There were so many ideas early on for The Witcher 3 that it very nearly became two games.
The story's core was nailed early on, and had the goal of bringing Yennefer and Ciri in where they had been excluded before. And it was to be more personal and less political, the lead writer Marcin Blacha tells me. "We wanted to make a game about a disabled family," he says in his low, ponderous voice. "There is Geralt and Yennefer and Ciri, and they're not like usual people, but they love each other. It's difficult love, but they do. We wanted to make an epic story about a family."
But around that were wrapped so many layers that things soon got out of hand. For instance, there were once more islands in Skellige, including one called the Isle of Trials, where you'd be imprisoned by none other than Yennefer. Blacha explains: "There was this moment when they had different goals and Yennefer made a trap for Geralt - I don't remember exactly what, it was something connected to Ciri - to imprison [him] for some time. She made Geralt a prisoner on that island, and Geralt had to escape from this island." Either you could escape by taking the eponymous trials of the island, or you could face off against a monster called Nidhogg (a name borrowed from Norse mythology, suggesting the monster was a gigantic snake of a beast).
A more ambitious idea still, and one that got fairly far down the road, was Geralt joining the game's titular Wild Hunt - the villainous force. "It's a very complicated story," Blacha begins, "but Geralt was an insider. He was joining the Wild Hunt because he was looking for something, he needed to find Ciri. We had this part where he was sailing on this Naglfar, this ship made of human nails, and he had some adventures on some islands and it was full of conspiracy. We even had dialogue trees written, and these dialogue trees were sensitive to what players say to Wild Hunters. Every time you gave a bad answer for a question, or when something was breaking your cover, the conspiracy ended."
Lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, Konrad's brother, expands: "You were supposed to disguise yourself as one of the Wild Hunt riders and spend some time with them. It was basically some illusion or spell that made you look like one of them and speak like one of them."
It couldn't all possibly fit in one game. "There were too many characters," Adam Badowski says, "there were too many different super-complicated story plots like those elves, The Wild Hunt. For a while we thought The Witcher 3 would be that big we have to split it into two parts, so [the series] won't be a trilogy - and the plan had always been to do a trilogy. We were very close. But I wanted to have a trilogy. A trilogy is cool, a trilogy looks good! It doesn't look like another... Assassin's Creed game. It was our initial concept - and we need to be in line with our previous decisions."
