The Witcher 4’s narrative director cut his teeth at CD Projekt Red by throwing quest ideas into a Witcher 3 Google Document for literal days, but it wasn’t dull work – it was just an extension of the studio’s “scrappy” energy at the time.
Philipp Weber’s first “professional” job was as a quest designer on The Witcher 3, the game that made CDPR a household name globally, after a background of modding the older Witcher games for fun. (Talk about manifestation.) But in a recent chat with GamesRadar+ about the RPG’s 10th anniversary, Weber revealed that things weren’t as rigid as you might expect from a developer so big.
“I came in with super high motivation, loving the Witcher,” he said, explaining that CDPR has a habit of hiring modders like himself. “I think the secret behind The Witcher 3 was that I wasn’t an exception – that was the case for so many people.”
You see, at the time, CDPR employed around 160 people and the energy was quite “scrappy.” So, Weber’s first task was simply to open a GDoc, brainstorm ideas, and then chuck whatever potential quests he could think of into the document. It was admittedly “a little bit vibe-based.”
“Do it immediately, do it fast, do it dirty,” he said of the studio’s winning philosophy, which starts with random ideas in a GDoc and ends with detailed side quests littered all around a fantasy world. “We check it and start iterating […] we keep that iteration going until the end – we’re never happy with the result until it’s too late and the game has to be out.”
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