# The Witcher 3 devs tried to give NPCs “fear reactions” but it got cut after a few horrifying weeks when “women were just dropping their babies, left and right”

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/the-witcher-3-devs-tried-to-give-npcs-fear-reactions-but-it-got-cut-after-a-few-horrifying-weeks-when-women-were-just-dropping-their-babies-left-and-right/
- Published: 2026-08-18T14:45:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-08-24T18:02:12+00:00
- Original publisher: GamesRadar+
- Original article: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-witcher/the-witcher-3-devs-tried-to-give-npcs-fear-reactions-but-it-got-cut-after-a-few-horrifying-weeks-when-women-were-just-dropping-their-babies-left-and-right/
- Topics: Entertainment, Gaming

## Key points

- CD Projekt Red tested NPC fear reactions for The Witcher 3.
- The generic ‘drop what you are doing and flee’ rule made mothers drop babies.
- The feature was removed before release rather than refined for the final game.

## Summary

CD Projekt Red experimented during development of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with a fear-response system intended to make non-player characters react when threatened. Quest designer Philipp Weber said the team wanted rural villages to feel inhabited rather than mechanically staged, using changing activities and pathfinding between points of interest instead of fixed routes. The proposed reaction made characters abandon their current task and run away, but this broad rule created an unintended result for mothers whose assigned activity was holding a baby.

According to Weber, the issue persisted for several weeks: when fear was triggered, those characters dropped the baby object along with anything else they were carrying before fleeing. The developers ultimately removed the fear-reaction feature rather than ship that behaviour. The account, reported by GamesRadar+ from an Edge magazine interview and separately summarised by PC Gamer, illustrates the difficulty of combining general-purpose NPC systems with context-sensitive actions in an open-world game.

## Coverage

- [GamesRadar+: The Witcher 3 devs tried to give NPCs “fear reactions” but it got cut after a few horrifying weeks when “women were just dropping their babies, left and right”](https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-witcher/the-witcher-3-devs-tried-to-give-npcs-fear-reactions-but-it-got-cut-after-a-few-horrifying-weeks-when-women-were-just-dropping-their-babies-left-and-right/)
- [PC Gamer: Witcher 3 designer says it wasn't easy to convince players its NPC simulation wasn't 'just fakery'](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/the-witcher/witcher-3-designer-says-it-wasnt-easy-to-convince-players-its-npc-simulation-wasnt-just-fakery-people-nowadays-are-interested-in-those-kinds-of-details-and-it-really-came-to-haunt-us/)

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.