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Philipp Weber who worked as a junior quest designer for The Witсher 3 admitted that the location of smugglers' caches on Skellige was to be "terrible".
During a recent stream dedicated to the 20th anniversary of CD Projekt RED, Philipp Weber, the campaign designer for the next Witcher game, admitted that the location of smugglers' caches on Skellige turned out to be "terrible".
Weber, who previously worked on The Witcher 3 as a junior quest designer, shared that the initial plan of the studio was to fill the world with big main quests and big side quests, however, later, in 2013 – which according to Weber was "pretty late" – the studio realized that the game also needs small two-minute quests to fill the world giving players more opportunities to discover it.
And this job was given mostly to junior quest designers like Weber was at the time of the Witcher's 3 development. The designer also shared that even later, in 2014, the team decided to add even more small quests to fill the world with some POI content. "But that was very, very late," Weber said and explained that this is where all the optional locations come from.
"I can admit freely, I'm one of those people who actually put those question marks in the world," Weber said. "But I'll be honest, I think it was late in 2014, so not that long before release when we basically just filled the world with that. So there wasn't a lot of time, so it was very much 'Okay, we just have to do it and we can't do it perfectly'."
"I did a lot of these terrible – I can say 'terrible' because I did it – smugglers' caches, but originally, we put them into the world and we put some seagulls over them so you would see them circling but it wasn't planned to actually have an icon on the map," Weber said.
He explained that the initial plan was that players would randomly come across those seagulls and realize that there might be some loot. However, after the team put some icons on these locations, it turned out that there were "like 50 of those" and the map was just filled with them.
Weber didn't clarify what made the team to change its decision and mark the smugglers' caches but he admitted that it was a mistake and said that he wouldn't do that again.