The Witcher remake developer Fool's Theory is working on under the supervision of CD Projekt Red is going to be open-world, like the fantasy series' more recent installment, The Witcher 3. But, according to the original 2007 game's lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec, it shouldn't be.
Ganszyniec tells Polish website Chip in an interview GamesRadar+ translated with DeepL and Google that converting The Witcher to a spacious open world would make it so "the pace and scale of the entire project would change immediately." He has this nagging theory that more land requires more content – and if you're like me and have played through expansive open worlds like in Shadow of the Erdtree and sighed a spoiled sigh at all the empty plains, you know he's right.
To Ganszyniec, the original Witcher is made more powerful by its snappy narrative and deliberate pacing. "We knew exactly where the player would be," he says, so CD Projekt Red developers could plan environments and cutscenes with a surgeon's intuition. But in an open-world version of the game, Ganszyniec muses, a player could instead grab something like a boat on Lake Vizima and just glide through its fifth act with no regard at all for the 2007 game's ruined old manor and carefully planned challenges.
If that were the case, I wonder if it would even really feel like you were still playing The Witcher 1. And if not, then a 20-year-old game might lose its value in most ways other than as a ploy to sell more copies.
"At some point, a pragmatic question must be asked: when does this multiplication of paths cease to be profitable?" Ganszyniec wonders. "You can invest an infinite amount of time and budget, but will it generate an infinite number of new players?"
In any case, The Witcher remake is going to be open-world. But Ganszyniec's questions are worth sitting with as the video game industry continues to decide if it still values preservation of the past on its journey of wanting infinitely more.
