In the Spirit of Mass Effect 2. CDPR on Early Plans for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

In May, the magnificent The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt turned 10 years old. In honor of the anniversary, CD Projekt has been looking back on the development of the epic project for a whole month — this time, the company shared old ideas that, for one reason or another, it was unable to implement.

In a conversation with PC Gamer journalists, key CDPR employees admitted that the early version of Wild Hunt was inspired by Mass Effect 2. As in the action RPG from BioWare, during the main quest, Geralt put together a squad in order to go to the last battle.

“We had an ending in the spirit of Mass Effect 2, where Geralt assembled a team and went on a suicide mission. You took a drakkar and went into the frozen sea to fight the Wild Hunt. "In the end, we reworked the ending to make it more personal," — Marcin Blacha, screenwriter of The Witcher 3

In this version of the title, Geralt also became one of the horsemen and, according to Blacha, "was a kind of spy." The hero could even travel around the world on the ship Naglfar.

Tomasz Marchewka, another screenwriter, admitted that in one of the iterations of the Blood and Wine add-on, there were no vampires. The fate of Regis, one of the characters in the book saga, also remained in question for a long time: the team thought a lot about whether to resurrect him or not.

And finally, in the DLC, they wanted to make a side quest about a young groom who, by the will of fate, acquired the armor of a knight who died of a heart attack, went to fight monsters and ended up dying at the hands of simple peasants. According to Marchewka, the quest was abandoned due to its insufficiently high quality.

Let us recall that CD Projekt is currently producing The Witcher IV and the sequel Cyberpunk 2077. Polish bloggers, however, hint that the studio is also making new content for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — allegedly, the studio even joined forces with the Fool's Theory team (which was tasked with the remake of the original The Witcher) to develop it.