CD Projekt's CEO was afraid that players wouldn't understand The Witcher 3. Then came unexpected help
Adam Badowski had big worries about the potential of dark fantasy before the release of The Witcher 3, until he was reassured by the success of Game of Thrones.
The creators of The Witcher 3 were a bit worried about how players would react to the dark fantasy, but the success of a certain TV show might have helped get people on board with the idea.
Dark fantasy themes are now so common that it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call them one of the main currents in modern fantasy. You can see it in the video game market too – it's not just filled with Dark Souls copycats and Warhammer licensed games, but also with original worlds that don't have much to do with epic fantasy tales. Not to mention the numerous game adaptations of well-known universes (not always particularly successful ones).
Back in the day, going for a "darker" style was seen as a bit risky, which made a certain Polish developer a bit nervous.
Fantasy in games before and after Game of Thrones
Adam Badowski, joint CEO of CD Projekt Group, mentioned these dilemmas in an interview with PC Gamer. The Polish company had already made two games featuring Geralt, but they were aiming much higher with the third installment in the series. This also meant higher development costs and a bunch of challenges – plus a fair bit of risk for the studio, which at the time could only handle working on one project at a time.
Badowski's concerns partly stemmed from other fantasy-themed titles. At the start of the 2010s, games like the ever-popular World of Warcraft and the newer Skyrim were really making waves. Back in the day, those kinds of titles were the go-to for creating fantasy worlds. Sure, both had their share of serious and even unsettling themes, but let's be real: Azeroth and Tamriel are high fantasy.
In this context, The Witcher 3 appeared to the devs as "a completely new offer for players." This raised Badowski's concerns that players "would not understand the concept of dark fantasy"—at least until the Game of Thrones series was released.
First of all, there are always other great games on the market, secondly, you can learn from those games, but like in music videos, you need to be fresh [and] innovative. So you cannot be a copycat.
We knew that [The Witcher 3] was a completely new offer for players. I had a lot of worries about the game as a business [...] The whole development was expensive and challenging, plus, we had only one game in development back then, and Witcher is dark fantasy. I remember that it wasn't that popular, and I was worried if people would understand the concept of dark fantasy.
High fantasy was super, super well known and appreciated by players. Everyone played World of Warcraft, but something has changed after Game of Thrones.
The adaptation of George R.R. Martin's books significantly contributed to the popularization of dark fantasy. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that this was the first major TV show (in terms of viewership and earnings) to show a morally gray world, without the usual heroics you'd expect from mainstream fantasy. (As a side note: a few months later, the first Dark Souls game was released, which immediately became FromSoftware's biggest bestseller at the time).
For Badowski, this was a pivotal moment after which he finally breathed a sigh of relief. The success of GoT showed that people had embraced darker fantasy and that it had "great potential," which boded well for the upcoming CD Projekt game. The same one that, a few years later, became hands down the biggest hit not just for the company, but for the entire Polish video game industry.
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Author: Jacob Blazewicz
Graduated with a master's degree in Polish Studies from the University of Warsaw with a thesis dedicated to this very subject. Started his adventure with gamepressure.com in 2015, writing in the Newsroom and later also in the film and technology sections (also contributed to the Encyclopedia). Interested in video games (and not only video games) for years. He began with platform games and, to this day, remains a big fan of them (including Metroidvania). Also shows interest in card games (including paper), fighting games, soulslikes, and basically everything about games as such. Marvels at pixelated characters from games dating back to the time of the Game Boy (if not older).
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