empathy is in quest design, citing The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

His goal, he explained, is to make players stop thinking about the logic of events and start feeling because it establishes a connection between the player and the quest. That makes them more immersed in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 when they genuinely feel like they're part of it or can relate to major story beats, despite the two games being far removed from reality. "I always tell my designers to try to get that player to be empathic because there are so many different things that can touch players," Sasko said. He gave two examples of how empathy can touch players: the first being when So Mi is dying on the train in Phantom Liberty and when the Bloody Baron carries the Botchling in The Witcher 3. Both are strong emotional sequences, things that can pull on a player's emotions, and years later, Sasko still recalls a letter he received regarding the Bloody Baron story.

In short, a man reached out to CDPR to express how deeply the Bloody Baron storyline affected him, emotionally, after losing both his wife and child during childbirth. The letter explained how difficult this quest was and how "he felt like he was the Bloody Baron, carrying that child. He really wanted it to work."

It's important to Sasko that quests are built with this empathy in mind. The Witcher 3 is about fatherhood, but he's not a father. That doesn't mean he can't make an authentic experience thanks to his empathy and talking with other fathers to create an authentic, if fantastical experience. Understanding how some folks may react to a video game quest is an important step in developing that question:

"Even though it's fantasy, it's some Botchling thing, there's a component of authenticity and realism that will touch people because you don't know what they went through. You have to approach quests with deep care and consideration."

Using empathy in designing quests, leveraging a player's empathy, and approaching every quest with deep care and consideration may seem like small steps in a grander process, but it's the little things and details that are the difference between a good game and a great game. Empathy is an important element of that, with Sasko summing it up simply,

"Show is about trying to talk to your empathy and trying to show things that can move you. For me, it's almost like a secret sauce for making really good quests."