I'm often curious about how major plot twists are pitched. Did Darth Vader revealing he's Luke's father make sense to everyone else in the room? What about when Ken Levine told his team about where BioShock was going? In the case of one of the bigger moments in The Witcher 3, the writing team was slightly flabbergasted, according to the person who came up with it.
To mark the 11-year anniversary of The Witcher 3, Pawel Sasko, a quest designer on the RPG who's now an associate game director at CD Projekt, revealed he threw out an idea for The Battle of Kaer Morhen that rendered his team speechless.
Some spoilers follow! So be warned
"In a meeting, I propose that Vesemir dies," he says in a post on Twitter.
"First reaction is wide eyes and silence," he describes. "The weight of it is exactly what the act needs. Ciri's outburst, the moment she throws the Wild Hunt back, requires that the floor fall out from under her first."
https://t.co/xSuDMZpfmRMay 20, 2026
He's got a point, and this particular scenario was begging for something dramatic. It's where the Wild Hunt storms the witcher school in search of Ciri, an attack, as Sasko points out, only ends due to a huge outpouring of her unrestrained powers.
To get to her unleashing those abilities, the story needed a catalyst. Vesemir, being an old, embattled witcher, was prime for a heartbreaking death on the battlefield, and so it goes that he does, and we all wept.
Sasko goes on to describe his ideation for the whole sequence. "I prototype meteors, rifts opening in the forest, Wild Hunt pouring out of them, the ride back to the keep on horseback," he recalls. "So much of it does not work. Technical issues. The quest flow is unclear. Review feedback I get is negative, so I rebuild."
He calls it the time of his life, and may we all be so creatively fulfilled at one point or another. If we're really lucky, it can involve a story-defining bit of writing, too.
