The whole reason The Witcher 2 goes off in a decidedly more political direction is because someone high up at developer CD Projekt Red wanted the first Witcher to have one more final ending cutscene and chose to have one made without much involvement from the studio's narrative team, according to original lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec.
Ganszyniec recently wrapped up his first playthrough of the original Witcher in about 20 years on YouTube, a 26-video series that yielded all sorts of interesting development insights, and the latest video sheds new light on how the game's final cutscene came to be.
We usually wouldn't do spoiler warnings for nearly 20-year-old games, but because there's a remake of the first game happening, it's worth confirming that we are about to discuss pretty big story details from the end of The Witcher 1 through the beginning of The Witcher 2. If you want to dive into the series completely fresh, maybe turn back.
"That's where we wanted the game to end, like with an open question and open future. But while we were finishing the game, someone decided, like the board decided or [Michał Kiciński, CD Projekt Red co-founder], that we needed an animated outro of the game," said Ganszyniec.
Based on the fantasy novel series of the same name by Andrzej Sapkowsk, The Witcher series has always had political intrigue bubbling beneath the surface from the first game, but it wasn't a driving force for the plot until the second game, when Geralt is framed for regicide. Apparently, the final scene of The Witcher 1 where Geralt fights off Foltest's would-be assassin wasn't the intended original ending, and set the story off on a completely different course that's much less intimate than the first game.
"The script for what we are seeing now, for this animation, it was created not really involving the story team. So we weren't really paying attention and that was a mistake, I think. Because this animation tells a different story than the outro pictures, because Geralt is still in Vizima, and he's deep, deep into a political intrigue because someone is trying to kill Foltest," said Ganszyniec.
"There's someone, as you will see, is a Witcher, and soon after that it became evident that the next game will have to follow up on this and tell a story about Witchers who are killing kings for some reason. And that's why the second Witcher is very political, and there's not really room for exploring who Geralt is, his family, his history, and stuff like this."
The Witcher remake was announced back in 2022 as a full-blown, ground-up redoing of the first game in the series, being made in Unreal Engine 5 by external studio Fool's Theory, which has previously provided development support for RPG greats like Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2. There's no release date just yet.
Meanwhile, here's everything we know about The Witcher 4.
