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The Witcher 3 devs debated for so long over how naked Geralt should be in the RPG's opening bathtub scene that it became one of the longest email threads in the company's history.
In a new video continuing The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary celebrations, narrative director Philip Weber says "I don't know if it's appropriate to talk about it, but one of the longest email threads in our company history was about the question [of] how naked Geralt should be in his bath scene? 'When he gets up, how much butt should we show?'"
It might seem puerile, but it's actually a more important question than you might think. This is the scene that The Witcher 3 opens on, after all, and CD Projekt had grand ambitions for its game. Literally everyone who loads up the RPG sees the cutscene, so they couldn't be offering up gratuitous Witcher-cheeks.
"In the end," Weber says, "I think we chose a good middle-point," which I'm not going to make the obvious joke about. "We showed nudity in a kind of European way," he explains - something that would appear later on in the game, during Ciri's time in the sauna.
That bathtub scene gives way to the game's first romantic moment, which animation director Maciej Pietras pointed to as "the most difficult thing you can do," partly because there had not been "much kissing in video games" before The Witcher series came along.
Whether you're personally in favor of the Yennefer-centric kiss or not, it's undeniable that Bathtub Geralt has become one of the most iconic scenes in one of the world's most iconic RPGs - so iconic, in fact, that Netflix's The Witcher series was perfectly happy to repeat it multiple times. Though maybe that's just what you do when you've got Henry Cavill in a leading role - and maybe we'll get to see it in The Witcher 4, too.
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