Look Deeper: Appreciating one part of CD Projekt Red’s storytelling
The Witcher 3 demonstrates some of the best “show don’t tell” aspects of game storytelling.
*no spoilers for big quests*
In the latest and final expansion for the epic fantasy game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I came across a tiny, insignificant quest. Within this small segment — in terms of both temporality and geography — players can experience CD Projekt Red’s talent at storytelling. Instead of opting for exposition and dialogue, the developers tell deeper stories with the environment and actual gameplay mechanics.
Consider this small scenario, by first noticing how the environment looks. Geralt stumbles across a collapsed building. We discover it’s been like this for some time. Using Geralt’s magic powers (called “Signs”), the player blasts away a barrier and enters what looks like a mining tunnel.
That is a line of carefully placed candles, leading all the way from the entrance of the passage to the end. I made Geralt light them, highlighting what they would’ve looked like when they were first laid out.
The line eventually leads further into the passage. If you follow it, you also realise you are following an old petal trail. This just screams romance in those most awful way, but it’s romance nonetheless. And the contrast between an obvious demonstration of romance and the creepy, abandoned tunnels where we find this demonstration is striking.
When you follow the candles and petals all the way to the end, however, this happens:
The player ends up in a fight with wraiths. Two, to be precise. After defeating them, the player is free to explore the rest of the room. You find this.
Look carefully at the bodies. Wine, plates, mugs, corpses lying atop one another. Exploring the bodies, you find a letter that give details about these two lovers’ names.
Two wraiths. Two bodies. The game gets you to navigate, interact with the environment — through lighting candles, exploring, and fighting —and carefully places items for the player to engage their imagination.
Indeed, much like the lover who carefully set out the candles, the developers position items in specific locations, trigger particular events when you cross a threshold, all to tell a certain story. How much the player gets out will vary, of course, but it’s all laid out: There’s no one banging you over the head with exposition.
Instead, with gorgeous candle lighting in dark hallways leading to bodies and wraiths, we encounter a simply love story without a word needed. I want to urge players to look carefully even around the smallest side quests, since it’s clear CD Projekt Red puts excruciating detail into their environment. (Even to the point where we can appreciate their understanding of topography.)
You will uncover the game’s biggest open secret: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a detective game. People constantly refer to Geralt as the best “tracker”, but we have a better name. Indeed, in most missions, Geralt follows clues in the environment and pieces together an event that occurred. This allows him to conclude where to go, who to look for and what he’ll find. No wonder then that CD Projekt Red is so meticulous when it comes to putting details into the environment.
By searching and looking at the world, Geralt will conclude the killer was a beast and the location of its lair. He’ll conclude a murderer wears a particular perfume and hunt the scent. Tracker? More like detective.
Thinking of the game this way also made me appreciate it more. I love the use of game mechanics, however simple, to tell a story — piece by piece. Geralt is not sniffing and following and looking in a cutscene: We do this. We control him.
By putting such emphasis on the environment, it forces players to appreciate just how much the developers put in. Take a few minutes extra to really examine the world in The Witcher 3: not merely as a place where “action happens”, but as a page where many stories are (silently) being told. We can only hope more developers use their game worlds to tell stories this way.
