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Between The Witcher 3's Skellige isles and the Trial of the Grasses, it's hard to say which caused Geralt more pain. The area is notorious among completionists for being both incredibly dense and remarkably fruitless – packed with question marks to hunt down to tidy up the map, including a lot in the freakin' sea, but not overflowing with interesting or valuable stuff to find.
Paweł Sasko, a CD Projekt Red veteran now known as associate game director of Cyberpunk 2 and previously as lead quest designer on Cyberpunk 2077, has been with CDPR since its Witcher 3 days. Back then, he was also working as a quest designer, albeit more junior. Sasko waded into a recent discussion among Polish fans chatting about Skellige, and I honestly can't tell if he's joking in his response.
A DeepL translation of a recent Twitter post reads, "Couldn't they have crammed even more question marks into Skellige?" Which is kind of like asking, couldn't they have put more sodium in this pork ramen broth?
Sasko pulled no punches in his reply. "We tried," a translation reads, "but it was no use." A separate machine translation differs slightly: "We tried, but it was no longer possible." Either way, this is a frightening read.
The thing is, Sasko is very active in the CDPR community, regularly replying to fans online when they share stories, criticism, questions, or jokes about The Witcher or Cyberpunk. His responses are a mix of interesting trivia and dev insights, and blatant but good-natured trolling. Gun to my head, I couldn't tell you where this answer falls. I would readily believe that CDPR tried to pack more bullshit into Skellige but feasibly could not, and the evidence is plain as day: they made Skellige. Once you've put 10,000 question marks in the ass end of nowhere, what's 10,001? The point where even the game engine starts to lose it, perhaps.
