This article is part of a new initiative on IGN where we spend a whole month exploring topics we find interesting in the world of video games. June is Icons Month, where we’re profiling iconic video game industry figures, characters, series, and themes.
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Since the release of 2007’s The Witcher, the development team at CD Projekt Red has been offering players epic stories with wildly varied outcomes, and complex moral decisions throughout. From something as simple as whether or not to interfere in a roadside conflict to determining the ultimate fate of life on The Continent, CD Projekt Red puts a staggering amount of effort into filling their games with meaningful choices and memorable outcomes.
We recently sat down with the studio’s Story Director, Marcin Blacha, to discuss the finer points of crafting interesting decisions within their games, and take a closer look at some of the most iconic moments of The Witcher 3. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/06/24/how-cd-projekt-red-designs-meaningful-player-choices"]Engaging, Believable Worlds
Every aspect of a story stems from CDPR’s core design principles, Blacha explains - an ongoing endeavor to create believable, engaging worlds for their stories to take place in. “The Witcher is set in a really grim and gritty world, and we always want to keep this world realistic,” Blacha says. “We want to talk about serious problems, about complex situations, about things that, sometimes, make the player uncomfortable… Choices must then be crafted in such a way that they do not simplify the world, but instead, have the player think and interpret it.”“Sid Meier famously said once: ‘A game is a series of interesting choices’,” Blacha says. “And it’s true — every game consists of choices players make, and these choices engage them on many different levels. My craft is telling stories through games, and interacting with players’ emotions… I need to present players with choices that are difficult, ones that will have them tear up, laugh, as well as feel relief, and so much more. These emotions — they need to be real, and it’s only possible to achieve that if the choices players make, as well as their consequences, are both meaningful.”
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Part of making those choices truly meaningful – of not only creating interesting narrative moments but also using them to reinforce the studio’s worldbuilding – is to rarely offer choices that can be simply classified as “good” or “bad.”
“We avoid black and white choices because they are not emotionally engaging,” says Blacha.. “They remind players that the world they immersed themselves in, no matter how deep it is, is less complex and interesting than the real one...The world outside is not black and white, it's not simple. When you want to create something as engaging as the real world, you have to avoid black and white choices.”Forming Connections
According to Blacha, the impact of all those choices - no matter if their outcomes are good, bad, or somewhere in between - all hinge on one simple thing: a player’s relationship to their character; whether or not the design/writing team has successfully made a player comfortable inhabiting them.
“Everything is based on this connection,” Blacha says. “Sometimes you can hate your character, sometimes you can like them, but you should always be fine with playing as this character.”
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Blacha looks at it much like a foundational aspect of other game mechanics. Just as combat is predicated on being able to move a character and control the camera, our ability to make choices throughout a game - and to truly invest in the consequences of those decisions - is based solely on our willingness to accept our role. Whether it’s as Geralt of Rivia, Thronebreaker’s Queen Meve, or Cyberpunk’s more customizable V, our willingness to engage with the world is, in no small part, based on how we feel about our avatar in it. And it’s that foundation that then sets the stage for how we handle relationships with other characters.
“A writer’s role is creating characters and relationships between them which gamers can get to know and interpret in their own way,” says Blacha. “Our ambition has always been to create characters that are believable, and relationships between real people are rarely easy. When the player enters the world of complex and ambiguous emotional relationships, they become part of it through the consequences of the choices they make.”
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“From a designer’s point of view,” he says, “the Bloody Baron’s storyline was, I think, the most interesting one to work on. We’d been building up this character across multiple quests, entwined with the Crones storyline, and it was difficult to find the perfect balance for him. The Baron needed to be a character that players couldn’t easily hate or condemn. Like a character from a Greek tragedy, we intended for him to be one you’d pity, and the events that surrounded him — full of dread. In the end, thanks to the involvement of some very talented designers, everything came together into a perfect whole.”
Triviality, Tension, and Trust
Of course, while some memorable story branches are the result of long and convoluted quest chains, there were plenty of other outcomes that rested on more incidental decisions. In the Blood and Wine expansion, for example, the fate of a major character (and potentially the entire Duchy of Toussaint) is entirely dependent on whether or not you choose to play cards with a little girl.
“When you are doing [a game] with many choices and consequences,” says Blacha, “you can always fall into a trap: you start creating a pattern, and this pattern is easy to recognize...We like to keep things fresh as much as we can, so that even the most clever of players will have a tough time seeing through the plots and intrigues we have in store for them. “Sometimes, it might be a single decision that leads to the death of a key character. Other times, it might be a few smaller ones. In the case of Anna Henrietta, the player had to make two choices and neither of them hinted at the terrible end they would bring about... We don't want to repeat ourselves, but we want the player to always be aware [of their impact],” he says, before adding with a mischievous laugh, “and suspicious that we are planning something really bad.” [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%E2%80%9CYou%20know%20which%20decision%20needs%20to%20be%20made%E2%80%9D"] Another way of changing up their formula is to provide moments during quests that offer a choice, but that are designed more around tension in a given scene than around choices piling up to lead to an outcome. In the Witcher 3 questline Count Reuven’s Treasure, for instance, Triss Merigold voluntarily gets captured and tortured so Geralt can extract information from one of her guards – all the while listening to her cries through a thin wall. Similarly, in the King’s Gambit storyline, Geralt may get to a point where he’s asked to throw a live baby into a boiling-hot oven. “In these kinds of decisions – ones that the gamer may not necessarily want to make – you know which decision needs to be made,” says Blacha. “The real dilemma here is: when will it be too late to make the choice? There’s a mechanic at play here not unlike, say, an auction, maybe a little bit of a gamble.“We divide the scene into a couple of steps, and in each step we give the player something that will peak their interest – usually a piece of information. At the same time, we keep raising the tension, suggesting the risk factor is increasing. It’s important that the gamer believes the threat they’re facing is real: that the baby will end up being burned alive or that Triss might truly die. The Witcher games' audience has grown accustomed to the fact that the choices we’re putting in front of them are no joke, and we’ve no mercy for our characters.”
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The infamous “throw baby” moment is another linchpin for CDPR’s narrative designers, and how they measure a player’s investment in their game and world. It creates a moment where they ask you not necessarily to put your trust, as Geralt, in Cerys an Craite, but rather you, the player, asks whether or not you can trust the designers themselves. “It isn't really the kind of choice where we expect you to trust, or not trust, the character,” Blacha says. “This is the kind of choice where we ask you to trust or not trust the game. We’re asking the player if they think the game is intelligent and self-aware enough – and also cruel enough – to let you do this.”