The Witcher 3 lead says designing for player curiosity 'really came to haunt us' when building village NPCs

Developing open-world games often comes with unexpected hurdles, particularly when players begin to inspect the smaller details of a simulated environment. In retrospective discussions about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red quest designer Philipp Weber opened up about the complexities of crafting believable non-player characters and how player curiosity presented unique design challenges during the RPG's production.

According to Weber, the team's focus on smaller countryside settlements naturally invited close inspection from players. In an interview with Edge Magazine, he explained that smaller environments make player scrutiny much sharper. "If a village only has eight houses, people will want to see if the people truly exist in the world or if it's just fakery," Weber said. "Lots of people nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us." He noted that while building out such a village today would take a fraction of the time, the studio's lack of prior experience with these specific systems at the time made it a tricky endeavor.

During early development, the studio prioritized establishing proper day and night cycles for inhabitants over intricate reactivity to sudden player actions. This division led to humorous and unintended bugs when the team implemented general fear reactions. When players began brandishing swords in peaceful areas, NPCs were programmed to drop whatever they were holding and flee in terror. Unfortunately, this blanket rule applied universally to all carrying items, leading to a memorable glitch where mothers holding infants would immediately discard them to run away. "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right," Weber recalled.

To solve population movement without relying on rigid, pre-determined tracking, developers utilized dynamic systems of interest points rather than strict paths. For instance, instead of assigning exact routes, NPCs were given available spots of interest to manage their own pathfinding, moving from woodcutting to tasks like carpentry outside their homes. Similarly, engineers created 200 possible spots for the 50 sailors stationed at the Novigrad harbor to ensure they always had viable options regardless of congestion.