CD Projekt Red Admits The Witcher 3 Overused Geralt's Witcher Senses

Summary

ACD Projekt Reddeveloper has admitted that the team “overused” Geralt’s Detective-Mode-esque Witcher Senses inThe Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, while pointing out that it was at least novel for its time.

The Witcher 3 is largely (and correctly) considered to be one of the best RPGs of all time, standing next to giants likeMass Effect,Dragon Age, and, more recently,Baldur’s Gate 3. As great as it is, though,it’s not a perfect game and certainly does have its problems. I don’t tend to agree with the complaints about its combat systems,but one hill I will die on is that The Wild Hunt really overuses Geralt’s Witcher Senses.

For those that mercifully don’t remember, The Witcher 3 lets players tap into Geralt’s aptly named “Witcher Senses” to follow clues left around the environment and work towards finding monsters, people, and everything in between.It was basically just the Detective Mode from the Batman: Arkham games, but felt way less intuitive and was generally considered a nuisance whenever it popped up - which it did often.

CD Projekt Red Knows It Overused Geralt’s Witcher Senses In The Witcher 3

As reported by GamesRadar+, CD Projekt Red’s Paweł Sasko, who is now working on Project Orion,recently spoke to Flow Games and admitted that CD Projekt Red “overused” the Witcher Senses mechanics. Sasko revealed that the team thought the mechanic was fresh at the time due to it being worked on in 2012, when only one Batman Arkham game had released.

Sasko acknowledged that players find the mechanic to be a bit stale now, but that when The Witcher 3 was in development, it had barely been in any other games and wasn’t at the point of being overused, leading the team to think it was a “great way to do” those clue-based missions. Even with that defence, Sasko admits that the team took it a little far and had “overcooked” it.

“But at the time it was really fresh, it was something different. And when we were doing it in 2012, we felt it was a great way to do it. Then we did Witcher 3 with it, and one of our conclusions was, ok, we’ve kind of overdone it, we’ve kind of overcooked it.”

This initial overuse in the base game did end up actually inspiring CD Projekt Red to change how it was doing things as,when it came to Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, it knew that it had to change things up a bit. This led Sasko and the team to purposefully implement clues more “consciously” and not just have a string of them that are found through Witcher Senses.

So even if you found the mechanic to be a bit of a pain in The Witcher 3’s base game, it’s worth noting that it did at least lead to better things, and seems to be something that CD Projekt Red isn’t keen on repeating in the future.Let’s hope The Witcher 4 continues that positive trend.