The first script for The Witcher 3's best quest was 40 pages long before a single line of dialog was even added

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The Bloody Baron was quest designer Paweł Sasko's first job on the RPG

The Witcher 3
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)

If there's a safe choice for the best quest in The Witcher 3, it's probably the Bloody Baron storyline, a dark, harrowing, morally nebulous about a local lord meeting the consequences of his own domestic abuse. This was, in fact, the first thing that quest designer Paweł Sasko built for The Witcher 3, and it already had a massive script before the dialog was even added.

"Family Matters, Bloody Baron’s story, was the first quest I designed for The Witcher 3, on outline by Marcin Blacha," Sasko says in Twitter thread reminiscing over his time at CD Projekt Red. "First script was ~40 pages long, just the plot, no dialogs yet. Used Slavic folktales about botchling and lubberkin to enrich quest about domestic violence."

"La Cage au Fou, the story of Marlene de Trastamara, a wight cursed by hunger, tackles issue of eating disorder in The Witcher dressing," Sasko says in a follow-up tweet. "She’s trapped in a cycle of emptiness, and Geralt’s only way to break the curse is to sit down and share a meal with her."

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.