Original Witcher designer on the remake's open-world challenge: 'As a designer, I'm starting to get gray'

Artur Ganszyniec, a designer on the original Witcher and Witcher 2, has opened up about just how difficult it is to rebuild the 2007 RPG as an open-world game — and why the Fool's Theory remake is taking so long to show anything concrete.

Speaking to Polish outlet Chip, Ganszyniec explained that the original Witcher's scripted moments worked precisely because the developers always knew where the player was. "In The Witcher 1, many things worked because we knew exactly where the player would be at any given moment," he said. "We could trigger a trigger, launch a scene, or insert Alvin between the fields and the village. In an open world, this would have to be handled completely differently." That's not a small problem — open-world design means players can approach locations, monsters, and puzzles in any order, and every system has to hold up regardless of how someone gets there. He illustrated the stakes with a specific late-game example: in Act 5, the action converges around Lake Vizima in a way that only works because the game controls how Geralt gets there. In an open world, nothing stops a player from grabbing a boat on the outskirts of Vizima and sailing straight to the old manor, bypassing the whole setup. "As a player, I might be happy about that, but as a designer, I'm starting to get gray," he said.

Ganszyniec isn't just an outside observer here. Beyond his work on the first two Witcher games, his most recent credit is as a narrative and story consultant on The Thaumaturge — a 2024 RPG developed by Fool's Theory, the same studio handling the remake. The original Witcher was a fairly linear game with discrete maps and tightly controlled progression, so turning it into an open-world RPG isn't just a visual upgrade — it's a fundamental redesign of how the game's story and world logic function. The remake was announced back in 2020, and four years on, CD Projekt and Fool's Theory have shared almost nothing beyond confirming it exists.

Ganszyniec's comments don't suggest the project is in trouble, but they do explain why a remake of this scope takes time — and why it's genuinely hard. The subtext of his remarks is that he's at least a little relieved he's not the one solving these puzzles full-time.