As part of The Witcher 3’s 10th anniversary celebration, CD Projekt Red spoke to GamesRadar about the “secret sauce” that made its quests so special. Maturity was cited as the main ingredient by Paweł Sasko, a quest designer on The Witcher 3, because the majority of its developers were entering their 30s and 40s. Also, importantly, they were Polish.
“I would say we, as Polish people, are much more negative than western societies,” Sasko said. “We have a tendency to see glass half empty rather than half full. Part of creating mature entertainment is just realizing that not everything in life is going to go great. In all of our lives, horrible shit is going to happen.”
And there sure is a lot of horrible shit in The Witcher 3. Fetus zombie? Fingernail torture? Baby in an oven? The Witcher 3’s got it all. Sasko compared these elements of awfulness in CDPR’s RPG to the moment you come to terms with the fact your parents are one day going to die. “I’m a development psychologist,” he explained, “so I think about those things a lot. For me this moment of transition, of understanding that your parents are aging and they’re going to get sick and die, is a part of our human experience. It’s dishonest to always show and paint the world in a positive light.”
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“You cannot prevent your parents dying,” he went on. “You cannot prevent the fact that maybe the pet you spent 15 years of your life with has cancer. You cannot completely prevent this. [But it’s about] being thankful for everything you experienced. Even in this fucking dystopian horrible world of Cyberpunk, or this dark noir Witcher world, there are good people. There are good moments. There are friendships. There’s love! I think that’s the ambition: to encourage people toward this, and it might be a bit dark when I’m speaking about it, but I want to make sure that ray of sunlight is visible in our work.”
Like the scene in Seven where Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Gwyneth Paltrow just have a lovely dinner together, these shining moments of contrast are cast in stark relief because they’re surrounded by, in Sasko’s own words, “horrible shit”.