CD Projekt Red has a reputation for making special games. The Witcher 3, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, is still frequently cited as one of, if not the best, RPG ever made. Meanwhile, Cyberpunk 2077 has (thanks to some substantial upgrades) blossomed into one of the deepest, most robust examples of open-world roleplaying. These two games alone have made the studio one of the most famous and respected in the world, not to mention its other, equally fascinating releases. But what is it that CD Projekt Red does that makes its games stand apart from their peers?
While there are many elements that come together to ensure a CDPR game’s quality, it’s how the smaller pieces connect to create a coherent and convincing whole that really makes these RPGs sing. The authenticity of that whole is achieved through the story, world, and characters shifting and changing based on your choices. It’s a template that many RPG developers use, but few have succeeded in their ambitions in quite the same way as CDPR has.
“When I play other triple-A RPGs or RPG adjacent games, I very often can feel the limitations of their tools,” says Patrick Mills, CD Projekt Red’s franchise content strategy lead. “You can see the ambition of the designer and you see that the ambition is not quite delivered upon. And I think a lot of people who don't know how games are made look at that and they just say, ‘lazy devs,’ or ‘they're bad designers.’ And that's not what it is. I think, a lot of times, it's that your tools just aren't capable of delivering the thing that you want to do.”
CD Projekt Red has spent nearly as many hours making tools as it has making games. Almost all of its RPGs have been built using the company’s REDengine, a bespoke toolkit that has been designed, augmented, and iterated upon across four different versions to allow the design team to achieve its very specific ambitions. Those tools have allowed all the pieces of each game to connect, enabling a coherent experience in which players’ actions feel impactful and accounted for.
Newer versions of the REDengine have also allowed the studio to get really wild with some of its quest designs. In The Witcher, for instance, there’s broadly three kinds of objectives: exploration and investigation, dialogue-driven drama, and cutthroat combat encounters. By Cyberpunk 2077, the studio had pushed deep into the minutiae of character creation, which opened up the need for a game that supported an even wider range of playstyles, including stealth and hacking – both of which require bespoke systems. Cyberpunk’s Phantom Liberty expansion doubled down on this, resulting in quests that referenced very different genres, such as its famous survival horror-inspired optional finale. Variety, then, has been key to CD Projekt Red’s journey.
“I think especially with the RPGs that we're making, which tend to be relatively sizable, it's almost like a necessity, right?” says Miles Tost, level design lead at CD Projekt Red. “You need to find the variety in the gameplay and ways to bend the systems in a way that you create some new and fresh experiences, because otherwise players will just burn out on it.”
“With the size of these games, even [with] the best story, people will slowly taper out if the gameplay doesn't keep them engaged and refreshed,” he adds.
Whatever the choice is and whatever the consequence is, we want players to feel rewarded, even if the emotion in the end is sadness.That’s not to say that stories aren’t an important part of CD Projekt Red’s games. Far from it. In fact the studio has a tried, tested, and proven approach to how it tells a tale in every single one of its quests. They all need a twist. A wrinkle. As Mills explains, killing the bandits who stole from a village is “boring” and “not an interesting story.” But successfully telling the story of a bandit attack isn’t just about turning an unpredictable corner – it also needs to take into account the method in which players explore that story. To anticipate that, CDPR puts every quest through “destruction testing”, in which playtesters attempt to navigate the mission in every conceivable way. With the data from that testing, quest designers are then able to re-tool missions to account for unexpected player behaviour, ensuring they support as many solutions as possible. The result is a more natural-feeling storyline that authentically responds to your choices.
Choices in video games are complicated. Cyberpunk’s open-ended nature means that every single body modification purchased, weapon looted, and skill point invested can change the way a player interacts with the world, and so a huge amount of possibilities must be accounted for – everything from stealth to brutality to diplomacy to the inevitable player-divised tactics that take developers by surprise months after release.
But such decisions are not the choices that CD Projekt Red is famous for. Rather, the studio is known for its big story-branching choices. For years such decisions were generally considered “BioWare-style”, so synonymous was the design with games such as Mass Effect and the original Baldur’s Gates. But CDPR’s take on them has arguably become the go-to in the public consciousness. That’s largely thanks to their challenge; there’s no clear line between good and evil in either Cyberpunk or The Witcher, and so every choice feels like untying a thousand knots to work out the best option. But there are other factors: CDPR has a tendency to delay the consequences of your actions, meaning you can’t immediately reload a poor choice and try again, which grants each decision a sense of inescapable authenticity. And when the consequences do strike, they feel impactful and far-reaching; choices often result in major character deaths, political upheaval, or roll the dice on romantic encounters.
The success of these choices is rooted in careful preparation. “All the sides are presented to you beforehand,” says Paweł Sasko, associate game director. “You had an opportunity to actually assimilate all the information. You understood it well, you get the characters, you know what they are about. So at the moment when you are faced with a choice, you understand the context and you understand the implications of what you're doing.”
This thorough approach means that players can have a nuanced relationship with the result of their actions. As quest designer Paweł Gąska explains, “We want the player to see that even a good choice can have bad consequences, and that a bad choice can still be justified because of something else you focused on.”
A great example of this can be found in Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion, which sees FIA agent Songbird offer to help cure your terminal condition, provided you help her escape the clutches of her tyrannic employer. Simultaneously her former partner, Reed, asks that you help him bring Songbird into FIA custody, as he hopes that his (admittedly questionable) bosses will do right by her. By presenting both character paths as viable, nuanced options rather than a choice between good and evil, CDPR helps players build authentic relationships and eventually make decisions that reflect their own feelings and values.
“Whatever the choice is and whatever the consequence is, we want players to feel rewarded, even if the emotion in the end is sadness,” explains Sebastian Kalemba, game director on The Witcher 4. “If this is coherent with the emotional journey we're delivering, [it will allow] the player to feel [that they are] okay with this consequence.”
Several of CDPR’s choices have gone down in video game legend. While the branching pathways through The Witcher 3’s Bloody Baron quest and the choice between helping Songbird or Reed at the end of Phantom Liberty are among the company’s best and most well-known, my personal favourite can be found in The Witcher 2. At the end of chapter one you must ally with either Vernon Roche, commander of the Temerian special forces, or Iorweth, the elven leader of the Scoia'tael freedom fighters. Your choice here completely changes the quests, characters, and location of the game’s middle-act. It was a bold, ambitious swing for the studio’s second-ever game, and one it has not attempted since.
“The difficulty with that is not so much about being bold, it’s mostly about the resources you invest,” says Tost. “We haven't gotten more afraid over the years of people missing our content. We're very much fine with that happening. But it's also the amount of resources you commit to basically making two different stories, which is almost like two different games.”
As quest designers, we can think of good choices, but it's the writers who have to actually elicit emotions in the players.The company’s decision to move away from level-based locations to an open world design made creating branching pathways as significant as that in The Witcher 2 “more difficult to do.” But the idea wasn’t abandoned. The final act of The Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine expansion is notably malleable. Similarly, the choice between Songbrid and Reed towards the end of Phantom Liberty results in two radically different pathways. “Phantom Liberty in general was sort of a response to some criticism that we got for the base game, which was that we lost a lot of non-linearity,” Tost explains.
According to Mills, CDPR worked on Cyberpunk 2077 “thinking that we understood choice and consequence,” but discovered upon completion of the base game that such choices weren’t landing correctly. “We built choice and consequence into most of our quests,” Mills insists. “We built it into the structure of the game, but it just didn't feel satisfying.”
Following a period of careful analysis, the Cyberpunk development team came to the conclusion that its approach to choice and consequence had been too subtle. Elements that telegraphed upcoming choices were often missed by players who simply could not spot such small details in the dense ocean of near-photo realistic detail that is Night City. And then, following their decisions, players were not being shown the consequences of their actions in a clear manner.
“The Witcher 3 had a structure where you were making your choices, you were visiting Skellige and [Velen] when you made those choices, and then later in following acts, you were actually visiting those places again,” recalls Sasko. “And we could, in a really simple way, show you, ‘Hey, here are your consequences, because you are visiting the same places again.’ It's so simple to do it. In Cyberpunk, the structure is so much more complex. You rarely come back to the places that you have seen.”
Sasko discusses his work on The Pickup, a Cyberpunk 2077 quest in which you must acquire a prototype combat robot from a gang holed up in a meat factory. There are a number of ways this quest can be tackled, and the aftermath reflects your approach. “When you come back to the meat factory, there are consequences of your choices,” Sasko says. “But you have to really be there, come and look for it, and most players don't. That's the reality. So the learning [is that] the structure of the game needs to support [revealing the consequences].”
It was this learning that led to a “more heavy handed” approach for Phantom Liberty and its branching final questline. But the choice and resulting branch is only worth so much in and of itself. Because no matter how good the choice is, no matter how many options are built into the story, none of it can succeed if the writing surrounding the choice is sub-par.
“As quest designers, we can think of good choices, good dilemmas, good themes, but it's the writers who have to deliver the dialogues that will actually elicit emotions in the players,” says Gąska. “It's the cinematics [team] and the animators who have to give [the story] to you in a way that you will actually feel it.”
Gąska likens this to the dilemma of a terminally ill person deciding to end their own life. Without any emotion or connection, the question is “just a theoretical thing.” But when the choice is personal, involving people you love and care for, it becomes a heart-wrenching issue. And so the fundamental skill behind creating resonant choices is to craft characters that feel truly authentic. Such authenticity can then inform how choices and consequences are built into the game's design and story.
“Our approach is the approach for the way we live, right?” says Kalemba, who explains that he doesn’t believe in foreshadowing the consequences of choices. “You don’t know what's going to happen tomorrow, but there are several choices you have today. And by designing the experience from the get-go this way, we let ourselves do our games as best as possible and ask players to be open and ready for the consequences.”
While Kalemba and his team will no doubt draw upon the studio’s prior successes for The Witcher 4, there’s naturally a desire to do something more advanced. Something more impressive. But to do so will require solving a tricky development puzzle.
“All of the work we did on [our] expansions was generally more enjoyable than working on the base games themselves,” admits Tost. “All of these unknowns that you had when you were working on the base game are answered and it's a matter of pure creation. I think we should look at how we answer these questions in a timely manner so that we can simulate the process of working on an expansion earlier than by the time we get to making an expansion.”
Such an approach is made all the more trickier by tools – CD Projekt Red is leaving its bespoke REDengine behind for The Witcher 4, instead opting for Unreal Engine 5. And so on top of trying to answer those questions, development staff will also be learning how best to maximise the potential of a new and unfamiliar engine. To meet their ambition, the team will need to avoid Mills’ earlier observation of developers fighting against the limitations of their tools. No doubt a close relationship with Unreal’s creator, Epic, will be vital to moulding the engine into a shape that allows CDPR to deliver on its goals.
“We want to put player agency in the center,” says Kalemba of those goals. “We want players to be able to really sense these opportunities and to go in-depth when it comes to choice and consequences.
“It's the evolution of The Witcher, so more tools at players' disposal to be able to not only play and go with the consequences narratively, but also gameplay wise,” he adds. “We want to give players more tools, more opportunities, to be able to feel that ‘I am the player and I define my experience.’”
Simply matching The Witcher 3’s choices and their resulting consequences would be a massive undertaking for CD Projekt Red. But to evolve and advance The Witcher 4 beyond the studio’s past accomplishments no doubt requires something much more complex. As Cyberpunk 2077 proved, even the master of branching stories can trip and fall. Phantom Liberty saw the studio stand back up and dust itself off, but The Witcher 4 will be the true test of how past learnings inform new ambitions. Hopefully Ciri’s next adventure will continue to cement CD Projekt Red’s reputation as the studio dedicated to respecting and fulfilling player choices.
Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor.
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