Artur Ganszyniec’s 26-episode, 40-hour-long playthrough of the first game in The Witcher trilogy has finally come to an end, but the game developer, who served as lead story designer on the 2007 game, waited until the final five minutes of his trip down memory lane to drop the juiciest piece of info regarding its development. According to Ganszyniec, the writers at CD Projekt Red were “not really” involved in the creation of its final cutscene, and this “mistake” ultimately forced the team to take The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings’ story in a completely different direction.
As spotted by PC Gamer, Ganszyniec decided to reveal this information as the final cutscene in The Witcher began to play. Those of you with good memories might remember that the game ends with the attempted assassination of King Foltest. After killing the would-be assassin, Geralt discovers that the culprit was a fellow witcher. This leads directly into the start of the second game, where we find Geralt locked up for his suspected part in the assassination.
Turns out, Ganszyniec had no hand in writing the final cutscene. “The script for this…it was created not really involving the story team. So it was sort of, we weren’t really paying attention. And that was a mistake, I think.” As he explains, this is why the “open question” surrounding Geralt’s future that’s presented in the narrated section, which precedes the animated cutscene doesn’t match up with the conclusion. “Someone decided, like the board decided, or [CD Projekt co-founder] Michał Kiciński decided, that we needed an animated outro of the game.”
This does explain why Geralt has suddenly teleported back to Vizima at the end of the game. The disconnect between Dandelion posing the open-ended question, “What then happened to the witcher?” in the closing narration and an ending cutscene that immediately answers said question also now makes sense, as the writers clearly intended for this to provide setup for something else entirely. On the plus side, Ganszyniec doesn’t seem bitter about the change, as he rounded off his playthrough by voicing his excitement for Fool’s Theory’s upcoming remake of The Witcher. “Let’s hope that the remake will be a really good game.”