CD Projekt Red admitted it included quite a few highlights in The Witcher 3: Skellig’s map for Wild Hunt, but also explained why it filled in so many question marks on the screen in the first place.
talking while Developer 20th Anniversary FlowWitcher 4 campaign manager Philip Webber, who was a junior mission designer at the time, said that the various smugglers’ hideouts—underwater chests scattered in dozens throughout Skellig’s oceans—were not actually presented as points of interest at all.
Given the exceptional size of The Witcher 3’s map, CD Projekt decided it needed something more than questions upon questions to fill out.
“I can freely admit that I am one of those people who have really put these question marks in the world,” Webber said. “It was already late 2014, so it wasn’t long before the release [in May 2015] When we filled the world with it.
“There wasn’t a lot of time so it was quite a bit, ‘Well we just have to do it and we can’t do it perfectly,'” he continued. Yet I have a defense.” “I’ve done a lot of these terrible–I can say horrible because I did–smugglers’ hideouts. But originally, we put them in the world, we put some seagulls on top of them so you could see them spin, but it wasn’t that you planned to actually have an icon on the map.”
Instead, Webber explained, smugglers’ hideouts were intended to be fun that players would encounter randomly, rather than somehow collectible that would take hours to complete.
“I totally agree that was a mistake,” he laughed. “I will never do that again.”
It looks like the upcoming Witcher game won’t have as many question marks on its map, at least not like many of the daunting question marks. It’ll be a while before we find out, as The Witcher 4 (for lack of an official name) only entered pre-production in May, so it’s likely years away.
CD Projekt Red only revealed one teaser image for the game, but one tiny little thing still sparks many fan theories. CD Projekt later confirmed that the photo featured a Lynx medal, but whether or not the Witcher School was new is still being debated.
We don’t know much about the game, other than CD Projekt Red who partnered with Epic Games to build it in Unreal Engine 5 and that its director has promised there won’t be a crisis on his watch.
Ryan Dinsdale is a freelance translator at IGN. He’ll be talking about The Witcher all day long.
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