The Witcher 3 modders Moonknight, Ferroxius, Crygreg and Glassfish (who co-created the mod that restored content cut from Brothers in Arms) released the first volume What lies unseena planned series chronicling the history of the development and evolution of The Witcher 3. RPG YouTuber xLetalis released a three-hour video covering the first volume, which shows a prototype version of The Witcher 3’s story that would be more than three times longer than the game we got. Some of the biggest changes and surprises in this version of The Witcher 3 include:
- The game was subtitled “A Time of Sword and Axe” instead of “The Wild Hunt”.
- The Witcher 3 had a VATS-like focus system that allowed you to target the delicate spots of monsters.
- There was a lot more back and forth between Velen, Skellige, and Novigrad, and storylines and characters that were more included in the final game were spread out over multiple acts.
- Your choice between Yennefer and Triss would mean that the other sorceress would be absent for the final third of the game.
- Iorweth from The Witcher 2 appeared and played a major role.
- There was a multi-part raid quest in Novigrad that required allies, such as the siege of Kaer Morhen.
- The Bloody Baron’s story was completely different and continued into the slow game.
- The endings were much more ambiguous and melancholic.
- Geralt and Avallac’h would teleport to Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 in one quest.
- The game didn’t have Gwentand instead there was a return of the arm wrestling and dice poker of TW1 and 2.
This project was created thanks to the release of CD Projekt’s REDkit modding tools, and the authors wrote that before these tools became available, the community’s knowledge of the work on The Witcher 3 “resulted from interviews with the company, as well as from incomplete leaked materials. “
“The big breakthrough came in 2024, when CD Projekt RED released the REDkit for The Witcher 3,” modders wrote in the introduction to the first volume. “Attached to this development kit was a string database containing almost every line of text that was written between the earliest and last stages of development for The Witcher 3. From this database, we worked together to translate the data into a tangible summary that makes up most of these documents.”
And the boy is there body to these documents: The first volume, covering the development stage around 2012, weighs only 584 pages. Includes area descriptions, scene directions, rough dialogue sketches, concept art, and some prototype models and assets still available in REDkit. The overall story remained the same: find Ciri, fight the Wild Hunt, explore Velen, Novigrad and Skellige, but there would be much more. Map and area decisions seem to have been decided very early in development, and in this longer game, backtracking between zones as the story progresses would be much more common. Many of the things that are side content in the final game would have been integral to the main quest, and there were many more new or returning characters to flesh out.
“Unlike the 2013 and 2014 versions of the game, we cannot be sure what the 2012 version looked like at this stage of development,” the team wrote. “Most characters, locations, and other objects would use placeholders, and the environments were still being sculpted. As such, most of the images we include are concept art or early assets and locations. However, several models from the company that are in progress, this period actually found its way into the game files.”
As for the reason for changing the scope of the game, it doesn’t require much expertise or imagination: The Witcher 3 is already a powerful game, with a reputation for being complex to maintain and complete, despite its quality. Nobody would be able to beat the damn game if it took 150 hours (an estimate quoted by modders several times in volume one) to complete the main quest. It would also be an extremely taxing game to ship within a reasonable time frame.
The Novigrad plot in particular just seems like a mess in this version of The Witcher 3, with a lot more characters and complicated elements. With that said, volume one featured more than a few scenarios that made me think, “Wow, that would be awesome as hell.”
A serial killer mission to Novigrad would lead to the discovery of a hidden vampire society in the city, a la Vampire: The Masquerade. The killer would be a rogue member of this group and the other vampires would assist you in your investigation while Shani from The Witcher 1 would show up. Both of these ideas will be explored again in the DLC for The Witcher 3. Iorveth from The Witcher 2 was also going to play a major role in this version of Novigrad, and I always really missed this character from The Witcher 3.
The game’s endings were also much darker, regardless of the choices made. Stopping the White Frost would require the deaths of Ciri and Avallac’h, and keeping Ciri alive would mean allowing the world-devouring force to continue unabated, as well as an emotional final boss fight with an emotional, betrayed Avallac’h, who in this version of the game had a more developed and affable relations with Geralt. The ending of Empress of Nilfgaard was very different but tonally similar to the final game, but Ciri’s ending in The Witcher would have seen her quickly become disillusioned with the monster hunting lifestyle while also feeling guilty about Avallac’h’s death and the continuation of White Frost. Ciri would then decide to travel by plane in search of another way to stop it.
The Witcher 3 downscope reminds me of all the areas and ideas Larian talked about after he pulled out of Baldur’s Gate 3: More is not always better, and these amazing games required disciplined and complex decision-making to ensure good pace and able to deliver on time and within the budget. More than anything else, I appreciate the historical value of what Glassfish, Ferroxius, Moonknight, Crygreg, and xLetalis are doing: shedding airy on the inventive process behind one of the best games ever made. I’m eager to see what later volumes of What Lies Unseen discover.
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