CD Projekt Red developers almost painted themselves into a corner early on in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's production since the team were more focused on giving NPCs believable schedules instead of making sure they reacted to the player appropriately, which led to situations where mothers would chuck their babies on the floor at the first sign of trouble.
CD Projekt Red quest designer Philipp Weber described the earlier parts of the open-world game's development in the latest issue of Edge Magazine. "Because we were focused on the countryside, it was easier for players to become curious," he explains. "If a village only has eight houses, people will want to see if the people truly exist in the world or if it's just fakery. Lots of people nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us."
Creating the framework for how NPCs should convincingly behave and react is now much easier for CDPR, but in and around 2012, that was a different story. "Today, if you said 'give me a Witcher 3 village that has eight houses', I could give you that in two hours," Weber says.
At the time, The Witcher 3 studio was "more focused on simulating their proper day and night cycle" and "when it came to actually reacting to the player there wasn't that much detail."
A big is example was NPC's fear reactions. In most open-world games, if you start swinging a sword in a docile village or shooting a gun in the air in Night City, civilians normally drop whatever mundane task they're carrying out and understandably run for their lives. The Witcher 3's villagers were programmed to do the same thing, but that also meant mothers in the game would let their newborns fend for themselves: "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right."
"Most NPCs in villages, we don't give them specific paths," Weber adds. "We give them spots of interest that are available and then they're the ones doing the pathfinding: 'Once I'm done with woodcutting, I'll choose another point, and maybe do carpentry in front of my house'. For the 50 sailors at Novigrad harbour, for example, we made 200 possible spots, so even if all 50 were active at the same time, they would have options."
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