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It's no secret that CD Projekt Red is working on a remake of The Witcher, the studio's first RPG centering around sword-wielding Geralt and his wild adventures as a monster killer – but it hasn't exactly been an easy road to go down for the studio.
GamesRadar+ recently had the opportunity to attend Digital Dragons, and it's during this event that lead technical writer Jarosław Ruciński goes over how difficult working on The Witcher remake has been – and it's all thanks to a lack of documentation from the production of the 2007 original.
"The true impact of our everyday documentation culture hit us in 2022 when we announced to the world that we want to make a Witcher remake," he begins.
"We were tasked to recreate the classic game for the modern audience, only to realize that we had little to no technical knowledge preserved from that time." CD Projekt Red did get a bit "lucky," as Ruciński puts it, since there are folks over at development partner Fool's Theory who are "veterans" and " remember the times of The Witcher 1," thankfully.
"That injection of this lost tribal knowledge was certainly uplifting, but even with their help, gaps exist." After all, "18 years does a lot to human memory," so it didn't fully tackle the issue.
"We find ourselves often doing professional guesswork, and sometimes [it] feels that we're trying to figure out a puzzle where half the pieces weren't even put in the box in the first place… the lesson from this era is quite obvious: some documentation is always better than none, and I personally would take the most horrible entangled chaotic mess of documentation over no documentation."
Ruciński explains, "You know you can spend time, you can spend some resources, and eventually figure out what the documentation was. If you don't have it, then you really have nothing. You can't really reverse engineer that."
In other words, some – any, really – documentation is better than none whatsoever. Taking the time to ensure you save some is the way to go, "because you're probably saving yourself a lot of trouble five years from now."
I mean, that checks out – I can't imagine that trying to recreate a game from the early 2000s with little to work with would be easy, but it's also not the first time that CD Projekt Red has had to deal with setbacks.
During the development of The Witcher 3, for example, there were plenty, with a lead recalling having to watch his work "fall apart in front of me" while creating what arguably now stands as one of the best RPGs to date.
Here's hoping that CD Projekt Red heeds Ruciński for future projects like The Witcher 4 – I'd like to think their preservation game is quite strong now, though.
