If you boot up The Witcher 3 today, you’ll see that its environments still feel as though they’re alive in a way that stands out when compared to most open-world games of the time. “So that was something we took up as a challenge.” How to open your world “There used to be this preconceived notion you would hear a lot that open world games can’t tell interesting or deep stories,” Weber explained. The game holds up, five years later, so it seems like they did a pretty good job.

This was a fallacy that The Witcher 3’s developers would try to put to rest by using the series’ non-open-world roots to rework the entire open-world formula. This is important, because open-world games are often seen as a trade-off, where the price of all that freedom is the tight storytelling from more linear games. “He said that the main goal was to combine the design philosophy of previous Witcher games, which was to create a complex and mature story that has choices and consequences, with an open world.”

“Our quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, who used to be the Lead Quest Designer on The Witcher 3, summarized it nicely for us,” Philipp Weber, senior quest designer at CD Projekt Red, told Polygon. So the team took the philosophy of its other, non-open-world games, which placed a huge emphasis on the quality of storytelling, and decided to rework it to keep what was special about its games, without compromising on that for the open world it wanted to create. Previously known for The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, developer CD Projekt Red had already established itself as a studio known for crafting great games - but not open-world games. The success and endurance of The Witcher 3 may be boiled down to a single sentence from Polygon’s original review: “ The Witcher 3 makes what should have been a terrifying risk look like the most natural evolution in the world.” Its stories, and the game that holds them, continue to endure, but why?

Today marks five years since the launch of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and players from around the globe are still becoming enamored with its refined universe of monsters, magic, and madness.

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