The process of making The Witcher 1 is a difficult series that young people who have never made the game of CD Projekt Red must overcome before having a complete game.
The future is uncertain.
By the time Mr. Maciej, the production leader of The Witcher, took over his role in 2005, the development of The Witcher had been going on for two years, but as you know, the game was still not complete. How much for different reasons. The two years of game development were two chaotic years because they could not find an accurate direction. They only know they want to make a game about The Witcher, it will be an RPG based on the novel of Andrzej Sapkowski, but those are the only factors that remain the same during development.
“Everything keeps changing. Sometimes we don’t even have a project manager, ” said Mr. Artur – The Witcher’s senior designer. This means that everyone makes content for The Witcher at their disposal – artists create character models according to their imagination, programmers write features according to their wishes, designers. writing gameplay according to my knowledge, and the test team responded that all the others were wrong because it was not like the Witcher they wanted. “It doesn’t matter,” Artur commented.
Mr. Maciej also said that at the time, he was only doing his part of programming and letting others take care of putting them together. Still, when he saw the development team’s chaos, he starts sharing his experience as the most experienced person on the development team. “I started talking about game production, about the goals of the game, and so I got promoted,” he said. “Since then, we all decided we had to face the problem and finish the game. We really started making a game because, at that time, we recruited a lot of people, we changed seats three times, and the Quality Assurance team became complete. ”
Mr. Adam Badowski, who later led CD Projekt Red as The Witcher 3.
So a project leadership team began to take shape, including Mr. Maciej Miasik (production leader), Jacek Brzezinski (project leader), and Adam Badowski (image leader). They started working on a complete version of The Witcher by grooming what they had and hiring helpers to turn their ideas into reality. “I didn’t say we finished the game. We just said that the three of us sat down and said ‘we’re going to make games like this,'” said Maciej. “We were thinking about what to do to turn The Witcher into The Witcher. To make a game. A product. Because until then, we had many previews showing every E3, but none of them was made into a complete game. ”
Learn how to make games
Michal Iwanicki, a development team member, said that CD Projekt Red was in a difficult situation at the time due to not knowing how to make games. “We’re just kids, nobody knows how to make games, and they have to try and create something.” Luckily, these “kids” got financial backing from the release branch of CD Projekt to test many different things in the making of the game. The executives of the company “gave the green light” to these tests because they knew that in the long run, profits from game releases would drop sharply (as EA and other major publishers jumped into Poland). The only way out for the company was to switch to making games.
“As a game company, we have to learn how to make games through lots of trial and error. So we made a demo, then two. Try changing the way you work, trying to create new systems to make the game more interesting, ” Michal said. “But they are all experimental versions that contribute very little to the final complete game. It was not until 2006 that we decided we had to finish the game, and for a long time, from 2004 to 2006, we only learned how to make games. “
Overtime
When you’re trying to do something you’ve never experienced before, and it’s full of greedy ambitions like The Witcher, missed deadlines are unavoidable, from bosses to employees. How to estimate the time needed correctly. But because CD Projekt Red was determined to complete the game, the game team began to “get up, put together” to complete their work.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, The Witcher’s senior designer and currently the Game Director of CD Projekt Red, said that just two months before the game’s official release, the Epilogue section had a severe bug. Indeed, almost nothing works generally in the Epilogue of the game, and Konrad has a month to redo everything from scratch, keeping just the lines and events. “Everything needs to be included in the beginning because everything is empty. It tells you how crazy this project is. We sometimes searched for the person in charge of the task called “To Samo” for a whole month, but then realized that the quest didn’t even exist in the game. It took a month to realize that its name is “Samo SC to Z,” by the font in the game does not display special characters. ”
Meanwhile, Mr. Artur recalled that during the final months of The Witcher’s development, one of their programmers ate and slept at the studio for about two weeks. “The funny thing is that in the first few days, nobody realized it. Everyone works with a strange schedule, comes home late, so everyone thinks he is still working or coming earlier than me, or just after a night of overtime. ”
About nine months before the game was released, CD Projekt Red realized that he would never complete the game’s maps and characters unless they have … two more years. As a result, all that could not be completed in time was cut from the game, and this part fell into Artur’s hands. “They told me we had a story, but half of the map would be deleted, half of the NPC would disappear, and that story would have to remain the same because a part has been released (through the maps). demos and trailers). ” And Artur has three weeks to finish this part.
This is probably the result of the Projekt Red CD game overtime.
At that time, the plot that CD Projekt Red created for The Witcher will take Geralt from Kaer Morhen to Vizima, across the southern lake of the city to the Order of the Flaming Rose territory, and the story will end in an Order fortress where you duel with the Order’s Grand Master. But the problem is that so far, CD Projekt Red has absolutely nothing on the south side of Vizima! This had led to horrific over time that many CD Projekt Red employees had shared that they “laughed” when they heard about overtime work in other studios recently.
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