Nowadays, gamers are looking for more immersion and escapism than ever before, and a lot of that comes from detail. Can I go in that house? Can I speak to that person? It can add a lot of pressure to a developer to make those systems and places feel alive. It's a feeling The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt developers knew all too well while working on the game.
Speaking to Edge (via GamesRadar), CD Projekt Red's Philipp Weber recalled how hard it was to make truly immersive settlements back then. "Today, if you said 'give me a Witcher 3 village that has eight houses', I could give you that in two hours," he said, acknowledging that this wasn't the case back in the day. "When it came to actually reacting to the player, there wasn't that much detail."
One example Weber recalls is in the early days of The Witcher 3's development, NPCs would be scripted to drop everything and run if Geralt whipped out a sword in a town centre. "For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right," he said.
Terrible parents aside, CD Projekt Red found that they key to making immersive NPCs was not having them be too predictable. "We give them spots of interest that are available and then they're the ones doing the pathfinding," Weber explained.
Now that immersive NPCs are firmly understood by CD Projekt Red, we can't wait to see how our settlements are going to look when The Witcher 4 rolls around.
