Witcher 3
Image: CD Projekt Red

The Polish video game company CD Projekt Red is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, and as part of this, it's been hosting special anniversary livestreams covering the history of its games.

During the latest one, focused on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Witcher 4 campaign designer Philipp Weber admitted he was partly responsible for the overload of "question marks" on the Skellige map in the game. At the time, he was a junior quest designer - assigned to fill the ocean with smugglers' caches (underwater chests).

These didn't start out as points of interest and were intended to be a "random" treat for players to stumble across, but sort of became a set of collectibles in the end that took players hours to find. On the map they were originally marked as undiscovered locations. Here's exactly what he had to say (via IGN):

"I can admit freely I'm one of those people that actually put those question marks in the world...It was already late 2014 so not that long before release [in May 2015] when we basically just filled the world with them."

"There was not a lot of time so it was very much, 'okay, we just have to do it and we can't do it perfectly'. However I do have a defense...I did a lot of those terrible — I can say terrible because I did them — smugglers' caches. But originally, we put them into the world, we put some seagulls over them so you would see them circling, but it wasn't planned to actually have an icon on the map."

Weber went on to reiterate how it was a "mistake" and mentioned how he wouldn't overload a map like this again.

While not everyone may enjoy seeking out every item or landmark on a map, for Witcher 3 diehards, this was a great way to prolong Geralt's adventure and see everything the world had to offer. If you've not played this masterpiece yet, be sure to check out our Nintendo Life review - the game also received a number of performance updates on the Switch, making it even better.

Did you feel a little overwhelmed by the points of interest and things to do in Witcher 3? Do you ever feel this way in other open world games? Is it something that needs to be redesigned in future games? Leave your thoughts down below.

[source youtu.be, via ign.com]