The Witcher 3 players will surely remember how much time ol' Geralt spends with his nose all but glued to some tracks, following his aptly named Witcher Sense down a trail of clues in search of a monster or missing person. It's one of the creakier elements of an RPG that, by all rights, has aged pretty immaculately, and even CD Projekt Red's Paweł Sasko, now associate game director on Cyberpunk 2077 sequel Project Orion, agrees it was "overcooked" by the time the credits rolled, even if it was novel for the time.
In a fascinating bit of development insight, Sasko discussed the clue mechanic in an interview with Flow Games. "When we started The Witcher 3, we felt that the loop with the clues was kind of fresh," he begins. "It was actually something that Danisz Markiewicz, he's an expert quest designer on my team, the two of us, we actually designed that whole loop. And bear in mind it's 2012 - at that time I think you had one Batman [Arkham] game out, and that was it. I think all other games that have that gameplay loop with clues weren't out on the market yet. You didn't have any Tomb Raiders, the new Deus Ex games weren't out yet. All of the things that, right now, we know that we're so tired of, of having clues in the game and investigating them."
