Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  All those days added up, and as they entered 2014, the studio realized that they needed more development time. In March 2014, CD Projekt Red announced that they were delaying The Witcher 3 an extra half year, to February 2015. “The board was really stressed, but they don’t come in and try to influence the game itself because they trust us,” said Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the director. “It was really hard for me because I got on my shoulders all of this stress, this baggage. I knew that it could be catastrophic because we put a lot of money into this game, and it needs to be a success.”

  Since Marcin Iwiński had founded CD Projekt in 1994 (and CD Projekt Red in 2002), they’d made a total of just two games. The Witcher 3 would be the third. The company was able to stay independent thanks to investors and other sources of revenue, like GOG, CD Projekt Red’s successful online store, and Marcin Iwiński wasn’t concerned that they’d go bankrupt if The Witcher 3 flopped, but this was still a huge gamble for them. Thanks to the Game Informer cover and several big trailers, The Witcher 3 was getting more buzz than either of its predecessors, and failing to live up to fans’ expectations might be a deathblow for CD Projekt Red’s hopes of competing with other big publishers. “This hype was really cool,” said Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “At the same time, when we were in the heart of the project, we got a lot of problems, like the engine would crash all the time and we didn’t get streaming on time. On the PS4 and Xbox we could render one dot on the screen. And we knew that we needed to deliver, so it created this huge stress on the whole team.”

  What this meant was that 2014 would be a year full of crunch for the Polish company.* At E3 in June, CD Projekt Red planned to show a lengthy Witcher 3 demo that featured Geralt exploring the swamps of Velen. During those long nights and weekends, when the crunch seemed like it would never end, what helped drive the development team was the fact that they’d be on the E3 stage alongside multibillion-dollar publishers like Ubisoft and Activision. Among the neon spectacle of the E3 show floor, where massive games like Madden and Assassin’s Creed dominated everybody’s attention, The Witcher 3 held its own, winning E3 awards from major websites like IGN and GameSpot. CD Projekt Red were the underdogs, the outsiders, the guys from Poland who had made only two other games, yet fans thought The Witcher 3 was one of the most impressive things at the show. “It’s a source of motivation for us,” said Piotr Tomsiński, an animation programmer. “We would like to be like the superfamous companies.”

  Throughout 2014, as the crunch continued and the development of The Witcher 3 grew more intense, the game kept evolving. The quest team overhauled large swaths of the story after realizing that not enough of their quests involved the ongoing war between the Nilfgaardian Empire and the Kingdom of Redania, which served as a backdrop to the game. The engineers rebuilt the streaming system, spending months trying to make objects load seamlessly in the background, so the player would see no loading screens while riding his or her horse from area to area.

  CD Projekt Red’s programmers were also constantly trying to improve the game’s tools. “There were times where the engine would crash twenty to thirty times a day,” said Jakub Szamałek. “And actually that wasn’t that bad, because we expected it to crash, so we’d save every five minutes.” Every day, it seemed like something new in The Witcher 3 had changed. The artists decided to connect Novigrad and Velen, fusing them into a single big map rather than leaving them as two separate locations. The designers tweaked and modified and iterated on just about everything. “We used to read the forums and check what people are asking for, and we’d actually add elements in the game based on people’s feedback,” said the lead quest designer, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz. “For example, there was this footage of Novigrad at some point. You could see the city in the distance. And there were some hard-core fans in the forums that were discussing the city. In the books it was said that the city has very solid, big walls. And in the trailer it didn’t. So we said, ‘Yeah, we probably should do that,’ and we did build it.”

  Novigrad, a gigantic, detailed city with narrow streets and red-brick roofs, bore an uncanny resemblance to Warsaw’s medieval Old Town. Both cities were intricate, cobbled, and full of life. Like Novigrad, Old Town was entirely fake, having been reconstructed brick by brick after it was destroyed by the German Luftwaffe in World War II. Unlike Novigrad, you could walk through Warsaw’s Old Town without seeing beggars glitch out and start floating.

  Toward the end of 2014, as the developers of The Witcher 3 finally started to see the finish line, CD Projekt Red delayed the game another twelve weeks, from February to May 2015. The extra time would allow them to fix bugs, and the business department thought if they released in May, there would be fewer big releases next to The Witcher 3. “It was the perfect spot for us,” said Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “Actually, I think we were lucky. If we had released the game at the first date, we’d be competing with Dragon Age [Inquisition, released in November 2014] and other games. In May, people had finished all the games from last year and they were ready for a new big game.”

  Another compelling reason to delay, CD Projekt Red staffers said, was so they wouldn’t turn out like Assassin’s Creed Unity, a game that had launched a couple of months earlier and was widely derided for its graphics glitches, including one particularly horrifying bug that made an NPC’s face explode. (Naturally, that face turned into an Internet meme.)

  During these final months, some departments had to crunch more than others. The writers had already been through their brutal deadlines, and toward the end of the project, they could relax a little bit. In those final months, their job was to write all the letters, notes, and other various bits of text that you’d see in the game. “CD Projekt Red understands the position of writer very literally, because a writer is someone who writes,” said Jakub Szamałek. “We’re making sure that geese have ‘goose’ displayed over their heads and a piece of cheese is called a piece of cheese. And a ‘legendary griffon trousers’ diagram is called exactly that.” The writers went through the entire string database to ensure all the names made sense. “We had times where the cat was called ‘deer’ and the deer was called ‘cheese’ and whatnot,” Szamałek said. “After years of writing dialogue, that was actually very relaxing. We sat there and did things and nobody bothered us.”

  For other departments, however, the last few months were more brutal. Developers on the very end of the pipeline, like the audio team and the visual effects team, spent long nights at the office trying to finish up their work. The quality assurance testers had a particularly rough time. On a game as massive as The Witcher 3, with so many areas, quests, and characters, it would be physically impossible to find every game-breaking bug and glitch, but the testers still had to try. “You start realizing not just sheer size of the game, but the sheer amount of possibilities on how you can do things,” said Jose Teixeira. “The game crashes, not if you go into a house, but if you talk to this person and if you get on a horse and then you go into a house. . . . [The testers] started coming up with these sort of ‘what the fuck’ situations.” The Witcher 3 ended up shipping with lots of bugs, as every video game does, but the extra three months helped them avoid an Assassin’s Creed Unity–like catastrophe.

  As the release date drew closer, the whole team started bracing for impact. Ever since the Game Informer cover, hype for The Witcher 3 had been building steadily, but who knew what the world would think? The developers thought the game might be good, and they were particularly proud of the story and writing, but neither of their previous Witcher games had drawn much of an audience outside hard-core PC gamers. Would The Witcher 3 really be able to compete with the likes of Skyrim and Dragon Age: Inquisition? They were hoping to expand their audience and sell a few million copies, but what if they were being too optimistic? What if the game wasn’t big enough? What if nobody cared about this RPG from eastern Europe?

  Then the praise started coming in. On May 12, 2015, when The Witcher 3’s reviews started going live on the Internet,
the hype reached a fever pitch. Wrote a reviewer for the website GameSpot: “Make no mistake: this is one of the best role-playing games ever crafted, a titan among giants and the standard-setter for all such games going forward.” Other reviews were equally adoring, and for the employees of CD Projekt Red, the next few days were surreal. Critics hadn’t paid nearly this much attention to previous Witcher games, let alone lavished them with so many compliments. “It was such a weird feeling because looking back, you’d think people would be high-fiving each other like, ‘Wow, we made it,’” said Jose Teixeira. “But we started reading these reviews and we’re just looking at each other going, ‘Holy shit, what do we do with this information?’ Nobody worked that day, needless to say. Everybody was just on Google going ‘Witcher 3 reviews’ and refreshing. Suddenly this became the best year in our careers.”

  On May 19, 2015, CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3. Somehow, the game was even more massive than any of them had anticipated. Perhaps to overcompensate for that persistent fear that they wouldn’t have enough content, they’d wound up making too much. Their goal had been a maximum gameplay time of one hundred hours, but between quests, points of interest, and areas to explore, The Witcher 3’s final count was closer to two hundred hours. It could stretch out even longer, if you played slowly.

  One could certainly argue about the merits of a game that long (and, in retrospect, some at CD Projekt Red felt like they maybe should have chopped 10 or 20 percent of the game), but what was remarkable about The Witcher 3 was that very few of the quests felt like padding. Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz’s edict to avoid FedEx quests had been successful. Every quest in The Witcher 3 had some sort of complication or twist, as Tomaszkiewicz had requested, which was a design tenet that BioWare’s developers would later tell me they were hoping to use in their own games after Dragon Age: Inquisition. CD Projekt Red, which had first found success when Marcin Iwiński got the rights to distribute BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate, had now made something that BioWare wanted to emulate. Who, now, could argue that European RPGs weren’t as good?

  Throughout the sleek wooden halls of CD Projekt Red’s sprawling office on the east side of Warsaw, a series of posters displayed the long-running game studio’s catchy, if slightly awkward slogan. “We Are Rebels,” the posters said. “We Are CD Projekt Red.”

  It was fair to wonder, I thought while strolling through a maze of desks and computers during the fall of 2016, just how that slogan meshed with reality. These days, CD Projekt Red was a publicly traded company with nearly five hundred employees and offices in two cities. As I walked by one glass conference room full of people, my tour guide said it was an orientation for new staff. CD Projekt Red was hiring so many people, he added, that they had to start doing these orientations every week. After the company’s astounding recent success, experienced game developers were emigrating from all over the world just to work here.

  The word “rebels” implied counterculture. It conjured the image of developers going against the grain, working together to make games that nobody else would think to make. CD Projekt Red, on the other hand, was now the largest game company in Poland, and one of the most prestigious in the world. As of August 2016, the studio was worth over $1 billion. How, exactly, were they rebels?

  “I think if you would’ve asked me this question a few years ago I’d say probably at this size we wouldn’t have the spirit, but we still do,” said Marcin Iwiński. They made a big show of giving out free downloadable content for The Witcher 3. They spoke out often against “digital rights management” (DRM), a catchall term for the antipiracy technology that restricts how games are used, sold, and modified. (CD Projekt Red’s digital store, GOG, doesn’t use DRM.) Iwiński liked to say they believed in the carrot, not the stick. Rather than try to make their games impervious to pirates, they wanted to convince potential pirates that a CD Projekt Red game was worth the money, as they had all those years ago during the era of Poland’s computer markets.

  “If you don’t have the money to actually buy games, you have two options,” said Rafał Jaki, a business development manager. “You won’t play games, or you will pirate them. But then if you turn twenty, and you start earning money, maybe you start buying games, and you turn yourself into a consumer. But if you feel that all the industry is fucking you over, why would you do that? Why would you convert when you have the money and resources to actually buy something, when you feel that there is a DLC package with [costumes] for $25, and if you buy it at GameStop you will get the blue ribbon but if you buy it somewhere else you get the red one.* Why would you do that?”

  Even during development of The Witcher 3, the team at CD Projekt Red thought of themselves as rebels, not just because they were competing against so many bigger, more experienced companies, but because they made decisions that they didn’t think other people would make. “It means that we are breaking all the rules in game design to achieve some particular goals,” said Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “To achieve those goals, from the pre-alpha of the game, I’m sitting in the room and I’m playing all the quests all the time. Actually I played all the quests in The Witcher 3 around twenty times to check if everything is correct, if the dialogue in this quest is consistent with the previous quest and the next quest, if we don’t have any gaps there. Because immersion is really crucial in our games, and if you will find the gaps or things we don’t fit in the game, you will lose this immersion.”

  As I sat in CD Projekt Red’s cafeteria, poking at a plate of vegetarian lasagna, I wondered if The Witcher 3 would have been possible anywhere else. The landscape outside Warsaw looked like a scene straight out of The Witcher 3, with its lush forests and frigid rivers. Poland’s cost of living was low compared with that in North America and other European countries, which meant that CD Projekt Red could get away with paying its staff relatively low salaries. (That was changing, Iwiński told me, as they attracted more expats.) The game was also inspired heavily by Polish fairy tales, not to mention the ugly history of racism, warfare, and genocide surrounding Warsaw, all of which had crept into The Witcher 3.

  More than that, though, it was the people who worked there who made The Witcher 3 possible. In 2016, CD Projekt Red had a somewhat culturally diverse staff, with enough non-Polish natives that the studio had officially switched to English a while back, so they could all understand one another. But so many of them seemed to have chips on their tattooed Slavic shoulders. So many of them had grown up pirating games at the computer markets, where they’d score bootleg copies of games like Stonekeep and fantasize about one day making their own RPGs. “I think that in communism, many people’s creativity was limited,” said Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “But after we were democrats, when everyone could do what they wanted to do, they started to fulfill the dreams they got in their heads.” Even after the success of The Witcher 3, the developers at CD Projekt Red sounded motivated to keep proving that they were good enough to take the stage at shows like E3. Maybe that was what it meant to be rebels.

  10

  Star Wars 1313

  Few video games have seemed as much of a sure thing as Star Wars 1313. It was the perfect mixture: Uncharted-style cinematic gameplay, in which the player would blast enemies and careen off flaming starships, combined with the rich lore of Star Wars, a series with more fans than just about anything on the planet. When the iconic game studio LucasArts showed its flashy Star Wars 1313 demo at E3 2012, people were stoked. Finally, after years of missed potential both on consoles and in theaters, Star Wars had returned to form.

  On the morning of June 5, 2012, the first day of E3, a handful of Star Wars 1313 leads set up shop in a small, dimly lit meeting room on the second floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center. They blew up their concept art on big posters and decorated the walls to make it seem like visitors were descending into the hives of Coruscant. Although they weren’t on the main floor of E3, LucasArts wanted to make a splash nonetheless. The past few years had been awful for their studio, and they wanted to prove tha
t they could make great games again. For three days, Star Wars 1313’s creative director, Dominic Robilliard, and producer, Peter Nicolai, played through the demo, showing it to a new group of press and visitors every half hour.

  The demo opened with two nameless bounty hunters walking through a rusty ship, exchanging quips about the dangerous cargo they were about to take underground. As the two partners bantered, a group of pirates led by a malicious droid latched onto their ship, sending in a flood of several dozen baddies to invade the cargo hold. From there, we saw Star Wars 1313’s combat in action as the player, controlling one of the bounty hunters, ducked behind a box and started shooting.

  After taking out a few enemies—first with blasters, then with an impressive half nelson that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Jet Li movie—the protagonist and his partner made it to the back of their ship just in time to watch the pirates steal their cargo. Following some theatrics (and a delightfully vicious moment in which the player’s partner stuffed an enemy inside a missile pod, then sent him off with a bang), both bounty hunters leaped onto the pirate ship to get back their mark. The player character, landing on one flaming hull, climbed across the crashing ships to keep up with his partner, and as he leaped across the wreckage, the demo cut to black.

  “It was one of the sharpest-looking demonstrations at E3 that year,” said Adam Rosenberg, a journalist (and friend of mine) who got a backstage look at the game. “LucasArts tailor-made that clip to press the buttons of video game–loving Star Wars geeks everywhere, and it worked.” Other reporters were just as thrilled, and fans started praising Star Wars 1313 as one of the best demos they’d ever seen. With Star Wars 1313, LucasArts’ stint of mediocrity finally seemed to be coming to an end.