'Do it fast, do it dirty': The Witcher 4's narrative director discusses the studio's philosophy and what made The Witcher 3 so great
Everyone has a different way of going about their work. Some like to plan meticulously, colour code information and have Excel spreadsheets on Excel spreadsheets, and others, well, others have GDocs.
As it turns out, throwing ideas into an ever-growing chaotic GDoc for days on end was actually Philipp Weber's first job at CD Projekt Red (via GamesRadar). Back when he was a quest designer on The Witcher 3 before he got promoted to narrative director for The Witcher 4.
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You may think that a company as big as CDPR would have to run a tight ship with everything organised to a T, but it seems that the philosophy, at least while work was underway on The Witcher 3 was a little bit more holistic.
The energy at CDPR around this time was apparently quite "scrappy" and Weber used GDocs to note down any and every quest idea he could think of. There wasn't much rhyme or reason to it, instead it was, he admits, "a little bit vibes-based."
"Do it immediately, do it fast, do it dirty," Weber says. CDPR's philosophy was to just keep the engine running and the ideas pouring out until the last possible moment. "We check it and start iterating [...] we keep that iteration going until the end—we're never happy with the result until it's too late and the game has to be out."
But CDPR's chaotic drive wasn't the only key to The Witcher 3's success. Among other things, it was also helmed by a bunch of enthusiastic fans and developers, many of whom were modders.
Back in 2013, CD Projekt ran a competition after opening its mod tools beta to the public, a competition that Weber, aka Benzenzimmern, won. "I came in with super high motivation, loving the Witcher," Weber explains. "I think the secret behind The Witcher 3 was that I wasn't an exception—that was the case for so many people." So I guess the secret sauce for The Witcher 3 was a combination of chaos, grit, and the mother of all GDocs, which I for one would really like to see.