Prime Ministers, Prank Calls, and Panic: Inside CD PROJEKT RED Upon The Witcher 3's Launch

Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, our English Adaptation Director, doesn’t like to celebrate. He doesn’t care about his birthday; he doesn’t care about his name day. “I don’t wanna celebrate until there’s actually a success,” Borys says. “And I really felt that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was something I was justified in celebrating thoroughly.”

The weeks leading up to The Witcher 3’s release on May 19, 2015 were fairly normal inside CD PROJEKT RED. Our office was smaller than it is today, but still open and bright, with wooden floors and white and red walls alongside the traditional brick. It was still lively — as while The Witcher 3 development had concluded in mid-April, the team was already at work on the freshly announced Hearts of Stone expansion. But as time progressed it became harder to focus, and REDs glanced at their calendars more and more frequently. Reviews were due on May 12, one week before The Witcher 3 launched proper. And on that day, things finally ground to a halt.

“I was a Senior Quest Designer and then lead of the Quest team,” says Paweł Sasko, now Associate Game Director at CD PROJEKT RED. “The Design team goes first with lots of things, so a lot of departments have to wait for us before starting their work. This means we were already busy working on Hearts of Stone when reviews were about to release but, of course, there was a moment when we all looked up.

“I remember the first one that dropped was GameSpot’s, and it was a 10 out of 10 — and in the studio there was panic,” Paweł says. No one at CD PROJEKT RED expected such high praise so feared this was a fluke. “When you’re working on something, it’s really difficult to tell what the reception will be, and in The Witcher 3 days, my god we were green.” But as more reviews came in, and more outlets pointed to The Witcher 3 as a wonderful role-playing game, the panic turned to disbelief and then sheer joy.

“It was incredibly hard to focus because I was watching and reading reviews one after the other instead of working,” Paweł says. “For two or three days many of us couldn’t do anything because everyone was so excited. You’d meet in the corridor and talk about it then go to the kitchen to talk about it, then go back to your PC and see a new review, again and again.”

While this was the third CD PROJEKT RED game launch for Borys, the previous two couldn’t compare. He joined the team in 2006, so was around for the original The Witcher’s release in 2007 and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in 2011. “The Witcher was about finding out if we could actually make a game, and The Witcher 2 was us creating the game we wanted to make,” Borys says. “But The Witcher 3 was the realization and explosion of ambition that had been growing inside us from the very beginning.”

Seeing that passion matched by players still came as a surprise though. Borys says the team felt confident they’d made a strong follow-up to The Witcher 2, that was at least on par with it, “but were we confident that people would take to it? Probably not,” he says. “I don’t think we imagined, or dared to imagine, that it would ultimately get the reception it did. That allowed months and months and months, or maybe a year, or two, or three, of just being chuffed.”

The buzz made CD PROJEKT RED the talk of the town, with even the Polish Prime Minister getting word of the accolades. “There was a spike of interest, that’s for sure,” says our Global PR Director Radek Grabowski. “We got a call from the Prime Minister’s office, for example. The Prime Minister of Poland wanted to visit us on launch day.” This also meant — in the hectic days before launch — the studio had to be inspected by the government’s security team and anyone involved had to be background checked. But when May 19 came around, amidst the other launch day excitement, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz visited the studio, learned about The Witcher 3 and its development, toured the office with board members, and hosted a press conference at our front desk. “It was wild,” Radek says.

Image Credit: M. Śmiarowski / KPRM

This wasn’t the only interaction with a major politician either, or so it seemed at least. “Reception got a call on launch day from someone from the Presidential Office, and they said something like, ‘Hey CDPR, the President of Poland is playing your game and they’re stuck! Do you have a walkthrough you can send to the President?’ Things started moving very fast; reception reached out to us in communications, then it went from us to gameplay designers… Because the President needs help! And turns out it was a prank call from one of the radio stations here in Warsaw.”

Despite the Prime Minister’s visit and the prank call, the most exciting part of launch day was players getting their hands on The Witcher 3. The same cycle of elation flooded the studio, as developers struggled to stay focused again as player reactions, streams, memes, and everything in between appeared online. But this excitement brought another feeling too: a determination to follow-up strong with The Witcher 3’s two expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.

“A mix of feelings came because, while we were so happy The Witcher 3 was well received, we knew we couldn’t drop the ball on Hearts of Stone,” Paweł says. “At that time we weren’t that confident in the expansions; everything worked out great in the end, but at the time I was so worried about releasing something of a lower quality than The Witcher 3. I was thinking, ‘my god, we cannot allow this to happen.’ Thankfully my team felt the same way, so that was good motivation for focusing again and getting back to work.”

So much love was shared for the story of The Witcher 3 in particular that this was perhaps especially felt by the Narrative team. “Those positive reviews and player reactions gave us an incredible kick to do more, to push even harder, to outdo ourselves,” says Magdalena Zych, who is our Senior Writer - Coordinator now but had just begun as a Writer when The Witcher 3 launched. “Those were very intense, emotionally charged days. We were punch-drunk, stunned, grateful, humbled, happy.”

Magdalena looks back on this time, and on “review day” in particular, very positively. “After 5pm we went out,” she says. “The weather was beautiful and we organized a spontaneous get together on the bank of the river Wisła, not far from the office. People were ecstatic. It’s one of my fondest memories, not only work-related, but in general.

“Those days shaped my perception of what working in game dev is like: heavenly, fulfilling, and thoroughly satisfying. Ten years later, I still believe that.”

Want to hear more tales of the Path? Check out our special The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — 10th Anniversary Celebration with the Developers video above.