CD Projekt Red quest designer Philipp Weber has revealed that during The Witcher 3's development, female NPCs would sometimes drop babies on the ground before fleeing in fear whenever Geralt approached. The bizarre bug stemmed from an early design decision that prioritised realistic day-and-night routines for villagers over sensible reactions to the player, meaning characters simply abandoned whatever they were holding, including infants, when startled.

Speaking to Edge Magazine, Weber explained the team focused heavily on making rural NPCs feel authentic, since players in small villages were likely to test whether characters behaved believably. Because reactive behaviour hadn't been developed to the same depth, NPCs fled danger by dropping their current task item, an oversight that briefly caused "women dropping their babies, left and right" before it was fixed. Weber also described the broader NPC pathing system, in which characters choose from pools of "spots of interest" rather than fixed routes, citing Novigrad harbour's 200 possible spots for 50 sailors as an example. A new Witcher game centred on Ciri is currently in development without a confirmed release date.