the wizardThe world is built on the creaking backs of characters who look much younger than they are. Mutants and Sorceresses can pass 40 or 20 respectively, but see more of the king’s face than a merchant full of coins. Don’t be fooled by smooth skin. Their youth is a facade that rarely holds up in conversation, and the rigid thinking and displaced perspectives of old age are quickly revealed.
Yes CD Project RED A remake of The Witcher – its first RPG – will have much the same result. No matter how shiny it looks on the outside, this is a game that will never be mistaken for or accepted as a modern product once it opens its mouth.
That’s not to say the studio’s debut was a bad Witcher game, or a poorly written one. Many of CDPR’s high-level decisions were justified: setting the story from the books, rather than repeating old events; bringing Geralt back as a protagonist despite the popularity of ’00s characters; finding action in Vizima City, where Geralt acted in the past The consequences could play out there. It’s these decisions that make the game such a great companion even now – living comfortably alongside the novel and the Netflix adaptation, each one further enriching the others.
It was clear from the outset that CDPR was the right developer to solve Wiedźmin’s problem, as the Witcher series was not well known until then. Watching behind-the-scenes interviews – especially with Polish audiences – you can feel the team’s awe of Andrzej Sapkowski’s work. Their commitment to his “innate” humor, emotional authenticity, and rejection of the simple answers in his stories.
“These books are about the modern man,” says lead designer Michaölstrok. Madjie. “You can easily understand their motives. They don’t want to save the world by throwing a ring into a volcano. They just want to have fun, gain power, make money, drink. They are real, the problems are real, in the game world The decision was also real.” It was a guiding statement that eventually led CDPR to Wild Hunt and popular culture resonance.
However, there is no precise, purposeful plot that defines the later games in The Witcher 1. The dialogue itself is pretty good—in isolation, nearly every line is illuminating, entertaining, or at least practical. But the dense quest logic tree they hung was as knotty and twisted as the one sitting on Whispering Hill.
This structural clutter can have a chaotic effect. New information has a habit of coming out of Geralt’s mouth, as if he’s been conducting his own investigations while the player is asleep. Meanwhile, other dialogues can be hollow — empty scaffolding waiting for events elsewhere in the game before they can be given meaning.
There’s nothing wrong with protecting players through repeated interactions, and once they have more to say, they can come back. In fact, it’s such a fundamental aspect of RPG design – necessary to make dialogue rotate – that even Bioware was guilty of being a bit clumsy in implementing the basics at the time. In The Witcher 1, however, inexperience and budget constraints exacerbate th is clumsiness.
It all culminates in Chapter 2, where CDPR intends to be a detective story full of cops, private detective Raymond, in a turtleneck. It’s Raymond who is in charge of your hunt for the Salamanders, a criminal organization that has attacked Kyle Morhan and stole the witcher’s secrets from its laboratory. But as lead narrative designer Artur Ganszyniec told TheGamer last year, the dialogue in Act Two was recorded before the mystery started to make sense.
Today, CDPR would simply use the money to fix the problem, re-recording the lines in question. But for studios just starting out, that’s not an option. Instead, Ganszyniec spent three days rewriting journal entries, trying to reconstruct the story around the recordings, and “learned a lot about how not to design investigations.”
As you can imagine, this solution makes The Witcher 1’s main mission muddy at best and impossible to navigate at worst. In the most shocking case, I found a key character cheating – but found the game left me with no option to speak it out. Only by digging through the wiki did I know that I needed to load an earlier save to go the path I wanted; during the autopsy, I picked the wrong fork in an innocuous dialogue choice. You are a better detective than me if you can spot a huge difference between the following two lines:
Moments like these are completely falsely ambiguous, in a series known for its grey areas.
Do I want CDPR to rein in its narrative ambitions to deliver a less garbled game? Not really. The ambition that made The Witcher 1 such an obscure story experience finally allowed CDPR to master the art of branching narrative in the sequel.
However, these early mistakes closed any shortcut to a remake. Of course, you can replace The Witcher 1’s spin, mouse and keyboard combat style with a more modern dodging “n” block system, in keeping with The Witcher 3. You can tinker with dialogue here and there, like Hangar 13 did in Mafia: Definitive Edition – deepening characters that were only roughly sketched the first time around. But in both cases, you’ll be, like Geralt, dancing around what’s really needed: a complete rewrite to bring the game’s narrative structure up to par. Suddenly, the project started to sound less Mafia: Definitive Edition and more Final Fantasy VII Remake. At that point, you have to question the value of the entire business.
This is a strange and sad conclusion. The Witcher 1, a critically acclaimed computer role-playing game, never made it to consoles due to various production issues — so it appears to have huge untapped potential. Given the striga-like appetite for all things Witcher, it seems like CDPR could easily resurrect it. However, the studio might be better off building a Witcher 4 when the required rework is so basic and extensive.
