The Witcher 3: Tips for the Environment Design

The Witcher series is turning 10 years old this month, so CD Projekt Red has decided to celebrate the anniversary with a heartwarming clip:

How are you going to mark this event? Here’s an idea. Take some time to read an old, but awesome interview with Mark “Jenn0_Bing” Foreman and Kacper “knj” Niepokólczycki from MapCore. How complex was it to create such a dense and open world as featured in The Witcher 3? The artists discussed some environment design tricks and talked about the main challenges. 

Kacper Niepokólczycki note that such projects are always executed in passes that are all about a very iterative process. The basis here was the story, of course. The story gave the artists enough info to for building the foundation of the game world: mountains, islands, forest and other locations. 

Environment Artists take the marquette and polish it into something you will actually see in the final game. They can even work without a concept, relying on general concepts of the look and feel for that part of the world. Environment Magicians work very closely with quest designers to create the best possible environment for any related quests.

The production was all about the time costs: