Modders have released a comprehensive document that reveals more details about the development of The Witcher 3. According to it, an important feature was not supposed to be part of the game.
What kind of document is this? Four modders named Moonknight, Ferroxius, Crygreg, and Glassfish have been working on The Witcher 3 for years. They particularly seem to be interested in the development history of the game by CD Projekt RED. Now, they have released a comprehensive document that brings new details about the game to light.
The document titled “What lies unseen” spans a remarkable 584 pages and is only part 1 of a four-part series. It is supposed to investigate how The Witcher 3 was created and which features and content were discarded or added along the way.
A look into the document on github.com reveals some exciting aspects from the development. At one point, especially fans of collectible cards are likely to breathe a sigh of relief.
Not only the modders are searching for more secrets in the game, other fans are continually finding new secrets as well.
A major time sink would have been missing
What does the document say? Anyone who has played The Witcher 3 knows Gwent. The collectible card game can be played in almost every village or at some point in the cities.
The simple gameplay combined with the typical collecting frenzy ensured that Gwent became a popular part of The Witcher 3. In 2018, a standalone game was released that can be played for free.
However, Gwent was not originally included in The Witcher 3. Because the developers wanted to incorporate mini-games, there were arm wrestling and dice poker – similar to the predecessor.
Fortunately, this point was rethought. So you can take a break during the adventure, play cards in taverns, and kill some hours. The main quest would be urgent, but hey, that one round of Gwent must happen now.
Speaking of the main quest: the modder’s document reveals some other exciting facts that are likely to interest fans.
What else is interesting? The main quest of The Witcher 3 takes about 50 hours, depending on playstyle. But it was supposed to be about three times as long, so 150 hours. Also, the subtitle “The Wild Hunt” was only changed late in the process; it was originally “A Time of Sword and Axe”.
Additionally, players would have had to choose between Yennefer and Triss. With both sorceresses, a romance could be started, as in the final game. However, the choice would have had significantly larger consequences. The sorceress not selected by the player was intended to not appear in the last third of the game. Overall, the endings of the game were supposed to be more melancholic and ambiguous.
The most curious fact surrounding the development concerns Cyberpunk 2077: the game was still in an early stage at that time. Nevertheless, CD Projekt RED had planned a quest in The Witcher 3 in which Geralt of Rivia would travel to the futuristic city of Night City.
What that would have looked like can only be speculated. What is certain is that The Witcher 3 has become a very good RPG even without all these additional contents. And it keeps the community busy even years after its release: A player discovers a place in The Witcher 3 that probably very few have seen after 9 years.
