The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is widely praised for making its open world feel populated by people with lives beyond Geralt’s journey, but CD Projekt Red’s attempt to create that illusion produced some bizarre problems during development. Philipp Weber, a former quest designer on the game, recently explained that the team’s focus on believable NPC routines eventually created unexpected challenges when players began examining the world more closely.
Speaking with Edge Magazine source, Weber explained that small villages made players more likely to question whether the NPCs genuinely existed as part of the world or were simply following scripted routines.
The Witcher 3 Developers Had to Fix a Major NPC Problem
Weber said the team’s attention to NPC behavior ultimately “came to haunt us” because players were naturally curious about how villagers actually functioned. Early in development, CD Projekt Red concentrated heavily on giving characters believable day-and-night routines, while their reactions to the player received considerably less attention.
That imbalance resulted in one particularly memorable problem. When Geralt caused trouble in a peaceful settlement, villagers were programmed to abandon whatever they were doing and flee. The system worked logically in most cases, but it produced an absurd result for mothers carrying newborns.
“For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies, left and right,”
Weber recalled.
The development team eventually created a more flexible system in which NPCs could select different activities and locations instead of simply following fixed routes. Weber explained that villagers were given multiple “spots of interest” and could choose where to go next based on what they were doing.
Novigrad’s harbor demonstrates the scale of that approach. According to Weber, the developers created around 200 possible locations for approximately 50 sailors, ensuring that the characters had enough options to make their movements appear less repetitive.
Weber now believes that creating this type of village is considerably easier.
“Today, if you said ‘give me a Witcher 3 village that has eight houses’, I could give you that in two hours,”
he said, highlighting how much CD Projekt Red’s approach to NPC simulation evolved during development.
