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Just in terms of pure landmass, The Witcher 3 has always been an enormous game. Most titles aspire to the size and density of even one of its regions, such as the massive province of Velen that's unlocked shortly after completing the already sizable prologue in White Orchard. There's also tons of bodies of water throughout the game, and one day, that led to CD Projekt's joint CEO Adam Badowski apparently asking a brief, but complicated question, one which made its world even bigger – not to mention, deeper.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Badowski revealed that he once asked the team, "There's water, [but] where's swimming?" His logic seems pretty straightforward. If a world, such as the Northern Continent that figures heavily into the Witcher series, has lots of water, it makes sense that a player should be able to fully immerse themselves and swim across, as well as under it. How else are players meant to believe in the depth of the world that CD Projekt Red spent years making if Geralt crumples over and dies the second his big toe gets wet?
Evidently, the room went quiet after Badowski asked The Witcher 3's developers this question, likely because the team now had to wrestle with the proposal to add one of gaming's greatest taboos to the already titanic title.
According to Badowski, members of CD Projekt Red debated cutting features of the game (which thankfully did not come to fruition) and instead followed up fleshing out the game even more. In Badowski's own words, "If there's water, there's swimming, if there's swimming, there's diving, if there's diving, you have to build completely new locations."
In the end, the team saw to it, not only adding swimming as well as bits of combat against submersible foes like drowners, but new locations as well, such as caves, which could only be reached by swimming underwater. And the end result was a memorably deep world and a landmark RPG. All's well that ends well.
