CD Projekt joint CEO Adam Badowski made everyone's life miserable when he pointed out if the The Witcher 3 had water, they had to add swimming and create completely new underwater locations

One of my fondest memories of playing The Witcher 3 was when I came home slightly inebriated with a friend and I thought it would be fun to try playing the game with each of us managing one half of the controls.

Within five minutes, I died by stumbling off a bridge that was barely a few feet off the ground and fell into the world's most shallow river. If only I'd fallen into literally any of the massive bodies of water available, I would have survived. And it would have all been thanks to CD Projekt's joint CEO Adam Badowski.

"I remember the moment when I asked a very difficult question [that felt] obvious to me," explains Badowski, "there's water, [but] where's swimming? The whole room was quiet." The team's main concern was that "they thought we'd need to cut something, so we didn't need to have swimming". Thankfully this wasn't the case.

Swimming is often quite a contentious mechanic, you either loathe it or deal with it, and I personally think it's only truly enjoyable when it's a game's sole focus like in Abzu. But, if there's accessible water and you die by dipping a toe in, that can be equally frustrating and pull you out of the experience. For Badowski, it was this "question of immersion" propelling ideas forward: "If there's water, there's swimming, if there's swimming, there's diving, if there's diving, you have to build completely new locations. And [the team] were like, that's the logic! Sometimes [as developers] we simply forget that [logic]."

Badowski explains that certain mechanics seem really obvious when creating a game, such as the classic 'game over', but he points out how GTA adds another layer to this because you don't just perish from obstacles in the open world, you also 'die' if you fail a mission—feeding into how that world works. "Here there are so many consequences and you have to [complete] every quest thinking about so many combinations because players can do whatever they want."

For Badowski, it's these consequential and seemingly innocuous aspects—including the ability to swim—that allow you to immerse yourself in an open world: "Sometimes there are quests limited by the location that's designed [in a] way that gives you this feeling of control. But for most of them, it's in an open world. So this little fact has so many consequences and production is really complex."

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