The Witcher 3 is a masterclass of interwoven stories. Its main narrative and sidequests are seamlessly connected, the sidequests weaving outer strands of the game's double helix DNA. For The Witcher 3's tenth anniversary, we spent some time with the writers, directors, and quest designers behind one of the best RPGs ever made to find out what makes a good Witcher 3 quest.
One of the best side quests in the game is A Towerful of Mice, a story of tragic love, sacrifice and bad choices with parallels to Sleeping Beauty and the Polish legend of Popiel.
Pacing, characters, backstory and gameplay are the key pillars that CD Projekt Red's quest designers lose sleep over. After being given the high-level story from the directors, they look to find interesting ways for main character Geralt to get from A to B while adding some new letters of their own and telling unique stories within the world of The Witcher.
"It depends a bit on the quest," senior quest designer Joanna Radomska explained when asked how much direction the quest design team gets. "Sometimes we get more information, sometimes less. For example, for the Ladies of the Wood quest, we got info that Geralt is looking for Ciri and he has to find some information. There have to be the witches, but side characters like Johnny and the evil spirit in the tree are on the quest design side. Then the writers write dialogues like art and put life in all the scenes."
For A Towerful of Mice, a quest that was originally intended to be part of the main story but was later moved to a side quest to condense the plot, the quest team was told they needed to design a mission around a cursed tower, which would also clear the island ready for a later quest called Forefathers' Eve. The quest would also give more screen time to sorceress Keira Metz.
Metz tells Geralt that she's going to the island to lift a curse, but she's secretly looking for a biological weapon developed by a mage scientist to use as a bargaining chip with the witch hunters. What you find when you reach the island is a small landmass infested with monsters, with a large tower at the center. The building is reminiscent of the real-life Mouse Tower in Kruszwica, often incorrectly, but commonly, associated with the Polish legend of Popiel, a tale about a corrupt and cruel ruler who -- alongside his wife -- was eaten by a swarm of rodents.
When you enter the tower during the quest, it's infested with rats. Torches light up as you ascend, as if the tower were awaiting your arrival. Doors knock as you pass by, floorboards creak and spirits caught in the glow of your magic lantern replay their final moments as a subtle orchestral track throbs away in the background, building to something.
"[We wanted to keep players] in this horror mode when they are stressed and feel like there's danger and they don't know what exactly will happen," Radomska said. "To uncover the mystery of what happened on that island and learn the backstory from different perspectives, we [spaced out] the information so players aren't overwhelmed, but we also have some gameplay challenges with the monsters and the clues."
In the first incarnation of the quest, Geralt originally arrived on an island dominated by the tower and blanketed by fog. It felt dangerous, but it wasn't. Quest designers placed monsters around to keep the player engaged, using the fact that the tower is strewn with bodies to settle on: corpse-eating necrophages as the main enemies. To clarify that there was some kind of plague, Radomska also infected the land with bloodflies to foreshadow things Geralt would learn inside the tower.
"I wanted to divide it so that outside of the tower we have combat, and inside the tower, it should be more horror-like, but with this tension," Radomska explained. "Stuff is happening, but we are not being attacked by monsters. I implemented a lot of paranormal activities there, like the torches, some barrels that move around, and some things that fall. I played the quest over and over, and I was thinking, 'Okay, this is the moment when I could use some tension.'
"I remembered while playing another quest that there was this knocking on the door sound. So I thought it would be super cool if Geralt enters the trigger and then he hears that, and the player thinks someone is here on this island, in this tower, and I think even I opened the door a little bit with some creaking, and no one is there."
At one point, Radomska tried to make it so the pesta -- the plague maiden you fight toward the end -- attacks Geralt as he ascends the tower with ghostly arms groping at him from the walls, floor and ceiling, but constant action didn't work as well as the quiet tension she eventually landed on.
In the final version of the quest, Geralt communicates with Metz using a magical radio device called a xenovox -- a spell that only works one way. This, too, was a solution to pacing issues. Originally, Keira was standing at the moor point and Geralt had to keep returning to her for more information, creating a stop-and-start backtracking rhythm to the quest that dragged it out in a way that doesn't engage the player.
You can get away with a lot in a magical world. This isn't Earth, so if something requires a creative solution, the developer can do whatever it wants, as long as it fits the lore. The rats in the tower, for example, are scaled up to the size of house cats to make sure they're visible to the player from a third-person perspective.
"We used to have them in proper scale, but they were barely visible and didn't feel like a danger," Radomska laughed.
The rats are a central part of the story for A Towerful of Mice, so making sure they appear threatening was key. The plague maiden you face at the end is the ghost of a woman who drank a potion to kill herself instead of being murdered by the peasants attacking the tower. Unfortunately, the "poison" was a strong sedative, so while the peasants left her alone, she woke up with her body paralysed, being eaten alive by the rats who saw her as another corpse among the slain.
"I think it was maybe my idea to add this Romeo and Juliet vibe into the story, so it's a little bit more relatable than Popiel, which is just a ruler and his peasants attacking him," Radomska explained. "Because we also had this topic of the plague, it all came together that we have this girl who died, there was this plague, and we have this curse, so she probably ended up as a ghost, and this is how we get the plague maiden."
Where and when ideas originated ten years after the fact is hard to definitively say because quests are such a collaborative process at CDPR. Daily calls, meetings, and emails across all departments exchange ideas and give feedback, making sure everything ties together and is meaningful. Such a complex web of interwoven quests and every department -- from art to writing to quest design and level design -- is complicated enough, but CDPR had to change its whole mindset for The Witcher 3, its first open world game.
"At first, there was a huge part of this quest where I wanted to make the lake impossible to go through to the island," Radomska remembered. "So we had this big part that we had to go to the woodcutter and the boat maker, get him some special wood that would have some super properties, being very durable, and we had to go to the witch's swamps. Back then, there was no evil heart in the tree. Instead, there was this ghost of a druid, and she was saying, 'Okay, you will be able to take a sapling, but you have to fix some trees in the bad witch swamps.'
"When I was reading that, it was like, 'Oh, my God, such s---.' We had this super fetch quest of getting wood to make a boat and go to the island. I think it was also connected to the Witcher 2 thinking, because at some point, we switched to the open world thinking. We were still in this mindset that we could block players with the environment."
Eventually, Radomska realized fetching wood wasn't the most exciting thing a player could be doing, so they decided to localize all the challenges and story around the island and tower itself, ensuring most players play it through in one sitting and don't lose the thread. Plus, if open-world games have taught us anything, players would have found a way to get to the island early, whether the developers wanted them to or not.
These kinds of decisions are what make The Witcher 3 one of the best RPGs of all time. From the size of the mice to the journey to the tower, every single step of the journey is iterated and adjusted until each minute of gameplay conveys the specific feeling the developers want. Bad ideas are tossed out and new ideas welcomed in, and every part of it informs something new about the characters, the world, or your own decisions in it -- even if there's no such thing as a happy ending in the world of The Witcher.