There’s nothing like going for a nice long walk around the world of The Witcher 3 and meeting some of the locals there. They say the nicest things. “Sod off, you misborn clod,” a guard will tell me. “Got so fucked up once, blood came out me ears,” a chap at the docks will announce. Or if I’m really lucky, “Go fuck your mums tits!” What a world to live in.
The thing is, I love this about the game. Being scolded by the ruddy-faced inhabitants of The Witcher 3 has long been one of my favourite things, ever since I first played it eight years ago. Even now, it manages to make me laugh. I’ll load it up and a villager will walk past, fart and giggle, and I’ll giggle too. I can’t help it.
Maybe it’s the abrupt delivery that tickles me, maybe it’s the shock factor, or maybe it’s just the sheer silliness of it all. Maybe it’s all of it. Whatever it is, it makes the world of The Witcher 3 stand out to me. It makes it special. I cannot think of another game that does it in the same way.
All of which makes me wonder. It makes me wonder who decided this should be a thing in the game, because there’s too much of this foul-mouthery to be happenstance. There must be a concerted effort behind it. So who’s responsible for it? And how on earth did they come up with so much filth? This, then, is my mission to try and find out.
First stop, CD Projekt Red. I ask the studio who the potty-mouth is and one name comes immediately back: Przemysław Sawicki. He works on Cyberpunk 2077 now (he made all the gigs in the game), but he was originally hired for The Witcher 3 to write the lines I’m talking about here. Apparently he even had to write a few drunks and children to pass a pre-work exam. By the time the Blood & Wine expansion was in development, Sawicki was responsible for 80 percent of the dialogue like this. “So yeah,” Przemysław Sawicki tells me when we talk, “I’m your guy.”