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Some of the best Easter eggs in The Witcher 3 and/or Cyberpunk 2077 apparently haven't been found yet, according to CDPR narrative lead Marcin Blacha.
Blacha discussed CDPR's approach to Easter eggs in a recent podcast featuring some fellow devs. He was story director on Cyberpunk 2077 and lead writer on The Witcher 3, and has been with CDPR in some sort of writing role since the original Witcher.
Game director Sebastian Kalemba, currently working on The Witcher 4 Polaris, asks Blacha about how Easter eggs come about in development (around 41 minutes in), and the story director explains that, "if we're talking about Easter eggs and all those tiny, funny things in the game, the thing is that you cannot really plan it. It's not like we have a list of Easter eggs and we make them.
"Let's say you're making a game and it's, like, the fourth year. You are really tired and then you have this idea and you cannot stop yourself from making it. That's how Easter eggs in our games start. Sometimes this idea is so good that some other people join you and something spectacular emerges.
"To be honest, my favorite of those tiny little funny things, those Easter eggs, are still a secret," he teases. "As far as I know, they are not discovered yet. They're really, really tough to discover, so I won't talk about them."
Even more tantalizingly, Blacha doesn't specify which franchise he's referring to here. Given his history with CDPR, these overlooked Easter eggs could be hiding in Cyberpunk 2077 or any of The Witcher games for all we know. I would wager it's either The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077, but even that is just an assumption.
Co-story director Tomasz Marchewka weighs in to say he can actually be bothered by Easter eggs as a player, and while he agrees there's a time and place for them, he reckons it's possible for them to get out of hand and immersion-breaking. This prompts Blacha to explain his reasoning. He reckons "it's a way for the developers to directly connect with the player, and not through the game, through the story in our case, but by something more personal.
"Let's say I like Doctor Who and I make a Doctor Who Easter egg in the game. It is something from my heart to the players. Some of them won't like it, that's obvious, but some of them will, and that's like a personal connection."
I'll tell you who's not gonna find these Easter eggs: The Witcher author Andreszj Sapkowski, who hasn't played the RPGs that cemented his fame.
