Before The Witcher 3 came two predecessors from CD Projekt Red: The Witcher 2 and the series original RPG – an RPG that features one heck of a, erm, unique romance system.
In case you've never played the first Witcher game, the 2007 gem boasts a certain set of cards you can collect that act as… well, sex trophies, basically.
While more modern genre giants like Baldur's Gate 3 have elaborate romantic cutscenes (many of which are indeed NSFW), The Witcher had these romance cards instead – little pieces of art that, much to many fans' dismay, arguably felt a bit shallow in substance.
According to lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec, however, CD Projekt Red opted for the cards because the developers knew they needed romance – The Witcher books do feature romance, after all – but didn't have the resources or ability to create full-blown, lengthy love arcs or animated cutscenes.
He recalls as much in an interview with CHIP (as translated by GameObserver), admitting he's not 100% sure how it all went down.
"Sometimes a feature appears as a result of someone going: in the books, there's lots of romance, so we'll probably need romance, too. Someone creates a list of characters; someone else looks at it productively and says: 'There's no way we're making so many cutscenes.' Then comes the question: 'if the cutscenes are a problem, what do we do? Maybe 2D drawings?'"
That might just be the origin story of the infamous "sex cards," as they're widely known.
"I don't know if that's the exact way it happened," Ganszyniec continues, "but that's how it could have happened. Everyone's responsible for finding solutions to their own problems, and suddenly something's in the game. When something's already made it into a version, it's difficult to remove it."
And, yep – "sometimes it worked as a shortcut." When you have cards instead of scenes, you "understand that it's meant to represent just part of a longer story."
Plus, as the dev puts it, "thanks to the fact that The Witcher was indeterminate and full of shortcuts, the player accepted it." That makes sense, I suppose – and, well, for the most part, folks did.
That's not to say the cards are popular, but it's not as though they soiled The Witcher's reputation. CD Projekt Red worked with the resources it had at the time, and Ganszyniec isn't "ashamed" of the romance cards despite their reception.
"Some of these moments ended up being absurd," though, and he's not afraid to admit as much. "It's just that sometimes you fail to write something good enough – then, you play the game, you read the dialogue, and you see: this did not work." Hey, it happens… right?
Here's hoping The Witcher 4 features a more, uh, immersive romance system, as CD Projekt Red has said it'll "absolutely" be a part of the RPG.
Excited to see more upcoming CD Projekt Red games come to fruition? Browse through our roundup for other great new games arriving this year and beyond, too.
