Witcher 3 designer says it wasn’t easy to convince players its NPC simulation wasn’t ‘just fakery’: ‘People nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us’
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A designer who worked on The Witcher 3 has said it proved surprisingly difficult to persuade players that the game's non-player character simulation was genuine rather than a scripted illusion. According to the designer, growing player interest in the mechanical details behind game systems meant that scrutiny of the NPC behaviour eventually became a problem, rather than simply a mark of the simulation's ambition.
The comments centre on how CD Projekt Red built believable daily routines and reactive behaviours for NPCs in the 2015 open-world RPG, and the challenge of demonstrating that this system was authentic rather than "just fakery" once players began picking it apart. The designer suggested that as audiences have become more attentive to the technical underpinnings of game worlds, this heightened scrutiny worked against the studio, complicating efforts to showcase the simulation's depth. The full article text was not available beyond the headline and introductory framing, so further specifics from the interview could not be confirmed.
- Witcher 3 designer says NPC simulation was wrongly seen as fake
- Player scepticism about scripted behaviour proved hard to overcome
- Growing interest in technical details increased scrutiny of the system
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People nowadays are interested in those kinds of details, and it really came to haunt us. The Witcher 3, released by CD Projekt Red in 2015, is an open-world role-playing game known for its detailed side quests and living game world. One of its notable features was a system designed to give background characters realistic daily routines and behaviours, intended to make the world feel more alive rather than static.
The story concerns comments from a designer who worked on that system, reflecting on how the studio tried to convey to players that these character behaviours were the result of genuine underlying mechanics, rather than a surface-level illusion created to look convincing. As players became more curious about how games work behind the scenes, this scrutiny made it harder for the studio to demonstrate that the system was doing what it claimed.
This matters because it touches on a wider conversation in game development about the gap between what a game appears to do and the technical systems actually driving it, and how player expectations and awareness of these systems have changed over time.