The Witcher 3 10th anniversary interview – the making of Open Sesame!

Hearts of Stone features the darkest series of quests you can undertake in The Witcher 3. The entire DLC sees you trapped in a Faustian bargain with a demon more powerful than anything Geralt has ever faced, tasked with completing an impossible request. From watching that creature in the shape of a man slowly push a wooden spoon through someone’s eye as they’re frozen in time to finding out more about the doomed romance at the center of the story, it’s oppressive and grim, so it’s understandable developer CD Projekt Red wanted to break that up with something more off-kilter.

One such change of pace is Open Sesame, a playable heist movie that takes cues from Point Break and Ocean's Eleven. Originally planned as a bank heist because the developers had already established Vivaldi Bank – the characters who run it, and as a location – CD Projekt Red switched to an auction house because it presented more opportunities for interesting gameplay.

“We wanted to have something more interactive,” expert quest designer Danisz Markiewicz explains. “The whole section of Geralt taking part in an auction, getting to meet people from high society, actually buying stuff – that felt very compelling. A bank heist could have certain opportunities, but this was on a completely different level. Plus, there are references to characters from the most recent Sapkowski book.”

CDPR took inspiration from GTA 5 and let players help organise the heist, recruiting for the various roles needed to pull it off. With Geralt as the muscle, you’re taken to a planning room plastered with wanted posters showing potential recruits. Here you plot things out alongside your recent acquaintance, initially known as The Stranger, who later turns out to be the auction house owner’s brother, on a revenge mission for his inheritance.

“There are some red herrings,” Markiewicz says. “Certain characters are dead on arrival. But we have choices, and the quest plays very differently because of them. We knew we wanted to have an escape artist. We want to have a demolitions person, a safe cracker. But the actual details and characteristics at this point were very raw. It was a couple of sentences, and then we started writing dialogues for them, and the characters came into being.”

As with anything at CDPR, characters are the most important aspect. For your heist crew, the developers started thinking about high-level character traits. Demolitions expert Casimir became the comic relief, while acrobatic escape artist Eveline took on an opportunist archetype who looks out for herself and her friends. These traits would later influence story beats, such as Eveline escaping by herself if things get too hot. These characters are introduced via little vignettes showing off their skills and personalities like a Mass Effect 2 teammate introduction.

“The atmosphere comes from the characters,” Markiewicz explains. “With Casimir, the dwarf demolition specialist, it came from our writer for the quest. He had this idea that he's a demolition specialist, and he probably has a short fuse. So let's have him sitting on top of his hut filled with explosives. On one hand, it is a tense situation, but because of how he is portrayed, the acting, it's hilarious. Thanks to work QA being very vigilant and asking the right questions – I know some people found this, but it's a little bit of an easter egg – if you throw a bomb at him from a distance before the scene even starts? He explodes.”

Thankfully, CDPR had an alternative character waiting in the wings, allowing the game to account for any bad behaviour players might exhibit. If one of your potential heist members dies before the heist, they’re switched in for your other option. Of course, it’s not as easy as just swapping them out. Allowing the player to build a team of thieves presented new challenges for CDPR because it was the first time in The Witcher 3 where characters could stand in for other characters in the same scene.

“We didn't want to redo the entire scene,” Markiewicz remembers. “So we developed some new tech to implement a scene so that those characters are technically there, but if they're not present, another character takes their place. You see that in several scenes – for example, when they're talking over the whole plan. If someone were to play this scene just as it is, you would get two characters talking over each other. Almost like Schrödinger's cat.”

Of course, allowing the player to take different characters into a quest must influence how certain things play out, or it feels pointless. Which safecracker you use influences the scene where you negotiate for the hostages while breaking into the vault, whether your escape artist ditches you early on, and who the safecrackers side with when the auction house brothers confront each other at the end. Even after that, the story can play out differently again depending on whether you’re willing to bargain with the auction house owner or not.

CDPR achieves this via the exciting medium of… graphs, spreadsheets, and sticky notes. As well as graphs for how much dialogue budget they have (localisation and VO are expensive), others show how many quests are needed, what genre they want to hit, and which characters need more screen time. Then there are spreadsheets showing how all of this intersects and impacts the wider world – for example, how Vivaldi Bank takes over the auction house if you kill the owner – and so other departments can suggest fleshing out other characters, such as how you can get some sweet backstory on Vesimir if you speak to Countess Mignole at the auction itself before a certain point in the main story. It’s a mind-boggling undertaking, and if Markiewicz could go back, he’d only make it even more complicated.

“If I were to design it again, I would make it less symmetrical, so the story diverges more,” Markiewicz says. “If I were designing my perfect scenario, no time limit, I would add a horse chase at the end. When you're escaping from a bank, there is always a car chase. The tension is winding down slowly. Other than that, I'm proud of how the auction itself turned out because it was a difficult moment to design.”

How do you make rich people buying things exciting? The developers designed some unique items that Geralt can bid on and created some optional conversations to make the player feel more involved. Sharp-eyed players can even spot The Stranger lurking around in disguise, they can get more information about the auction house, and more backstory on Geralt’s mentor. But some of these conversations can also influence what you bid on.

Prove to an art collector that you understand art and he’ll tip you off about a good piece at auction, as well as a potential buyer. Tell Vivaldi about your tip and you’ll have to outbid him for it, so keep it to yourself and you’ll net a tidy profit. There’s also an item that can lead to a quest, as well as some fashionable vanity gear (I’m sorry to report that there’s no hidden meaning behind the Concealment Kit; the devs just thought it was fun to have a goofy item set for Geralt to wear).

The design process for the entire expansion was relatively smooth, and the developers managed to account for some edge cases they wouldn’t have even thought about if not for thorough quality assurance — but the best artists know when to kill their darlings.

“One of the bigger changes for the auction house was that initially we wanted to introduce some purely magical security system for the vault,” Markiewicz explains. “There was this idea of a portal opening and Geralt being dropped into a cave with a Golem. In the end, it felt a bit off because everything about the quest was very grounded. So after some brainstorming, the magical golem became an actual trap door with a bunch of spider-like creatures.”

It’s interesting to look back at this stuff with the people now working away on The Witcher 4. Hearts of Stone is the pinnacle of The Witcher 3 and shows what the team can do when it’s unshackled from creating the technology alongside the game. No matter who you speak to, they wish they did more or made things more complex and branching. It might have been ten years since we got The Witcher 3, but something tells me the next Witcher game will be worth the wait. In the meantime, check out our coverage of The Witcher 3's The Last Wish, which we dived into in another making of feature.