CD Projekt Red is one of the most well-recognized studios in the modern gaming industry, but not for all the right reasons. The company has earned quite a negative reputation in light of the recent Cyberpunk 2077 launch debacle, but that doesn't nullify the team's great work on The Witcher games.

The studio's biggest darling, many fans consider The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to be CD Projekt Red's magnum opus. The game gets compared a lot to Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim for a multitude of reasons, but The Witcher 3 is so much more than the sum of its parts.

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Unlike Bethesda Softworks, the creators of The Elder Scrolls series who gained huge fandom before the turn of the century, CD Projekt Red's story of success is quite interesting. Originally a company focused on localizing games for the Polish demographic, CD Projekt Red dipped their toes in original game development with the very ambitious The Witcher.

The game's development was far from smooth, but the team did get some help from BioWare, who provided CD Projekt Red booth space to advertise the game at E3 2004. The Witcher was a decent success, and the team immediately got to work on the sequel. The Witcher 2 upped the ante in many ways, but failed to hit the sales figures CD Projekt intended, falling short of the 2 million mark in copies sold.

However, the fandom garnered with the two games did ultimately pay off. Hopes were high for The Witcher 3, and CD Projekt Red didn't disappoint. Finally releasing in 2015, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt garnered huge critical acclaim and went on to receive multiple Game of the Year awards. Additionally, sales reception received a huge bump with more than 30 million copies sold at the time of writing. However, The Witcher 3's biggest merit lies in putting CD Projekt Red on the map; as a consumer-friendly studio with a strong focus on putting out titles with a consistently high level of quality (which hasn't aged very well).

While the first two Witcher games were great in their own right, the giant leap that CD Projekt Red took with The Witcher 3 can't be understated. Transitioning from a mostly restrictive world to a gargantuan open world, CD Projekt Red cleverly avoided a bunch of open world tropes and in turn, created something truly special. The game might not have the best graphics or combat loop, but the team did double down on two of the aspects that can make or break an open-world RPG: the world, and player choice.

The Witcher 3's unnamed Continent is a war-ravaged land but is teeming with things to do. There's enough side-questing and monster hunting to keep players busy for hundreds of hours, and all of it has a consistently high level of quality. The side quests in particular are some of the most well-written in all of gaming, and everything is focused on choices. Unlike many binary choices found in a lot of RPGs, The Witcher 3's choices lie in the morally grey area where nothing is completely right or wrong. Everything will have implications, so it's up to the player to keep the world and characters as close to normal as they can be given the current circumstances.

The effects of The Witcher 3's great open-world design can be felt in almost every modern open-world game developed after. Following in the footsteps of The Witcher 3, many developers have now started giving more thought to the idea of meaningful side content. Games like The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild and Red Dead Redemption 2 are shining examples of this revolutionized open-world design.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions also in development.

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