The Witcher 3 10th anniversary interview – the making of The Last Wish

The Witcher 3 is a tapestry of interwoven stories. Its main narrative and sidequests are seamlessly connected, each making room for major and minor characters to grow and have their moment. For The Witcher 3’s tenth anniversary, I spent some time with the writers, directors, and quest designers behind one of the best RPGs ever made to delve into what makes a good Witcher 3 quest.

This time, we’ll dig into one of the core relationships of the entire Witcher series: the bond between Geralt and Yennefer, who either cement their love or reveal it as a lie in a quest called The Last Wish. 

The Last Wish was put together late during The Witcher 3’s development. The team already knew how the siege of Kaer Morhen would play out, and they knew what Geralt’s interactions with his love interests would be up to that point, accounting for each branching possibility players could have chosen. On top of that, they had a strict budget of dialogue lines – 250 per sidequest – because of localisation costs. 

“We needed to be very brief and we needed to express a lot, mostly through one-liners and conversation,” story director Marcin Blacha explains. 

To make sure Geralt’s potential love interest paid off, the game director at the time, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, Marcin Blacha, and associate game director Paweł Sasko sat down in a room for two hours and created a treatment for what would become The Last Wish. 

“We designed the framing, the structure of the whole narrative,” Paweł Sasko explains. “We wanted to make sure that you have a good, fulfilling romance with Yennefer and with Triss in our game, with interesting choices and something that will stay in your memory. I was looking for something that would be impactful, and I had a couple of ideas. There weren't many quests in triple-A games touching mature topics like a Bloody Baron in 2012. That was the same kind of thought that I had with The Last Wish. My first idea was probably the most edgy, and that's one that we decided not to go with.” 

In the lore, sorceresses can’t bear children because of a powerful ritual they undergo to reinforce their latent powers. Sasko’s first idea revolved around Yennefer’s wish to restore the one thing she couldn’t have in the world — the thing she couldn’t control about her own body, itself already transformed with magic. After thinking about the idea for a while, the team realised there was another part of her life she didn’t have power over — her love for Geralt. 

In Andrzej Sapkowski’s short story, The Last Wish, Geralt uses his final wish with a djinn to bind his fate to Yennefer to save her from the magical being’s wrath. The Witcher 3 sees Yennefer take Geralt on a quest to find another genie and break the magic to discover whether their love is illusory. 

“We went with more of an emotional thing that also binds them together,” Sasko explains. “The previous idea I mentioned would make her feel a bit more egotistic, because it's more about her rather than about you together. It was important for us that she doesn't seem cold as a person, because Geralt is incredibly important in her life.”

Yennefer already takes Geralt on the quest while withholding knowledge of their true objective, which she only reveals once he’s committed to it. It’s a storytelling technique CD Projekt Red uses often across its games, hooking the player with either half-formed or false information before subverting their expectations. It’s a powerful tool when used correctly, but there’s an art to doing it in a way where the player doesn’t feel like they were sold a lie, and it’s another choice that could have led to Yennefer feeling cold or indifferent to Geralt’s feelings. 

CD Projekt Red sidesteps these issues in The Last Wish via another technique you see in the studio’s other games. In the Cyberpunk 2077 mission Pyramid Song, the main character goes diving with a potential love interest called Judy, exploring her flooded hometown. During the mission, the pair are linked and can feel each other’s emotions, creating a transcendent intimacy that even works to cement their fictional friendship if you don’t pursue romance with her. 

The Last Wish begins aboard a boat. Yennefer takes the helm (this required entirely new scripting techniques because Geralt never shares a boat ride anywhere else in the game) as you scour the waters looking for a shipwreck. The journey deepens Geralt and Yennefer’s relationship as you dive deeply into the cold waters, simultaneously delivering exposition for those who haven’t read Sapkowski’s books. As Geralt descends underwater, Yennefer uses telepathy to link their minds, whispering into each other’s consciousness as Geralt’s other senses are dulled by the sea. 

“I love contrast in my storytelling,” Sasko explains. “I wanted to introduce the player into the romantic vibe of being on a boat together with Yennefer — they’re sailing together, casting a spell and seeing things through Geralt’s eyes, and he hears her voice in his head. It's very intimate. So I slowly started changing the genre towards romance. I was looking for a way to create a striking contrast, something that would surprise you but would still make sense, and would excite you.” 

That contrast comes when you surface, board the boat, and pass Yennefer the half of a ship’s crest you found among the partial wreckage underwater. She counts to three and teleports you to its twin, where the rest of the shipwreck is located. There’s a flash of bright light, and then it’s white all around you as snowcapped mountains create a jagged edge to the horizon. The wind is biting, and the ground around you is blanketed with snow. From the wind whistling, you can tell you’re up high, and the UI confirms it, announcing you’ve arrived in the mountains of Skellige. You crest a hill and there’s the ship, lost and forgotten on a lonely mountaintop with no water in sight. It turns out the djinn had granted the ship captain’s wish to escape. 

“The djinn did it in a way that created this sphere that cut out part of the ship,” Sasko says. “And then I was looking for an incredible contrast to being on a boat. I wanted to create it so there was this sphere that cut out part of the land, so you were almost like in the deepest point in our world, as deep as you can go when diving, and then I moved you as high as I could. It's this technique of stacking the contrast, one after another. In storytelling and a good quest, you are achieving multiple objectives with everything you do. I wanted to surprise the player, I wanted to make it fit the story, I wanted to make it fresh and different. I also wanted to create a space for the artists to shine.” 

Like with the Judy scene in Cyberpunk 2077, Sasko plays with bonding, relationships, and connection through his work. It’s everywhere you look in Night City, from Johnny Silverhand’s personality construct bleeding into V’s psyche, or how people go back to primal instinct when they replace too much of their bodies with chrome. That’s because Sasko is a psychologist by education, who loves noodling with these themes and playing with our emotions. 

“One of my favourite things to do is take a topic neatly connected to psychology, and then talk about it in a different context, and make players wonder,” Sasko explains. “I'm an artist, and I'm here to deliver entertainment and inspire, rather than preach and teach anyone. But I want to show people how they can feel, how they can have a connection with someone. When you're playing games like The Witcher, you can explore those moments and understand what empathy is. This is how games can impact culture. It stays with you for a long time — an impactful and important part of your life.” 

While designing their quests, CDPR devs constantly think about two things: what the player is thinking, and what they’re feeling. The idea is to manipulate the former to achieve the latter. For quests like The Last Wish, there are many variables. First off, it’s a sidequest. The developers have no idea what you’ve been doing when you arrive (or if you’ll even do the quest at all). Sasko alleviates this by creating what he calls a “bridge”. 

For The Last Wish, that’s arriving at the small town with the tavern, where Yennefer is being accosted by villagers to both remind you of her place in the world and make sure she’s seen by people other than Geralt, which makes her feel more real as a character. As the quest progresses, the environment changes. Yennefer takes you inside the tavern where it’s darker, there’s a fire, the camera cuts in close, and it’s more intimate, away from the baying villagers. 

“My first goal as a designer is to remind you who Yennefer is, because maybe you forgot,” Sasko says. “Maybe between the last quest and this quest, your child was born or you've been on a long vacation. So this is a bridge I'm building to make sure you understand who she is.” 

From the scene in the tavern to their first moments on the water, the developers are trying to reinforce the mood of the story you’re about to experience, preparing you emotionally and setting up what you think, so your feelings are primed. From controlling the weather to making sure you see a rare whale cresting the water, the designers build out a romantic mood as you sail over calm waters. 

“The trick and the craft is in knowing how much you can do this so the player doesn’t see it. I cannot let you know that I'm doing this,” Sasko explains, letting me know that he’s doing this. 

Like the villagers accosting Yennefer in the town, the team uses every brush to paint Yennefer’s character. She’s always helping. She uses magic to link your minds and create a sonar pulse to ping for wreckages, she gives you direction, and at the end of the quest, she helps you defeat a djinn. This is a powerful sorceress who isn’t some passive observer. That’s one of the reasons Geralt loves her. 

You may have noticed how Geralt acts differently around Yennefer. He cracks more jokes and doesn’t take himself as seriously — that’s because CDPR has well-defined rules for its characters. It’s this kind of attention to detail that sees the developers create new systems like the sonar and sharing a boat with an NPC for a single, missable quest. 

“With Geralt, we have a set of written rules,” Marcin Blacha says. “For example, he's very enigmatic, he has partners, and he says ‘zaraza’ in Polish. The more you write, the more you try to make the characters like people. Sometimes we stay away from the rules just for a brief joke or situational gag. Usually, we are following the books and trying to remember that The Witcher is a franchise that relies not on the setting, but on the characters and relationships with them. So it was crucial to make them as detailed and as interesting as possible.” 

Whether it’s a love story for your Geralt or some closure on an old flame as you push Yennefer aside for Triss *spits*, it’s these surprising little side adventures that make The Witcher 3 special. Everything feels personal and everything has stakes, no matter what side of the fence you sit on. Just remember that the reason you’re sitting on any fence at all is because the puppetmasters at CDPR gently placed you there with a little velvet cushion tucked under your backside.