"For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies": The Witcher 3 lead on designing NPCs that react appropriately

"Left and right"

Gone are the days where a developer could give an NPC maybe two lines of dialogue and call it a day. The steady shift to realism essentially enforces the idea that characters must behave realistically, which is why whenever some kind of glitch or bug makes an NPC move about in an impossible manner it does numbers on Your Favourite Social Media App. And according to CD Projekt Red quest designer Philipp Weber, getting The Witcher 3's NPCs to react appropriately was a tad tricky.

"Because we were focused on the countryside, it was easier for players to become curious," Weber explains in an interview with GamesRadar. "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." He notes that these days, building out convincing NPCs in such a small village would be much easier, it was just the lack of experience in doing so at the time that was the tricky part.

For the most part, CD Projekt Red were focused on the day and night cycle as opposed to something like NPCs reacting to whatever you made Geralt do. One example that Weber offers is related to fear reactions, as in, say, you as Geralt start slicing and dicing, causing the NPCs to run and scream in fear. This came with an unintended consequence: mothers leaving their babies behind. "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right," Weber said.

He continued, "Most NPCs in villages, we don't give them specific paths. 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."

If you ask me, the women should have dropped their babies anyway and the sailors should have only had one spot to head to because I like it when a funny video appears on My Favourite Social Media App so I can forget about the horrors for 30-60 seconds!