The Witcher 1 Dev Has Some Concerns About The Remake

It's really hard to put into words why I like the first Witcher game so much. The dead-eyed, uncanny NPCs create an almost liminal horror at points—especially when you're just trying to meet with Shani at night and have to contend with her monstrous old landlady. Then there's the frustrating, almost rhythm-like combat, and a story completely detached from the fundamentals, leaving an amnesiac Geralt roped into a wholly different love triangle without a single mention of Yennefer. And yet, there's something incredibly compelling about this scrap-bucket development, capturing an early CD Projekt Red desperately trying to compete with the RPG greats.

So, when the remake was announced, I was a little skeptical. There's a distinct mid-2000s charm to The Witcher that is almost impossible to recapture without alienating all the new fans that The Witcher 3 brought in. And that's not even mentioning the dated aspects of the original, like Geralt hoarding nudes of the women he slept with, treating romance like some skeevy, Vizima-themed trading card game. Still, Fool's Theory is giving the remake an honest Kaer Morhen try, and lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec has a few concerns—and a few crucial words of advice—on what needs to change.

"With all due respect to the work of everyone involved, but in some aspects, it was basically a modding effort," Ganszyniec said in an interview with Mateusz Łysoń (via Game Observer). "We were a group of enthusiasts fighting against an engine in hopes of squeezing something new, something we wanted to create out of it, something for which we did not have a big budget."

Should The Witcher Remake Go Open-World?

As much as I love The Witcher 2—easily my favorite in the series, thanks in part to that stellar opening and the branching paths with Iorveth and Roche—it's undeniable that The Witcher 3 feels far closer to what CD Projekt Red was originally striving for. Ganszyniec himself admitted that the third entry was "spiritually closer to The Witcher we would have made if we had the time, money, technology, and skills"—instead, they had the Aurora engine and a dream. However, revisiting the 2007 cult classic all these years later, Ganszyniec isn't sure that making it more like The Witcher 3 would be the right approach for Fool's Theory.

"If we opened the locations up, there would be more space, and if there's more space, there needs to be more content," he explained. "Immediately, the tempo and the scale of the project would be shifted. In The Witcher, many things worked because we knew exactly where the player would be at any given time. We could set up a trigger, fire up a scene, and make it so Alvin appears between the fields and the village. In an open world, we'd have to approach that completely differently."

Ganszyniec uses the fifth act as an example of where the cracks in an open-world would start to show. The map revolves around Lake Vizima, and if it's open world, couldn't the player simply grab a boat from the outskirts of Vizima and head directly towards the old manor? "It might be exciting from the point of view of a player, but as a designer I can already feel my hair turning gray," he said.

In so many words, if Fool's Theory wants to make The Witcher remake more like The Witcher 3, it ceases to be a remake—instead, it's a far more ambitious reimagining. One that Ganszyniec argued would not be pragmatic. "When does this proliferation of paths cease to be worthwhile? You can pour an infinite amount of time and money into it, but will it bring an infinite number of new players? At a certain point, the cost and the return begin to diverge."

Where the remake should change, Ganszyniec suggests removing the infamous romance cards, overhauling the combat, and improving the level design. Though he stands by the amnesiac storyline, which not only helped the team keep the scope to a manageable level, but made the game an easier jumping on point for newcomers who hadn't read the books preceding it. Geralt's lack of knowledge regarding Yennefer and Ciri might be jarring to returning fans, but it could equally make the first game the perfect introduction for newcomers in the future, easing them into The Witcher 3 and eventually The Witcher 4.

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