CD Projekt dev defends The Witcher 3's "overdone" Witcher Sense clue mechanic: "At the time it was really fresh," even if "we've kind of overcooked it" by the end
Jul. 11, 2024Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine deliberately pulled back on clue tracking
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The Witcher 3players will surely remember how much time ol' Geralt spends with his nose all but glued to some tracks, following his aptly named Witcher Sense down a trail of clues in search of a monster or missing person. It’s one of the creakier elements of an RPG that, by all rights, has aged pretty immaculately, and evenCD Projekt Red’s Paweł Sasko, now associate game director onCyberpunk 2077 sequel Project Orion, agrees it was “overcooked” by the time the credits rolled, even if it was novel for the time.
Sasko points to the overall pacing of the experience, and reckons that excessive clues could hurt the flow of the game. Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine noticeably improved on the clue problem, but for overall pacing, Sasko points toCyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty as CDPR’s crowning achievement.
“There, that pacing is really, really well-crafted,” he says of the DLC. “But already in Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, you could see that we’d learned. There were no situations like in The Witcher 3 where it’s like, ‘Oh god another blood trail, marks from the foot of a monster. How many times can I go through this?’ All of those conclusions came in, and that’s why it was just a better work.”
The first quest CD Projekt made for The Witcher 3 led to the best one in the RPG: “There are quests that are not that great, and we’re very much aware of that.”
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