The Witcher 3 devs "toyed with" a system that would have prevented Geralt from swimming - unless he took all his armor off first.
As CD Projekt Red continues to celebrate The Witcher 3's tenth anniversary, the studio revealed an idea that seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor pretty early in development. "We toyed with the idea of a mechanic where Geralt would drown if he entered the water fully geared up," the studio said in a tweet.
If you did want to swim, Geralt would "have to strip down and leave his armor and weapons on the shore." Finishing up by pondering what the community might have thought of the idea, CDPR asked, "Immersive or just a bit too realistic?"
During development, we toyed with the idea of a mechanic where Geralt would drown if he entered the water fully geared up. To swim, he’d have to strip down and leave his armor and weapons on the shore. 🌊Immersive or just a bit too realistic?#10YearsofTheWitcher3 pic.twitter.com/J3j6Sk6E7QMay 31, 2025
I'd say the answer is almost certainly the latter - if this concept didn't make it past the team 'toying with the idea of' it, then I'd posit that the devs themselves didn't particularly like the mechanic. While I can see it working for quick dips to fetch a cache in a shallow river, it would quickly become tedious when going any further afield. And how would it work for deep-sea exploration, or quests that involved Geralt disappearing underwater for minutes at a time?
Amusingly, there's some degree of historical precedent for this particular idea. Some accounts of the death of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the end of the 12th century AD claim that, exhausted from a long ride, he stepped into a river to cool off - in full armor. Weighed down, he's said to have drowned, in a pretty ignominious fate for an Emperor.
Whether or not Barbarossa's death actually went down exactly like that is lost to history, but suffice to say that it doesn't seem like the world's most entertaining gameplay mechanic, and I think I'm glad CDPR dropped it when they did - if only so it doesn't show up in The Witcher 4.
