The Witcher 3 was a genre-defining RPG when it released in 2015, and pushed the boundaries of narrative storytelling in games. The Bloody Baron quest was one of its crowning achievements. But even its designer thinks he would do thinks very differently if he were crafting it from scratch today.
“In the Bloody Baron quest, I made so many mistakes,” Paweł Sasko told Kotaku at Gamescom. “The way it was built, it’s almost four hours long when you play it. The quest is good on a narrative layer, but I could have told that story better with better pacing.”
Spoilers for those who haven’t played through The Witcher 3 before. The Bloody Baron is a questline that caps off the open-world RPG’s first main act. Geralt is searching for clues about where his surrogate daughter Ciri, a Witcher-in-training, has been, and the Bloody Baron won’t share any information until the monster slayer helps him find his own missing wife and daughter.
This being The Witcher, however, nothing is as it seems, and the quest line ends up revealing that the Baron, an alcoholic from a lifetime of ruthless wars, beat his wife and, during one fit of drunken rage, caused her to have a miscarriage. At one point, Geralt is forced to confront the unborn child, now a Botchling, as the Baron confesses his sins. You can read Sasko telling Kotaku about the questline’s origins back in 2015 here.
It’s a grim emotional roller-coaster ride that also has probably two or three more twists, turns, and detours than it needs. “The way we learned to do it on expansions for both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk is structuring gameplay into focused beats of around 40 minutes of intense, thematic gameplay and story,” Sasko said. “After that, we give the player a breather where the world opens back up to explore.”
He continued, “There are moments where you can break that rule—like in finales, or like the Somewhat Damaged quest in Phantom Liberty where you’re trapped in a bunker with a monster. In those cases, we consciously don’t let you put the controller down because we want you to feel exhausted by the situation.”
While Sasko, and CD Projekt Red as a whole, may have refined their storytelling and quest design chops in the 11 years since The Witcher 3, it’s still a landmark game in both categories. I’ll be more than satisfied if the upcoming DLC, Songs of the Past, has something even half as memorable.
