CD Projekt RED has laid the groundwork thoroughly before beginning development on The Witcher 4. The Polish studio has taken a hard look at itself and decided to abandon certain outdated practices that have hindered some of its projects.
During a panel discussion, Jarosław Ruciński and Adrian Fulneczek, technical writers at CD Projekt RED, revisited the thorny issue of documentation. They revealed that during the production of the studio’s early games, almost nothing was clearly documented.
As a result, obvious problems arose during the development of the The Witcher 1 remake, since the knowledge from that time had not been preserved. Fortunately, part of the team from Fool’s Theory studio was already on board when the original title was developed.
For Cyberpunk 2077, the company did the opposite, this time producing over 8,000 technical documents. As a result, those related to the “Phantom Liberty” DLC were scattered between the cloud and the company’s internal storage systems, creating significant confusion when trying to locate specific data.
So, for The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2, CD Projekt has revised its approach.
“The future looks really promising for us. We learned our lesson. We’ve got some new requirements, especially a new definition of ‘done’.
So as you know, any project, any game goes through development stages, and right now, every stage ends with a gate. Part of the requirements to pass that gate is the documentation, which wasn’t the case before.
Unlike in the past, now, today our knowledge isn’t locked between specific teams’ permissions. It’s a shared asset. If a team working on, let’s say, The Witcher figures out a solution for a specific issue, the Cyberpunk team can see it, benefit from it, take it into their own code, modify it probably a little bit.”
