Witcher 3 modders Moonknight, Ferroxius, Crygreg, and Glassfish (who contributed to the Brothers in Arms cut content restoration mod) have released the first volume of What Lies Unseen, a planned series chronicling the development history and evolution of The Witcher 3. RPG YouTuber xLetalis has put out a three-hour video going over the first volume, which covers a prototype version of The Witcher 3's story that would have been upwards of three times as long as the game we got. Some of the biggest changes and surprises in this version of The Witcher 3 include:
- The game was subtitled "A Time of Sword and Axe" instead of "The Wild Hunt."
- The Witcher 3 had a VATS-like focus system that let you target weak points on monsters.
- There was a lot more travel back and forth between Velen, Skellige, and Novigrad, and plotlines and characters that were more contained in the final game would extend across multiple acts.
- Your choice between Yennefer or Triss would mean that the other sorceress would be absent from the final third of the game.
- The Witcher 2's Iorveth appeared and had a major role.
- There was a multipart heist quest in Novigrad that required allies like the Kaer Morhen siege.
- The Bloody Baron's story was very different, and continued late into the game.
- The endings were much more ambiguous and melancholy.
- Geralt and Avallac'h would teleport to Cyberpunk 2077's Night City in one quest.
- The game didn't have Gwent, and instead saw the return of arm wrestling and dice poker from TW1 and 2.
This project came about thanks to the release of CD Projekt's REDkit modding tools, with the authors writing that prior to these tools becoming available, community knowledge of The Witcher 3's development "stemmed from interviews with the company as well as leaked material that was incomplete."
"The big breakthrough occurred in 2024 when CD Projekt RED released REDkit for The Witcher 3," the modders wrote in the introduction to volume one. "Included with this development kit was a string database, containing almost every single line of text that was written between the earliest and latest point in Witcher 3's development. From this database, we collectively worked to translate the data into a tangible synopsis that makes up the bulk of these documents."
And boy is there some bulk to these documents: Volume one, covering this circa-2012 stage of development, weighs in at a doorstopper 584 pages. It contains area descriptions, scene directions, rough drafts of dialogue, concept art, and some prototype models and assets still accessible in REDkit. The overarching story was still the same: Find Ciri, fight the Wild Hunt, explore Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige, but there just would have been way more of it. The maps and areas seem to have been decided on very early in development, and this longer game would have had a lot more backtracking between zones as the story went on. A lot of stuff that's side content in the final game would have been integral to the main quest here, and there were also a lot more new or returning characters to fill things out.
"Unlike the 2013 and 2014 builds of the game, we cannot be certain as to what the 2012 build looked like at this point in development," the team wrote. "Most characters, locations, and other entities would have been using placeholders and the environments were still being sculpted. As such most of the images we included are concept arts or early assets and locations. However, a few work-in-progress models from this time period did make it into the game files."
As for why the game was rescoped, that doesn't take a lot of expertise or imagination: The Witcher 3 is already a massive game with a reputation for being difficult to stick with and complete, despite its quality. Nobody would have been able to beat this damn game if it was 150 hours (an estimate quoted by the modders several times in volume one) just to finish the main quest. It also would have been an incredibly taxing game to ship in any kind of reasonable timeframe.
The Novigrad plotline in particular just seems like a mess in this iteration of The Witcher 3, with way more characters and complicating elements. With that said, there are more than a few scenarios laid out in volume one that made me go "Wow, that would have been rad as hell."
The serial killer quest in Novigrad would have uncovered a hidden vampire society in the city, like something out of Vampire: The Masquerade. The killer would have been a rogue member of this group, with the other vampires helping your investigation while the Witcher 1's Shani would have made an appearance. Both of these ideas would be revisited in The Witcher 3's DLC. The Witcher 2's Iorveth was also meant to have a major role in this version of Novigrad, and I've always really missed the character in The Witcher 3.
The game's endings were also much darker no matter what choices you made. Stopping the White Frost would require Ciri and Avallac'h's deaths, and keeping Ciri alive would mean allowing the world-eating force to continue unabated, as well as an emotional final boss fight with an emotional, betrayed Avallac'h who, in this version of the game, had a more developed and friendly relationship with Geralt. The empress of Nilfgaard ending was very different but tonally similar to the final game, but Ciri's Witcher ending would have seen her quickly become disillusioned with the monster hunting lifestyle, while she also felt guilty about Avallac'h's death and the White Frost's continuation. Ciri would then resolve to travel the planes searching for another way to stop it.
The downscoping of The Witcher 3 reminds me of all the areas and ideas Larian has talked about having cut from Baldur's Gate 3: More is not always better, and these incredible games required some disciplined, difficult decision making to ensure that they were well paced and able to be delivered on-time and on-budget. More than anything else, I appreciate the historical value of what Glassfish, Ferroxius, Moonknight, Crygreg, and xLetalis are doing: Shedding light on the creative process behind one of the best games ever made. I'll be eager to see what's revealed by the later volumes of What Lies Unseen.
