The Witcher 3 didn't originally make you choose between romancing Yennefer or Triss: 'This decision was made pretty late'

(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)

Adam Badowski, joint CEO of CD Projekt Red, doesn't look back fondly on the collectible-card romance options in The Witcher 1. "It was childish in the beginning," he says when the topic comes up. He's much more pleased with how things turned out in The Witcher 3, which did justice to what he calls "the emotional aspects of the characters from the books."

After two games in which Yennefer is barely mentioned and relegated to flashbacks, she drops into The Witcher 3 like a bomb to upset the cozy relationship you probably built with Triss in the second game. The ex Geralt never properly ended things with, and the canon love interest as book readers will tell you (it's me, I'm book readers), she complicates Geralt's love life and forces him to belatedly grow up—which feels thematically appropriate, as he retakes his place as Ciri's father figure over the course of the game.

Yet that element wasn't always part of The Witcher 3. As Badowski says, "It wasn't [there] from the beginning, but at some point we understood that this lack of kind of conflict, personal conflict—of course, there's Ciri—but there was a lack of something." As soon as someone suggested the idea of making players choose between Triss and Yennefer, they realized this was what had been missing. "This decision was made pretty late," he says, "but it was great. It was a great decision."

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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