The Witcher 3 was, you may have heard, a large game. But it was once an even larger game. When it was still cooking over at CD Projekt Red, dev brains bubbled over with designs for questlines, cutscenes, and all sorts of other stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor before it released. Naturally, when I visited the studio for The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, I asked for all the deets on the stuff we never got to see.
Like, for instance, that one quest where Geralt would have actually joined the Wild Hunt, signing up as a rider in Eredin's army. "The biggest changes were probably regarding the Wild Hunt," says Witcher 3 lead writer Marcin Blacha, "Geralt became kind of like an insider in the Wild Hunt… and he was sailing on the Naglfar—this ship that the Wild Hunt sails—and there were some quests with the riders of the Wild Hunt, and Geralt was one of them, and he was doing stuff pretending to be one of them."
This earlier, Hunt-heavy (or heavier) version of the game had a very different ending in mind, too: one that drew direct inspiration from Mass Effect 2, then a relatively recent game. "Mass Effect 2 was a huge inspiration for the game," says Blacha, "and even initially, we had an ending that was kind of inspired by Mass Effect 2… that moment when Geralt gathers a party and goes on a suicide mission.
"It was on a Skellige drakkar you were sailing into a frozen sea, and you were supposed to fight the Wild Hunt on this drakkar." That's not a million miles off from the endgame we got, which saw Geralt face-off with Eredin on a ship stuck in a—you guessed it—frozen sea, but it wasn't quite a full-on ME2-style suicide mission. You weren't sending Ciri into the vents or selecting Yennefer to lead a second squad of battle-hardened vets. "We redesigned it a little bit, and we decided to make this more personal ending."
And so we got a game that was a little less about Geralt vs the Hunt and a little more about Geralt and his relationships with Ciri, Yenn, and Triss. A change for the better, I reckon.
Other parts of the game couldn't escape the gaze of the editor, either. Blood and Wine, the game's second and final DLC, once had a lengthy quest revolving around a hapless stableboy who pilfered a dead knight's armour and looned off to have adventures of his own. "I blame myself for it being cut out," says Witcher 3 writer Tomasz Marchewka, "it was because of the lack of craftsmanship."
It would have gone like this: an old knight forgot to take his meds, eventually meeting his end at the hands of a heart attack. A stable boy—Egg—would have found the body, and nicked the armour in the hopes of impressing some damsel or another. Off he goes to fight a monster, wearing armour that's far too heavy for him, discarding piece after piece until eventually he's standing, naked but for a sword, before a monster he never would have had a shot at killing anyway.
"So we were saving him," says Marchewka. "But it all fell apart when you saved Egg and came back to the village… because he stole [a knight's] armour, he was lynched and killed by the people in the village." Which is a very Witcher-y tale, sure, and makes sense as the kind of twist CDPR would come up with on Blood and Wine's themes of knightly chivalry and fairytale endings.
What makes less sense is a version of the DLC that would have taken out the 'blood' part of Blood and Wine—an expansion completely free of vampires. "[There were] a number of versions along the road," recalls Marchewka.
"For example, Regis—he was in and out. We had versions with Regis and without Regis." Which makes a degree of sense: Geralt's higher vampire pal Regis met a sticky end in Sapkowski's books, so bringing him back to life was a bit of fan-service on the part of CDPR. There were also versions with no Detlaff—the DLC's rogue vamp antagonist—and, apparently, "a version without vampires.
"But for a very short time," Marchewka stresses. I have to admit, I have no idea what that would even look like, given how integral vampires are to both Blood and Wine as a released DLC and to the project's original pitch: per Marchewka, when he was introduced to the project, the two bulletpoints were that it was gonna be big and it was gonna be about vampires.
Alas, Marchewka is loath to chat about that bloodless iteration of Blood and Wine, demurring with a quick "Well, let's not talk about it" when I press for details. Still, you have to wonder what The Witcher 3 would have looked like had all these ideas made it in. A lot messier and probably worse, I'd say. But man, what I'd give to know what a vampire-free vampire DLC looked like.
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