Witcher 3 modders just upended everything we know about how it was made with a 584-page breakdown of an early prototype that had a 150-hour main quest, all thanks to a database 'containing almost every single line of text' from its development
Witcher 3 modders Moonknight, Ferroxius, Crygreg, and Glassfish (who contributed to the Brothers in Arms cut content restoration mod) have released the first volume of What Lies Unseen, a planned series chronicling the development history and evolution of The Witcher 3. RPG YouTuber xLetalis has put out a three-hour video going over the first volume, which covers a prototype version of The Witcher 3's story that would have been upwards of three times as long as the game we got. Some of the biggest changes and surprises in this version of The Witcher 3 include:
This project came about thanks to the release of CD Projekt's REDKit modding tools, with the authors writing that prior to these tools becoming available, community knowledge of The Witcher 3's development «stemmed from interviews with the company as well as leaked material that was incomplete.»
«The big breakthrough occurred in 2024 when CD Projekt RED released REDkit for The Witcher 3,» the modders wrote in the introduction to volume one. «Included with this development kit was a string database, containing almost every single line of text that was written between the earliest and latest point in Witcher 3's development. From this database, we collectively worked to translate the data into a tangible synopsis that makes up the bulk of these documents.»
And boy is there some bulk to these documents: Volume one, covering this circa-2012 stage of development, weighs in at a doorstopper 584 pages. It contains area descriptions, scene directions, rough drafts of dialogue, concept art, and some prototype models and assets still accessible in REDKit. The overarching story was still the same: Find Ciri, fight the Wild Hunt, explore Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige, but there just would have been way more of it. The maps and areas seem to have been decided on very early in development, and this longer game would have had a lot more backtracking between zones as the story went on. A lot of stuff that's side content in
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